Andrew Gray's travel tales

30th March

People come to Melsisi to go to the store, to sell their vegetables at the
market, to visit the little building that functions three days a week as a
bank and post office, to play sports, to attend school, to load and unload
cargo from ships, to get treated at the mission hospital, to watch DVDs on the
occasions when somebody can spare the petrol to run an electricity generator,
to earn money as teachers and traders and nurses and handymen, to participate
in ceremonies, and to hold meetings. Every Sunday morning, a thousand or so
people from the surrounding hills literally descend on Melsisi for church.
While there, they catch up on the week's gossip, and take the opportunity to
buy their weekly supplies of tinned meat and milk (from shopkeepers who are
more pragmatic about the Sabbath Day than their counterparts in the Scottish
Highlands).

Many of these people have houses in Melsisi where they can sleep for a night,
or for a week, or for the duration of the school term. However, these places
are not homes. Ask a person in Melsisi where he lives, and he will tell you
that his home is "on top", and nod in the direction of the mountains, at some
village obscured in the forest.

People from the mountains have always come down to Melsisi to trade and to
access the sea. Once upon a time, the visitors ran the risk of being attacked
and robbed there - I am told that the name Melsisi meant "spoil" in the area's
original language. Relations improved after the arrival of Catholic
missionaries, who landed in 1898 a couple of miles down the coast (today a
concrete crucifix marks the spot) and were met by the local chiefs. The chiefs
liked the idea of worshipping Jesus, local stories recall, but they were taken
aback when the missionaries told them they would need to give up cannibalism
and polygamy. Their traditional way of settling grievances - tying the
offender to a namele tree and setting it on fire - was also deemed
inconsistent with loving thy neighbour. However, after a lengthy discussion
amongst themselves, the chiefs agreed that Jesus's ideas made sense. They were
fed up, apparently, with dealing with the aggrieved relatives of people they'd
eaten or burned alive, and supporting a dozen wives each was just too much
hassle. Christianity offered the opportunity for a fresh start.

Having convinced the locals to adopt the new religion, the missionaries
established a church and clinic close to the mouth of Melsisi River, on a
triangular patch of flat land with mountain slopes on two sides and a stony
beach on the third. A couple of cyclones and tsunamis later, they moved their
mission up the hill, constructing an enormous whitewashed church on a breezy
mountainside well out of reach of the sea (although occasional earthquakes
still do their best to try and destroy the building). The old site is now an
empty field, shared by cows and sports players, although I'm told that if you
look down on the football pitch when the sun is shining from the right
direction you can make out the outline of the former church. The stone ruins
of the old mission hospital still stand at one corner of the field,
intertwined now with the roots of a giant banyan tree. They look as if they
are a thousand years old rather than merely a hundred.

Up on their hill, the missionaries certainly had a good view. The coastline
curves away southwards like the rim of a giant basin, lined with a ribbon of
gold where the mountain meets the ocean. The gold seeps into the sea like wet
paint, turning the shallows green and turquoise. Elsewhere the ocean has the
watery darkness of dilute ink. The rim is steep, and scars on the slopes and
boulders lying in the sea attest to a history of landslides. At the far end a
headland juts out into the water like a broken edge, jagged with vegetation.
In the distance is the grey stone caldera of Ambrym Island, drifting in ocean
mist and volcanic vapour.

Despite its spectacular setting, Melsisi itself is a relatively ramshackle
place. Most of Pentecost's other villages are such homely little settlements,
with well-tended huts surrounded by gardens and fruit trees and little creeks,
that it is easy to forget that you are in the impoverished Third World.
Although these villages are muddy and poor, they are the sort of place in
which you could imagine living and being happy. You could imagine growing up
there, spending your childhood working the gardens and playing in the forest,
leaving for the better life of the big city yet always thinking fondly of your
old village, taking your own children for holidays there, and perhaps
returning in your retirement to spend your final days contented in the place
that will always be your home.

