Getting Stoned with Savages (10 page)

UPON INDEPENDENCE
in 1980, Vanuatu shed its colonial designation—the New Hebrides—and assumed its current name. Vanuatu derives from
vanua,
the word for “land” in many Pacific languages. Most newly independent nations would take this as just the beginning. The names of towns would change. Street names would no longer honor King Leopold or some other distant tyrant. Islands and provinces would assume their original, precolonial place-names. Not so in Vanuatu. Indeed, our neighborhood in Port Vila still retained the name given to it by American soldiers in World War II:
Nambatri,
pidgin for “number three.”
Nambatu
was just down the road, which led to
Nambawan,
or downtown. It was much the same throughout the islands, where many bays, lagoons, points, and even mountains retained the names given to them by Westerners. Even many of the islands themselves kept the names bestowed by the first foreign visitors. Captain Bligh didn’t even set foot on the Banks Islands, which he named for Joseph Banks, the naturalist. Of course, he was in a hurry at the time, having recently lost his ship
The Bounty
to Christian Fletcher and his fellow mutineers, and after his open longboat was chased by cannibals when he passed through Fiji, he knew that this was the wrong neighborhood for dillydallying. There have, however, been some modifications to island names. Pedro Fernandez de Quirós, when he landed on Vanuatu’s largest island in 1606, believed he had discovered the mythical southern continent, and he named it Australia del Espíritu Santo. The Australia part was dropped, however, when someone found another Australia, and today the island is called Espirítu Santo, or just Santo.

One can understand the reticence of the Ni-Vanuatu when it comes to changing their islands’ names. If, for example, the people of a particular island speak twenty languages, there are likely twenty different names for the island, and so settling on a local word for their home is bound to be difficult. Nevertheless, if there is one island where one would think that its inhabitants would make the effort, it would be Malekula. Like so many islands in the South Pacific, Malekula was named by the intrepid Captain Cook, who stumbled upon it in July 1774, during his second great voyage of discovery when he was captain of the
Resolution.
He called the island Mallicullo, and it is generally understood that this was a play on the French expression
mal a cul,
which translates as “pain in the ass.” I found this a little fanciful, a little out of character for Captain Cook, who is widely regarded as having been particularly humane and tolerant in his relations with people in the South Pacific. It seemed unlikely that he would name an island in a fit of petulance, but after reading his notes on Malekula, I wasn’t so sure. “The people of this country are in general the most Ugly and ill-proportioned of any I ever saw,” he wrote. “They are almost black or rather a dark Chocolate Colour, Slenderly made, not tall, have Monkey faces and wooly hair…We saw but few Women and they were fully as disagreeable as the Men.”

Sadly, the Malekulans did not write, so we do not have any notes that could tell us what they thought of Captain Cook and his crew, who had spent the previous two years tightly confined in a rat-infested wooden ship, much of it spent in the tropics, without access to a shower or deodorant, and as they were Englishmen in an age before sunscreen, their skin must have been of particular interest to Malekulans. “These Creatures are the most Repellent beasts we have yet encountered,” one can imagine a Malekulan writing. “They have Red skin that flakes and sheds like a serpent, except for the parts that they cover, which is a Hideous white. Many are Furry like our swine and they exhibit a most Malodorous stench. They have no Females among them, and we take them for Sodomites, with an Unnatural appetite for Buggery.”

In the end, Cook did not stay long. Though he was in need of food and water, the Malekulans had made it clear that they really rather wished that he and his men would just mosey on and leave their island. Presumably, they thought Cook was a ghost, and who could blame them for wanting little to do with the Undead? As they left, Cook and his officers dined on a couple of fish they had caught, which caused them to be “seiz’d with Violent pains in the head and Limbs, so as to be unable to stand, together with a kind of Scorching heat all over the Skin.” Perhaps this was his pain-in-the-ass moment.

