Andrew Gray's travel tales

3rd July

The people of Pentecost Island did not traditionally think in terms of
North, South, East and West either. Their world is shaped like a Toblerone
bar: a jagged triangular prism about forty miles long, six miles wide, and
half a mile high. Here the four directions are 'up', 'down', 'up the coast',
and 'down the coast'. In the local mindset 'up the coast' is southwards and
'down the coast' northwards; I suffered a lot of confusion until somebody
eventually explained this to me. If Pentecost islanders rather than
Europeans had invented cartography, they would probably have portrayed the
Earth with Antarctica on top and Britain languishing down under.

Whilst the characters in Terry Pratchett's fantasies go about their lives on
the surface spinning disc, for the inhabitants of Pentecost life takes
places on a slope. What is striking to visitors about the island's geography
is not the fact that it is mountainous - a feature that it shares with
thousands of other wild and beautiful places in the world - but the fact
that the islanders build villages and roads with total disregard for the
steepness of their landscape. Look at any two neighbouring villages on a map
and you can bet that there will be a well-used footpath running directly
between them, no matter how sheer and dangerous the intervening terrain is.
A friend at Waterfall Village once took me gardening; the poor guy's garden
turned out to be halfway up the mountain, at the end of a muddy trail that
led up a rock face and through swamps and streams. (I never truly
appreciated what it means to "lead someone up the garden path" until I came
to Pentecost.) The high ridges above Ranwadi and Melsisi, which look from a
distance like a precipitous wilderness, are in fact the site of several
small villages. Bunlap, one highly traditional community in the south-east
of the island, is built on ledges hacked out of a diagonal slope. I visited
it in wet weather (one consequence of Pentecost's mountainousness is that it
provokes damp ocean winds into dumping extraordinary amounts rain onto the
island's eastern side) and found myself scrambling on all fours up muddy
slopes just to get from house to house.

After a few months of living on Pentecost, a weird thing happened to me: my
dreams became sloped. Previously, the landscapes in my dreams had either
been nondescript flatland or rolling hills (the scenery of south-eastern
England, where I grew up) or flattish land with mountains in the distance
(the scenery of much of Scotland). On Pentecost, my mental imagery became
three-dimensional in a way that it had never been before; now I frequently
have dreams that involve going up and down steep hills. Often the scenery
remains otherwise British, even if I am dreaming about people and situations
I have known only in Vanuatu - I have never seen a palm tree or a coral reef
in a dream - but the gradient of the island I am living on has insinuated
itself deeply into my mind.

Westerners living in mountainous countries usually settle in flat,
accessible spots - broad river valleys and coastal plains. On Pentecost, by
contrast, the rivers have no chance to carve broad valleys on their short
tumble from hilltop to ocean, and although there are a few strips of flat
land along the coast, these were historically uninhabited. In traditional
Pentecost villages, the only flat piece of land is the ceremonial ground, a
brown clearing of compacted earth outside the nakamal that is used for
dances and gatherings. Some of these are artificially levelled out of steep
mountainsides, which must have been quite a job in the days when digging
tools were made from sticks and stones. The ceremonial ground is known in
the local languages as 'saa' or 'sara'; in Pidgin, which adds 'na' to the
start of every indigenous word, it is a 'nasara'. When Europeans arrived on
Pentecost and created flat places of their own, the locals referred to these
using the same words that they used for their old ceremonial grounds.
Nowadays, villagers use the word 'saa' to mean the school football field,
and the airfield at the northern end of Pentecost is known as Sara Airport.

To foreign visitors, some aspects of the island's geography defy reason.
When the College de Melsisi recently organised a fundraising afternoon, each
student was told to go to his or her home village and bring back one piece
of taro to be sold at the event. The kids dutifully trooped off into the
mountains, and one of them invited Sara to go along. She came back after a
seven-hour return hike into the centre of the island with tales of slipping
and sliding down 45-degree slopes ("everybody fell down") and teetering
along precipices above hundred foot drops ("we could have died") - all for
the sake of one vegetable.