Melsisi, by contrast, is nobody's home. Although it is by no means an
unpleasant place - 'shanty town' is too strong a term - it is very visibly
part of the Third World. The grey cement houses of the mission sit jumbled
together with metal shacks and dilapidated wooden huts on a rough, grassy
slope, broken up by a scattering of trees. There are no streets or driveways,
just an organic network of tracks and pathways threading amongst the houses.
In wet weather the most heavily-used paths are trampled into shitty mud.
Villagers fetch water in buckets from communal taps, cattle and chickens
wander amongst the houses, and men and women sit under trees waiting for
somebody or something or nothing in particular. Being a Catholic community,
Melsisi is infested with children, who spot foreign visitors a mile away and
gather by the roadside to shout out greetings. Many of them only know two
English phrases, "Good morning" and "Good night", so turning up in the
afternoon confuses them.

At the top the slope immediately above the sports field are the main buildings
of the College de Melsisi, the local French-speaking school. Vanuatu's
burdensome bilingual education system is a hangover from colonial days, when
the country was ruled jointly by the British and French, whose missionaries
each established their own schools. Since independence, the English-speaking
schools have been maintained because English is the major language of business
and tourism in the South Pacific, and is the language of the region's main
universities. The French-speaking schools have been maintained because France
would stop giving aid to Vanuatu if they weren't. The French, aware that their
language is losing ground (parents are starting to realise that their children
are better off learning English and are choosing schools accordingly), have
made desperate efforts to try and instil some linguistic pride into their
former subjects. Recently the people of Melsisi held a lafet to celebrate
'Francophonie Day' (it took me a while to figure out that 'lafet' was the
local pronunciation of 'la fete'). Songs were sung in French, speeches were
given, a feast was held, and when the lafet was over everybody went back to
speaking Pidgin English.

At the College I usually call in to visit Sara the Peace Corps girl, who lives
in a plywood house next door the Principal, surrounded by trees that drop
mushy rose apples and giant avocados onto the bare ground. Visitors who speak
English are always welcome - Sara doesn't get many - and are usually greeted
outside the house by Princess Oreo, Sara's biscuit-coloured dog.

I first met Oreo on Sara's birthday, when the little dog woke up to find her
house filled with burning cakes and giant rubber spheres that exploded when
clawed or bitten. Oreo rightly blamed me for these intrusions, and our
relationship got off to a bad start. For a while the dog would try to bite me
whenever Sara wasn't looking, and I became quite skilled at fending the
creature off with umbrellas and pieces of wood. However, after spending
Christmas with the local villagers - who presumably beat some discipline into
the animal - Oreo decided that white men weren't so bad after all, and now
greets me (and any other pale-skinned visitor) by jumping up with muddy paws,
misinterpreting my cultural unwillingness to kick her as a sign that I want to
be her friend.

Oreo's official purpose in life is to guard her mistress against would-be
rapists and intruders, although in fact the dog frequently buggers off at
night and sometimes Sara actually has to go out on her own in the darkness to
look for the wandering animal. Oreo's other pastimes include: getting in
people's way, yapping at visiting children, acquiring parasites, obeying
commands to "sit" and "stay" when it suits her, bringing home disgusting
objects such as the hooves from freshly-slaughtered bullocks, tormenting the
dog next door, and running a mile when Sara tries to take her down to the
river for a bath. Sara loves the dog all the same.

- - -

Local sorcerers, it is claimed, can fly to Melsisi from Ranwadi in only a
couple of minutes if they find the right magic leaf. For the rest of us it is
a four mile (6 km) walk, along the puddly dirt road which crosses the headland
north of the school and then runs along the narrow coast.

