Perfectionist's Lair

By MARGO PFEIFF

Oct. 24, 1999 12 AM PT

Margo Pfeiff is a writer and photographer based in Montreal

LORD HOWE ISLAND, Australia — Whenever I’m having a bad day in front of my computer, I close my eyes and I’m standing thigh-deep in a crystal lagoon, once again feeding the neon-colored fish that swirl around my legs. When I’m stuck in traffic, I remember clapping my hands and watching little brown birds running out of the rain forest toward me. These were prime memories from a week I spent on Lord Howe Island in 1989, and, frankly, I’ve been afraid to go back ever since.

Then, Lord Howe was a magical place. The closest thing to a traffic jam was the crowd at the weekly outdoor fish fry. Everyone rode bicycles on the potholed single-lane roads. Carts and putters awaited golfers in an unlocked shed with an honor box. The birth of a new islander was announced with the flying of a pink or blue “nappy” from the flagpole of Government House.

Had a decade of unprecedented worldwide tourist traffic overrun this once-little-known speck in the sea off Australia?

Back in 1981, long before “eco-tourism” tripped off everyone’s tongue, the elected board that administers the island acted on the locals’ fear of development and pollution and laid down a series of strict environmental policies. With such dedicated custodians and the island’s designation in 1982 as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, even a skeptic like me had to admit that if anyplace could resist the advances of mass tourism, it would be Lord Howe. Last March I returned to see for myself.

Just 450 miles--a two-hour flight--east of Sydney, boomerang-shaped Lord Howe Island is seven miles long and barely two at its widest. As the plane banked toward the familiar tiny volcanic crescent hugging a vivid turquoise lagoon, I could make out only a few small buildings half buried in tropical vegetation. Maybe there was cause for optimism.

What I found exceeded my wildest hope: Lord Howe is still laid-back in every aspect except the fervor with which its 317 inhabitants protect their corner of paradise.

As soon as I got signed in at the hip, nautical-themed Capella Lodge, I grabbed a mountain bike from the “help yourself” rack outside and went off to explore. There was not a single billboard or overhead cable in sight as I pedaled along the 15 miles of roads, past the lagoon and through tunnels of kentia palms.

The kentia has been the world’s most popular indoor palm for 120 years. Its seedlings are for sale alongside “tinnies” of Foster’s beer in Lord Howe’s one liquor store. The store is operated by the island board, which funnels all profits into local improvement projects. One of the island’s mantras is that when you down a pint here you can honestly say you’re performing a public service.

One of the first stops on my reacquaintance tour was at the home of Clive Wilson, an islander I’d met on my last visit.

Like most locals, Wilson wears many hats. He works at the tiny airport, runs the lawn bowling tournaments and is a church organist, among other things. He reassured me: The population (300) and the number of houses (105) had hardly changed in decades.

The number of cars (70) is strictly limited. “If you want a new vehicle you have to first prove to the board that you really need one,” Wilson said. In the interests of the environment, the shipping line that serves the island takes your old clunker back to the mainland free of charge.

There are plenty of rules on Lord Howe: The board must be consulted before so much as a tree branch is felled or a home painted. Locals joke that you need a permit to dig over your garden. “We’re sometimes accused of being bureaucracy gone mad,” Wilson said, “but our goal is to prevent change and to preserve our unique and delicate environment.”

Happily, that has not prevented improvement in the lodging scene. When I was last here, the accommodations were plain at best. There are still only 17 tourist lodgings and together they are still limited to 393 beds. But everything I saw, from simple housekeeping units to upscale tropical fantasy, has grown in style and quality. For instance, the Monday night fish fry at Pinetrees Lodge had added a huge salad buffet and sushi to the traditional battered kingfish.

And Capella Lodge can hold its own in any hotel market. The decor of my room evoked a sailing ship’s cabin. It even had a short-wave radio (but, of course, no TV). I was told the decor was the work of a well-known designer for a popular surfer T-shirt company, which may explain the hotel’s clientele--young, hip Aussie professionals.

Lush and tropical, feathered with palms and trimmed in gleaming white beaches, Lord Howe is the tropical paradise that everyone pictures in their mind’s eye. The island might be tiny, but in a single day you can do half a dozen sports if you feel so inclined. I spent my first morning mountain biking on trails and country roads to lookouts and shaded valleys. Once, I rented one of Wilson’s kayaks (another of his sidelines) for a morning and paddled across the lagoon to the tiny speck of Rabbit Island, which I had all to myself.

That afternoon I paddled back to the lagoon beach, left my kayak at the scuba shop and checked in for a diving trip to Rupert’s Reef.

At Rupert’s, warm currents from the Great Barrier Reef bring swarms of tropical species to mix with those of Lord Howe’s cooler waters; this creates a rich and unusual collection of underwater critters and corals not normally found together. I spotted lion fish, double-headed wrasse and half a dozen species of moray eels, including the native lord howenii, a little fella with mighty big teeth.

The next morning I set off early toward the southern end of the island, capped by the twin rounded peaks of 2,295-foot Mt. Lidgbird and 2,600-foot Mt. Gower. The two mountains are within a park preserve that covers 70% of the island. It takes a full day to hike the summit of Mt. Gower and back, and I joined Jack Shick, the necessary licensed guide. As we started out through the low palm forest along the coast I clapped my hands, and sure enough the island’s most watched-over residents came running out of the brush toward me.

The Lord Howe Island wood hen is a flightless brown bird the size of a small hen, and it shrieks with the sound of a rusty pulley. The birds plucked bits of cheese from my fingers without fear, a negative trait that has sent thousands of them into wood hen pie over the past 200 years. By 1979 scientists could find only 15 of the birds sheltering atop Mt. Gower. The wood hen was placed on the list of the world’s 10 rarest birds, and a rescue attempt was begun.

In 1981 the first captive-bred wood hens were released into a wilderness cleared of feral pigs and cats (which are now banned on the island). Today more than 300 of the chirpy critters wander the island, many having taken up residence in locals’ gardens.

The trek through steamy, semitropical bush finally reached Mt. Gower’s summit, a mossy mist forest, a Tolkien-esque world of stunted, gnarled trees, orchids and dripping ferns. It was well worth the hike; it’s not every day you can watch a group of grown adults standing on a mountainside yodeling in unison at the top of their lungs to attract the attention of rare Providence petrels wheeling in the updrafts!

By late afternoon we were back at the bottom, and I headed off for one more date. As shadows cooled the air I cycled to Ned’s Beach, where I noticed that the golf course honor box concept extended to a shack filled with snorkels, masks and flippers with a tin alongside for payment. But I was there for something simpler: to relive that decade-old dream of standing thigh-deep in the water, feeding crumbs to hundreds of blue and rainbow fish swarming around my legs.

The warmth of this memory, coupled with the reassurance that Lord Howe was in good hands, would keep me through another decade of stress-busting--if I were to wait another decade to return.

Perfectionist’s Lair

More to Read

More From the Los Angeles Times