Andrew Gray's travel tales

12th September

Back home, this is not too difficult to achieve. Once upon a time it was
said that an Englishman's home was his castle, but a modern Englishman's
house is in fact his aquarium: a glass-windowed tank, carefully sealed from
the outside world. The main reason for this design is to shut out cold air,
but it has the useful additional benefit of shutting out any creature
incapable of turning a door handle. In any case, most of Britain's wildlife
is of the kind you see in children's books sitting on toadstools in the
forest, rather than the kind that you see illustrated on cans of poison
spray. As a result, most British homes contain few living things larger than
a bacterium, and with the help of expensive cleaning products even the
bacteria can be kept to a minimum.

Houses on Pentecost are different. Since none are heated or air-conditioned,
there is no need for them to be well sealed - in fact, many builders
deliberately incorporate holes in their houses to let in light and fresh
air. Even houses that are made from cement and plywood, rather than from
bits of the local forest, are lightly built and contain plenty of cracks and
crevices. Windows are almost permanently open, and although in the newer
houses these are meshed to keep out mosquitoes, the meshing easily acquires
holes. This being the tropics, there is no shortage of critters that will
find them.

Here at Ranwadi I accepted long ago that my house is a place of
biodiversity. Housekeeping here is an exercise in ecology, trying to
manipulate the environment so as to control the populations of the more
obnoxious members of the ecosystem. Rats, for example. These are endemic in
Vanuatu's villages, and in its schools. Leaning against the walls of the
Dining Hall, you can feel the vibrations of the creatures running behind the
wooden boards, inches away from you. In a staff meeting I was once laughed
at for suggesting that the school ought to try and do something about them.

Every so often one of these rats finds its way into my kitchen and spends a
contented couple of days foraging there. Things come to a tragic end when
the hapless rodent stops to investigate the morsel of food placed temptingly
on a metal plate surrounded by spring-loaded wire. A few rat-free weeks then
go by before another rat comes along, finds the seemingly-inviting territory
to be vacant, and never stops to wonder why.

Few of the rats make it as far as my bedroom (I am very careful not to keep
anything there that might tempt them in), but one or two are adventurous.
One night I had a dream in which a rat was crawling over me. I awoke to the
sound of scuttling rodent disappearing down the side of my bed, and realised
that there had indeed been a rat crawling over me.

A different rat, finding all the food in my kitchen sealed into gnaw-proof
containers, developed a taste for eating the candles that I keep around the
house to provide lighting after the school generator is switched off in the
evenings. When I got fed up with the tooth marks on my candles and hid them
away in tins at bedtime, the rat switched to eating my bathroom soap
instead. The following night I set two traps: one baited with food, the
other baited with candle wax. The rat ignored the food, but couldn't resist
the wax, and is now roaming the great chandlery in the sky.

Last month, in a reshuffle of the staff accommodation at Ranwadi, I was
moved into a new house, at the bottom of the hill at the entrance to the
school. Rats don't seem to venture down to this part of the school much, but
in their place the house has other visitors: large black lizards that hide
in the cupboards and leave runny trails of droppings across the kitchen
floor. Lizards present an unusual pest problem: they don't touch (or don't
spring) my rat traps, and none of the store-bought poisons that proudly
claim to kill rats, mice, flies, ants, cockroaches, spiders and so on make
any mention of diarrhoeic reptiles. In the end I was reduced to chasing the
creatures around the kitchen, trying unsuccessfully to stab them with
various implements. I didn't want to have to kill the lizards, but nor did I
want to cook in a kitchen full of shit.

The black lizards, together with the yellow geckoes that hunt moths across
the walls, form the top of the house's food chain. I am technically at the
bottom of the food chain (in an interesting reversal of the outdoor
situation), since it is my crumbs and dead skin cells that sustain the
smallest of the insects, and my blood that feeds the mosquitoes which make
it past the netted windows.