The distance to Melsisi is about the same as the distance from my childhood
home to the town where many of my schoolfriends lived, a journey it never once
occurred to me to make on foot. In Britain, four-mile walks are strictly for
weatherproofed outdoor enthusiasts in scenic areas; if you suggested walking
four miles for the simple purpose of getting somewhere, people would react as
if you were crazy. Try it sometime and see. Even if the walk would only take
an hour and you might spend nearly that long waiting at the bus stop, even if
the time spent earning money to buy a car would cancel out the time saved by
travelling in it, walking four miles is crazy. There's a bus stop round the
corner. I can give you a lift. You'd be crazy to walk.

The people who tell you this are not necessarily lazy; many would happily
spend a similar amount of time and effort on a treadmill down at the gym. This
costs money and achieves nothing except the regeneration of a few muscle
fibres and the oxidation of a few grams of food molecules. But using that
energy to actually get somewhere would be crazy.

Not that four-mile walks back home are a particularly pleasant way of passing
the time. In most cities it's hard to walk four miles without passing through
neighbourhoods that are depressing or dangerous. As for the rural highways of
England, most are downright unwalkable unless you enjoy picking your way along
a muddy, litter-strewn verge within buffeting distance of the giant vehicles
that thunder past at twenty-five metres per second spraying clouds of grit,
rainwater and uncombusted diesel particles onto the crazy person by the
roadside.

The four-mile walk to Melsisi, by contrast, is a very pleasant outing. Shady
trees overhang the road, and scented flowers and decomposing fruits combine to
create an ever-changing succession of perfumes. Crabs dodge sideways like
obstacles in a computer game, and pigs grunt at you from the bushes nearby.
Growing in the verges are sensitive grasses that fold their leaves when poked;
give them a second poke and the entire plant cowers down in alarm, exposing
its thorns. When teaching biology in Edinburgh I once grew some of these
sensitive plants a pot in my classroom (where they helped to convince one
sceptical student that plants are in fact living things), but when the heating
was switched off during the school holidays the poor things died of cold.
There is no danger of that happening here.

In one spot the roadway descends right onto the beach, passing a small cave
and running around the base of a magic cliff. Here I often stop to try and
hurl a stone into the natural chimney running through the rock so that it
tumbles, arcade-style, out of a hole of the bottom of the cliff. This is
reputed to bring some sort of luck. (I assume it's good luck, since nobody
would try it otherwise.)

Vehicles are a rare sight on Pentecost's roads, and when one does pass the
driver will slow down and wave; sometimes he will even stop for a quick chat.
Where the road passes along the shore, I occasionally come across people
shovelling 'sand beach' into sacks and loading the materials into a truck to
be taken to nearby building sites. Sometimes I am offered a lift on the back
of the truck; sometimes I help with loading the sand beach in return.

It would be highly rude to pass a fellow walker on the road without at least a
smile and a nod of the head, and the majority of people will stop to talk. The
language varies - most commonly Pidgin, sometimes the local language, perhaps
the odd word of French, and very occasionally real English - but the
conversation is nearly always the same:

"Yes, Andrew!" Nearly everyone along the road to Melsisi now knows me by name.
"Ko ban ibe?"

"Nam sak Melsisi." The same place I'm always going when you meet me along this
road and ask me where I'm going.

"Kon mulma nangih?"

"Bung mwerani." I'm coming back tonight.

"By you walkabout 'long night?" For some reason people usually revert to
Pidgin English when they're surprised.

"Uh-huh." Unlike most people on Pentecost I'm not too frightened of ghosts to
go for a long walk in the dark. And unlike them I have a good supply of
rechargeable batteries for my torch.

"OK." Sometimes there's a shaking of the head and a rather-you-than-me look.
"Allez!"

