Andrew Gray's travel tales

2nd December

"Are you coming dancing with us?" asked one of the Peace Corps girls when I stepped off the plane at Port Vila airport.

I look down at my shoes. I was wearing my enormous Doc Martens, the ones that I had worn in high school and retrieved from my parents' attic many years later when I went in search of some robust, expendable old shoes to take to Pentecost. They were hard and chunky, and the soles were the size and weight of hardback books. They hadn't been polished since high school, unless you count the time I painted them with wood preserver (it was all I had) in order to stop them growing mould after a damp week in the jungle.

The only other shoes I had with me were the sandals held together with parcel tape. (The ones held together with pins had come irreparably unpinned, and the ones held together with superglue had long since come unglued. After a failed attempt to tie them together with fishing line - which simply led to them breaking in different places - I had given up, taken them to the cliff where people at Ranwadi dispose of their rubbish, and hurled them into the bush.)

"I think I'll give dancing a miss," I said. It wasn't just the shoes - I didn't want to go dancing. I knew how that kind of evening would turn out. I would sit in the corner wincing at the loudness of the music and trying unsuccessfully to shout a conversation at someone while guys with better shoes (all right, better guys) took to the dance floor and left with girls in their arms.

Besides, like most people on the islands I had been up since dawn, which is about 5 a.m. in the South Pacific at this time of year. I like getting up at dawn.

We caught a minibus into town. The two Peace Corps girls chatted about friends I didn't know, and things I didn't want to know about friends that I did know, and what a great evening they were going to have.

"You should come dancing with us," one of them repeated, turning to me. "There'll be a guy there who's come out to the islands to help people set up computers. You'd enjoy talking to him." She had known me a few minutes and already had me figured out as a nerd.

The minibus dropped me at the hotel where I was staying, and took the Peace Corps away to begin their night out.

Over the next day or two, I saw or experienced the following for the first time in six and a half months… hot running water, asphalt, cars, minibuses, road signs, hotels, chlorinated swimming pools, sidewalks, soap dispensers, buildings with more than two storeys, tiling, street maps, coin-operated appliances, supermarkets, urinals, vouchers, pastry, fire extinguishers, pizzas, agencies, cash machines, Asian people, street lights, paper towels, police cars, trolleys, fences high enough to keep out human beings, leaflets, espresso machines, car parks, receptionists, billboards, men in uniform, serviettes, roundabouts, ceiling fans, wireless Internet access, Ladies and Gents toilets, mobile phones, local radio, petrol stations, storm drains, air conditioning, the day's newspaper, and anonymity. A few of these things were welcome, but the majority I hadn't missed.

After a day of trailing around town, I was already missing Pentecost. There was only one solution. That evening, I flagged down a bus heading in the direction of the airport.

"Green Light, Fresh Water?" I said. The driver nodded. Port Vila's buses don't follow fixed routes; it's up to the passengers to discuss with the driver where they'd like the bus to go.

When people from other islands began to move to Port Vila, each group of islanders bought their own plot of land, on which they did their best to recreate the village communities they had left behind. Some built small cement houses, into which they crammed huge extended families, while others lived in crudely-assembled shacks of plywood and old pieces of corrugated metal, with dogs and chickens wandering the bare ground in between. Visitors label these places slums, but what they really are is jungle villages without the jungle. People may be crowded into tiny shacks, and animals may be grubbing around outside, but the same is true back in their old villages. Whilst these little urban settlements may lack the beauty of a rural village, they also lack the isolation. Good jobs, good shops and a good hospital are only a short bus ride away, and for those who can afford it there is piped water and electricity. And since most islanders cannot dream of affording the suburban homes flogged by suntanned Australian estate agents who boast about how much prices have gone up lately as an indication that the property is a good investment - nor would they want to live in such a friendless environment - these squalid patches of communal land provide the only opportunity most ni-Vanuatu have to live affordably in their own capital.

The district of Fresh Water, which occupies a damp hillside on the northern edge of town, overlooking the road to the airport, is the Central Pentecost islanders' home away from home.

After doing a circuit of Port Vila's outskirts, picking people up and dropping them off, the bus driver pulled up by a road junction flanked by hedges and heaped with piles of rubbish. A revolving green light that looked as if it belonged on a toy ambulance was flashing behind one of the hedges. I got out of the bus, skirting the rubbish, and passed though a gate into a large yard. Running along one side of the yard was a long cement building containing a series of kiosks. Snacks and cigarettes were being sold at one window, bottles of wine and beer were on display behind another, and at a third a man was cooking up hot meals. At the far end of the complex, opposite to a row of benches with wooden shelters above them, a man behind another window was dispensing shells of kava. The word "sini" - kava, in the language of Central Pentecost - was buzzing back and forth.

"Is this Charlot Salwai's nakamal?" I asked a guy standing beside the kava bar.

"Yes," he said. This was the Green Light Nakamal that my friends on Pentecost had told me about - the place run by Charlot Salwai, Central Pentecost's MP. The man at the bar looked surprised. "How do you know Charlot Salwai?"

"I work on Pentecost," I explained, in the native language. The man smiled, and offered me a shell of kava. We sat down on one of the benches and chatted. Other people came over and introduced themselves. All were from villages within a few miles of Ranwadi. I hadn't met them before, but in many cases I knew their uncles, their brothers and their cousins. Some had even heard about me from relatives on the island.

More rounds of drinks were offered. I asked what the guy at the food counter was cooking.

"Taro," they said simply. These were Pentecost Islanders, all right. I chuckled and remembered one reason why I was glad to be going home for Christmas.

"You should get yourself some for dinner," my companions urged.

"Hmm..." I said. Port Vila is known throughout the South Pacific for its fine dining, and whilst my budget didn't stretch to any of the lagoon-side restaurants featured in the tourist brochures, there was no way I was coming into town after two hundred days of island food and eating lumps of starchy taro dug out of a Pentecost swamp. Near the hotel were food stalls run by women from Paama and the Shepherd Islands - islands whose climate is not suited to taro - who fry up a pick 'n' mix selection of meat, eggs, yam, fruit, and laplap with coconut cream, which they serve on strips of giant leaf. (Nibbling with your fingers at lumps of meat and vegetables on a wooden bench in the dark by the food stall isn't quite the same as dining in a French restaurant, but it's quick and tasty and nutritious, and never costs more than a couple of dollars. And it's a huge improvement on taro.)

"Maybe I'll get some taro later," I said.