"Yet the people who live in that village do that trek all the time," she
said. "Why?! I mean, you'd think they would be better off just taking the
entire village and moving it down to the coast?"

In recent years an increasing number of islanders have indeed moved to the
coast, where they have easier access to the goods that arrive on cargo
ships. However, there are reasons why many continue to live in the
mountains. The climate is cooler up on the slopes, and some crops grow
better there. Vanuatu lies in an earthquake zone, and settlements by the sea
are vulnerable to tsunamis. There isn't room for Pentecost's entire
population on the coast (at least, not unless they learn to live like the
Japanese, inhabiting high-rise blocks and feeding themselves by plundering
the ocean). Above all, the people here have deep ancestral ties to their
home villages. Few Westerners would fret that they were leaving their
homeland if they moved to a new house three miles away, but on a Pacific
island three miles is a long way.

In societies such as Pentecost's, each clan traditionally had its own patch
of land, and the more treacherous and remote the patch, the easier it was to
fend off unfriendly neighbours. Nobody in Vanuatu nowadays worries about
being kidnapped and eaten by the guys from the next village, but they do
still worry about the land on which they make their homes and gardens being
appropriated by greedy outsiders.

During the colonial era, European planters and missionaries laid claim to
the areas of land that they deemed useful or habitable. On islands like
Pentecost these areas didn't add up to very much, but among people who
depend on the land for their survival, the slightest suggestion of it being
taken away from them inspires a powerful horror and resentment. Even today's
normally-peaceful islanders deem it quite acceptable to take their bush
knifes to somebody who tries to infringe upon their rights to their land.

At independence, the Vanuatu government therefore reinstated the prehistoric
system of land ownership, drawing up a constitution which states that all
rural land belongs forever to its customary owners: the villagers who have
always lived and gardened there. Outsiders such as property developers and
plantation owners are allowed to lease such land, but cannot buy it outright
- they will always have to respect the local chiefs as their landlords.

- - -

Recently, foreigners have been experimenting with a potential new means of
depriving Pacific islanders of their land: polluting the planet so as to
raise its sea levels. Within the next few centuries a couple of countries in
the region will probably be reduced to nothing more than scribbles on a
nautical chart warning sailors of "submerged reefs". Vanuatu, fortunately,
will not be one of them.

Friends back home occasionally ask if the South Pacific island I'm working
on is going to disappear because of global warming. I laugh at the idea. In
reality, Vanuatu is probably less vulnerable to the effects of climate
change than any other coastal country. Its land rises just as high as
Britain's, and given that Britain's highlands are fairly uninhabitable
whilst Pentecost's support lush gardens and thriving populations, I know
which island I would rather be on in the even of a Great Flood. Even the
sort of apocalyptic rise in sea level that would occur if every ice sheet on
Earth melted and ran into the oceans would deprive islands like Pentecost of
only a few percent of their land area, and displace only a minority of their
people.

True, a large rise in sea level would wreck Port Vila and Luganville,
decapitating Vanuatu's infrastructure and wiping out most of its official
economy. A bunch of Australians would lose their holiday homes, a few
offshore banks and dubious Internet companies would lose their headquarters,
and a lot of urban ni-Vanuatu would have to abandon their sunglasses and
stereos and return to their home villages. Rural islands would have to
function without central government, police, or communications with the
outside world. However, since they get by with a minimum of these things
anyway, life there might not change very much. Chiefs, elders and Jesus
would continue to do their job of maintaining peace and order, much as they
do now, and it could conceivably be a long time before the islands descended
back into savagery.

While the rest of civilisation collapsed in chaos, old men on Pentecost
would sit quietly in their shady huts in the forest, surrounded by flowers
and birdsong. Smoking their home-grown tobacco and drinking their kava, they
would murmur to their grandchildren that they had always known that building
villages in the mountains was the right thing to do.