- - -

I find many excuses to visit Melsisi - visiting the shops, going to the bank,
catching up with Sara, going for a walk - but the village's real attraction is
that it is the only place for several miles around where you can be sure of a
good night out. Each of the local communities whose members come together in
Melsisi has its own bar, where men gather in the evenings to swill down
coconut shells and plastic bottles filled with "sini" - the local name for
kava. The drink is made from the roots of Piper methysticum, the 'intoxicating
pepper plant', which are brought down in baskets from gardens high on the
mountain. The yellow roots are pounded into paste using an old drainpipe and a
wooden ram, mashed up with water fetched in buckets from a nearby tap, and
then sieved through rice sacks and old stockings. The resulting liquid looks
and tastes utterly poisonous, but has the useful property of shutting down
those parts of the brain that are overly concerned with the tedious details of
life while leaving the rest largely unaffected. This leaves drinkers free to
contemplate their deeper thoughts, enjoy the friendship of their companions,
and fully appreciate how wonderful it is to be in the South Pacific on a warm
tropical night.

Officially, a shell-full of kava costs "selen kalim" - five shillings. (The
price is actually 50 vatu, but since numbers larger than ten are awkward to
say in the local language, people continue to quote prices in pounds and
shillings - 200 vatu to the pound, and ten to the shilling - even though these
forms of money haven't been used in Vanuatu since colonial days.) However,
half an hour of pleasant conversation is usually enough to earn a free shell
of the drink, and among the regulars at the bar money seldom changes hands. At
one kava bar I was given a drink on the house in return for saying grace (it's
customary at many bars for drinkers to pray and ask God to bless their drug
abuse before the first shell is drunk). On another occasion the barman
actually pursued me out of the door as I was leaving, a brimming shell of kava
in his hand, in his eagerness to give me a free drink.

"You one customer now. You no pay'em," I was told recently, as I took my shell
of kava and tried to hand over my 'five shillings'.

You're a regular customer now, so you don't have to pay. I wish the same had
applied at the student bars in Edinburgh.

22nd March

On that distant Friday night in the Scottish Highlands - a place where the
nightlife is so limited that teachers are forced to go and get drunk in the
same places as their students - I never imagined that I would get the chance
to prove whether or not he was right. Much as I love colours and smells and
explosions, a career of helping bored students get to grips with a subject
that most of them loathe wasn't what I'd dreamed of.

However, after Mr Noel's retirement, Ranwadi needed somebody to teach its
senior Chemistry classes. Since I was the only person around with a science
degree (albeit in a different science) - and the only science teacher who
didn't blankly refuse to touch the subject - I was given the job.

Ranwadi's senior science lab was built less than two years ago with Australian
aid money, yet already looks dingy and old-fashioned. A hibiscus hedge along
one side of the building blocks out light and harbours mosquitoes, and on the
other side an overhanging roof obscures what would otherwise be a beautiful
view of the vine-draped ridge across the valley from the school. Along the
wooden panels where the walls meet the roof are rows of government posters
carrying important messages in Vanuatu's three national languages ("Don't
litter in our beautiful Pacific. Respektem korel rif blong Vanuatu. Sauvons
nous tortues de l'extinction"). Elsewhere the walls are made of plain, painted
blocks and resist attempts to decorate them: you can't put pins into solid
cement, and sellotape and blu-tack quickly lose their stickiness in tropical
conditions.

On blustery days, draughts through the windows make any experiment involving
flames nearly impossible. Experiments requiring mains electricity have to be
done in the evenings, since there is usually no power during the day, which is
awkward since all the lights in the lab are broken. The shed housing the
school's electricity generator is right next door to the lab, and on the rare
occasions when somebody does decide to switch on the power during the day it
fills the room with noise.

At the start of term several of the water taps in the sinks along the sides of
the room weren't working. The water supply mysteriously restarted one
lunchtime when nobody was around, and a tap that had inadvertently been left
on flooded the room.

Next door to the lab is a gloomy store room full of glassware and chemicals.
By Vanuatu standards Ranwadi's science department is actually very well
equipped, partly due to Mr Noel's efforts in bringing science materials from
New Zealand and partly thanks to a recent shipment of supplies from AusAID.
However, the overworked Mr Noel seldom had time to clean and tidy the
storeroom, and nobody else ever bothered. Many pieces of equipment were buried
in dusty, unlabelled boxes (some of them, I suspected, had been left
unlabelled on purpose to discourage theft), and dirty bottles and test tubes
left over from long-past experiments mouldered on the benches. Most of the old
glassware was covered with a grey film of dirt, and cobwebs clung to the
ceiling. One large spider, in a remarkable feat of engineering, had managed to
construct a web that spanned the entire room.