As I made my arrangements for Malekula, it occurred to me that if I had the choice, I would much rather sail to the island in a rat-infested wooden ship than fly Vanair. I do not like to fly. A 747 reduces me to sweaty palms and heart palpitations. A Twin Otter in a mountainous third-world country is basically a full-on cardiac event for me. Not long before, a Vanair Twin Otter had crashed into the ocean near Port Vila, downed by a violent squall. Though miraculously four people were able to swim to shore, eight died. A few years earlier, a Vanair Islander had slammed into a mountain on Aneityum. There were no survivors. That’s two planes lost by a four-plane airline. I wondered whether I should pack a defibrillator.

At the time, Sylvia was on a business trip to Bali. It’s rugged work, international development, but if someone was needed to attend a weeklong conference on coral reefs at a beachside resort in Indonesia, Sylvia was willing to do it. With a week to myself, I had decided to spend it in a hut on a malarial island far away from the resorts on Efate. But as I caught a minibus to the airport I began to regret Sylvia’s absence immensely. No man likes to be reduced to a quivering, sobbing wreck in front of his wife, and in the past, whenever we had flown on small planes together, it was that fact alone, I felt, which had prevented the onslaught of panic. I had some dim hopes that I would be flying the ATR, a forty-five-passenger prop plane, the largest in the Vanair fleet, but I knew that those hopes were misplaced. The ATR required a proper runway. Malekula didn’t have a proper runway. It had a clearing in the bush. And so I boarded a Twin Otter with about the same enthusiasm I’d feel if I were settling in for a root canal. To my mild surprise, I wasn’t the only Westerner aboard. There were two missionaries, a middle-aged couple from Australia.
ELDA WOODRUFF,
said the man’s name tag, and if his black pants and white short-sleeved shirt didn’t give it away, the name tag did. They were Mormons. Like me, they were probably hoping to find cannibals, too.

I said a quick prayer to the Mormon god—why not? It couldn’t hurt—and soon we were high above the ocean, where the pilot steered a course toward every squall in the greater Vanuatu area. It was remarkable flying. I could see through the cockpit window, and I noticed that if we flew just a little to the left, we would avoid flying through a billowing black cloud, the kind of ominous dark mass that would give even a 747 a good shake. Instead, we plied right through it, lurching wildly, and when we emerged, the pilot immediately turned his plane toward the next squall. Indeed, I believe we may have even turned around to fly through the same squall twice. Needless to say, I had curled myself into a fetal position, closed my eyes, clasped my hands, and spent a long hour muttering,
I am in my safe place,
until the pilot, with a move that would make a kamikaze pilot proud, took us into a steeply pitched dive, engines screaming, and aimed the plane toward a mountain on what I took to be Malekula. Then up we went again, barely cresting a dense growth of trees, thumping in the turbulent air, until suddenly we were following the coastline toward the airport at Norsup, where we landed on a slab of jagged coral. Emerging from the plane with trembling knees, I felt immeasurable relief that the ordeal was over, and then it occurred to me that in five days I would have to do it all over again. This better be an interesting island, I thought, and when I noticed the airport building, I realized that it would be.

The building, which had once been a tidy single-story cinder-block structure, had been reduced to a slab of stones and burnt embers. It was not decayed. It was destroyed, though this did not prevent the Vanair representative from conducting his business. He had set up a table in a roofless room, surrounded by rubble and clucking hens, and there he checked in the passengers who were continuing on to Santo. If this had been the scene in Port Vila, I would have turned around right then, my confidence in Vanair shattered, but this was an outer island, said by many to be the most “primitive” in Vanuatu, and now that I was here, with the terror of air travel behind me, I was feeling positively ebullient, eager to experience the raw Pacific.