At the second level of the food chain are the spiders. Pentecost's is home
to some worryingly exotic-looking spiders - such as the armoured
black-and-yellow Butsungos, which shares its name with a monster in local
stories - but these tend to stay outdoors. Most of the ones I find indoors
are essentially ordinary brown house spiders, although some of them would be
large enough to get their photos in the local newspaper if they came
crawling out of a bunch of bananas back home. Despite their evil size, they
don't appear to be dangerous to anything larger than a cockroach, and since
anything dangerous to cockroaches is very welcome in my house, I have never
attempted to sweep out the creatures. As the saying goes, my enemy's enemy
is my friend. The giant spiders, which seem to hunt by pouncing on their
prey, are at least less messy than the smaller ones, which gather in
colonies to spin webs of sticky fluff along the walls and ceiling.

The house's insects, too, are an ugly but ultimately fairly harmless lot
(unless you count the abundant malaria-carrying mosquitoes, which are
technically the world's most deadly creature). Wasps and hornets are absent,
apart from one slender variety (an introduced species, according to the
locals) that doesn't appear to sting anyone. Flies are an immense irritation
when sitting outdoors, but the mosquito netting keeps most of them out of
the house. The ants are a nuisance in the kitchen, but can easily be kept
off food by standing the plates and containers in dishes of water. (This
doesn't stop the geckoes, which enjoy licking sugary things and have been
known to take flying leaps onto trays of cakes and biscuits surrounded by
water.)

The local insect life is most evident at night. Moths and other species that
evolved to navigate by flying towards the moon never anticipated that human
beings would one day fill the world with artificial moons, and Ranwadi,
being the only place for miles around with electric lighting, attracts
swarms of the creatures. After the power is turned off for the evening, the
moths and flies abandon circling the fluorescent lights and turn their
attention to any other light source they can find. When working late on my
laptop, I keep a candle beside it to distract the insects that would
otherwise hurl themselves at the screen when the electricity goes off and
the laptop, switching to battery power, becomes the only source of light in
the room. One particularly stupid variety of beetle will fly straight into
the candle flame, get knocked out by the heat and spend a few minutes
recuperating before flying straight back into the flame, repeating this over
and over again until the witless insect succeeds in burning itself to death.
I hope that if enough people burn candles on Pentecost, evolution will
eventually teach this species to fly only towards the cold white moon, not
the hot yellow one.

At bedtime I blow out the candles (which leaves the house smelling of
birthdays), and the place becomes completely black. This is the cue for the
cockroaches to come out of their crevices. Occasionally I attempt to deal
with these by fumigating the house with spray cans brought from Vila, which
kills a good number of them, but the population quickly recovers. Brands of
insecticide that promise to provide "lasting three-month protection" don't
live up to their claims; Pentecost houses are too porous, and too
well-ventilated. Fumigation does have the interesting side effect of driving
out the more exotic crevice-dwellers, organisms that I would never otherwise
have realised that I was sharing a house with, but in some cases I would
have preferred them to remain hidden. Past hauls of dead creepy-crawlies
found after fumigation have included millipedes as long as pencils, a
centipede as long as my finger, and a small scorpion.

The centipede bothered me the most. From the otherwise-dull Arthropod
Biology course that Edinburgh University forces its zoology students to take
in their final, two images stuck in my mind: the eerily blue eyes of one of
the girls in the class, and the sight of a garden centipede under a
microscope. The latter made me shudder; a more sinister-looking creature
would be hard to imagine. The tropical centipede that I found dead in my
house at Ranwadi looked much the same, except that I didn't need a
microscope to make out clearly the rows of jagged, articulated legs or the
red, venomous pincers. The locals reassured me that the beast was harmless.
The giant venomous centipedes that terrify expatriates in Port Vila are an
urban pest, not found on Pentecost.

I put the centipede in a jar, took it down to the science lab, and pickled
it in methylated spirits. Next time the biology students were learning about
the redness and toothiness and clawiness of Nature, it would make an
enlightening specimen.