I grabbed my backpack, made my way past the chickens and assorted onlookers, and immediately wondered how I was going to get myself to Rose Bay, where I had made arrangements to stay in a guesthouse. There were a couple of battered pickup trucks idling beside the airport, and seeing that there was no one here to take me to the guesthouse, which was some twenty miles north of Norsup, the main village on Malekula, I asked the drivers in my rudimentary Bislama if they were heading in that direction. I knew enough about the outer islands to realize that if there’s a vehicle going in your direction, get on, because it could be days before there’s another. Soon I found myself in the back of a pickup truck, holding on for dear life as we careened along a gravel road. Past the coconut plantations that surrounded the airport, the gravel gave way to a deeply gutted dirt path, and as we barreled over every pothole, I found it was all I could do to remain inside the truck. How do they do it, I wondered as we passed another pickup fully laden with people. There I was, tucked into a sort of Ninja crouch, my arms encircled around a steel rail, and still I flailed alarmingly, whereas the locals managed to sit on the rim, and not only did they not fall out but they weren’t even holding on, just leaning their bodies in accordance with the truck’s movement.

After about a half-hour of this, the driver suddenly came to a stop, which nearly sent me hurtling over the hood. His other passenger, a barefoot, bearded man carrying a bushel of yams, emerged from the passenger seat, disappeared up a footpath, and was soon swallowed by the bush. The driver indicated that I could join him in the cab. He didn’t have to ask twice. His name was Gerard, and as we proceeded toward Rose Bay, following an increasingly narrow path that cleaved through the jungle, we got to talking. Malekula is predominantly francophone, and so I asked him, in French, about the airport.

“Land dispute,” he said. “The landowner wanted more money from the government. When the government refused to pay, the landowner destroyed the airport building.”

“And is this a common way of settling land disputes?” I asked.

“Very common.”

Gerard asked me about what I intended to do on Malekula. I mentioned that among the places I hoped to visit was the island of Vao, just off the northeast coast of Malekula. Vao was a kastom island.

“You cannot go to Vao,” Gerard said.

“Why not?”

“There is a dispute with the chief. No one is permitted to go to Vao.”

“And are there many disputes on Malekula?”

“Many. But do not worry. Peter will take care of you.”

Peter was the owner of Rose Bay Bungalows.
Bungalow
might be a rather extravagant word to describe the rudimentary shelters he had constructed, though they were certainly ingenious. It’s funny how accustomed one gets to electricity and running water, and as I contemplated the bamboo walls, the mosquito net, and the courtesy kerosene lantern, I marveled at what a different world Vanuatu was outside Port Vila. This wasn’t quite as primitive as the outer islands of Kiribati, but I still felt far away from the world beyond the reef.

“Is malaria a big problem here?” I asked.

“Yes,” Peter said. “It’s a very big problem. And now is the malaria season.”

Of course it was.

I immersed myself in a toxic cloud of mosquito repellent and followed Peter as he showed me around. There were several other Gilligan’s Island–style bungalows, connected by a series of stone paths that looped through the trees in an amusingly complex manner. Malekula is a remarkably fecund island. Some twenty thousand people live there, and on the drive from the airport, I had wondered where, exactly, were these twenty thousand people, until I peered a little more closely through the trees and realized we were passing through a village. Even the villages were difficult to distinguish from the lush growth that seemed just one rainfall away from swallowing everything. Within minutes of following Peter, I was thoroughly disoriented.

“Dinner will be at six,” he informed me. This left a little more than an hour to ramble about.

“I can hear the ocean, Peter. But I can’t see it. Could you point the way?”

The beach was just fifty or so yards from where we stood. The sand was an ash-gray ocher color festooned with driftwood and shells. A short distance offshore were two lush islets, Wala and Atchin, both inhabited. Strolling along the beach, I wondered if I could swim here. The air was still and humid, and after the excitement of flying Vanair I fairly ached for a plunge. Normally, I would have dived right in, but Malekula has a well-deserved reputation for shark attacks. Tiger sharks, bull sharks, even great white sharks were known to prowl its waters. About a half-mile farther, I noticed what appeared to be a group of women and children. Curiously, none of the kids were swimming in the ocean, which told me all I needed to know. There were sharks.