Any chemical with a tendency to degrade in warm conditions had long since done
so, and those with the ability to absorb water from the air had turned to
slush in the humidity. The salt in the tub marked 'sodium chloride' looked as
if it had been scraped from a winter road. Worst of all, there were several
bottles and flasks of liquid that had no label, or that looked and smelled as
if they weren't what the label claimed them to be. What was I supposed to do
with these mystery chemicals? Were they corrosive? Flammable? Poisonous? I had
no idea. I was reluctant to simply leave them lying around the lab, but nor
did I want to pour them down the sink, from which they would probably drain
straight into the local stream. In the end I put them all in a tray marked
"Unknown chemicals" with a note to the students and the other science
teachers: "If you made these or you know what they are, please label them or
dispose of them." I knew that nobody would touch them.

My new Year 12 Chemistry class, who had already studied the subject for a
year, were beginning a topic on Organic Chemistry.

"Living things are made of carbon compounds," I told them, and proved the
point by plucking a flower from the bushes outside and dropping it into neat
sulphuric acid; the flower disintegrated into a black carbon sludge. The
students were impressed, especially when I told them that the same thing would
probably happen to my finger if I dipped it into the acid.

The Year 11s were just beginning their course, and were tackling the
boring-but-necessary topic that forms the first chapter of every chemistry
book: the structure of atoms.

"You can knock electrons off their atoms," I explained, rubbing a balloon
against my shirt. I held the balloon up to my hair, expecting a tickling of
static electricity. Nothing happened. The electricity had been sapped away by
the humidity in the air. I would have to try the demonstration again in the
dry season.

After a few weeks, a new science teacher arrived at Ranwadi, and Year 11
Chemistry was taken off my hands. Instead - and in spite of making it as
obvious as I could that I wanted nothing to do with Year 13s this year - I was
given a Year 13 Chemistry class to supervise. My class turned out to consist
of one student.

Most Ni-Vanuatu youngsters go through a phase of being exceptionally shy. They
are particularly shy around white people, teachers, and members of the
opposite sex. A white male teacher giving one-on-one tuition to a local girl
was therefore going to be an awkward situation. Fortunately, the girl turned
out to be a keen student (perhaps she had picked up on the fact that I would
gladly drop the class given a good excuse), and the first few lessons went
surprisingly well.

The Year 13 courses are organised by the University of the South Pacific
headquarters in Fiji, and comprise a fixed weekly programme of practical
activities, individual study, and periodic assessments which are sent to Fiji
for marking. The courses make virtually no allowance for the fact that the
science facilities at many schools in the South Pacific are basic, nor for the
fact that most students in the region do not speak English as a first
language. As in last term's Year 13 classes, much of my time was spent
explaining in simple terms what the dense, university-style language in the
course materials was trying to convey.

Matters weren't helped by the fact that the Year 13s at Ranwadi, in typical
Pentecost style, were five weeks late in starting their courses.

"It says here that we should have a big exam next week," my Chemistry student
pointed out to me during her second tutorial. "But I haven't had a chance to
study any of the material for it yet." (She didn't say this in quite so many
words, but through whispered half-sentences and by pointing at her Course
Guide she managed to communicate what she meant.)

"Can the exam be postponed?" I asked the teacher responsible for organising
the Year 13 courses.

I didn't get a straight answer.

I secretly hoped that there would another military coup in Fiji. Nothing
nasty, of course, just something that would disrupt the University of the
South Pacific enough to set back the Year 13s' assessments by a few weeks and
give the poor students a chance to catch up.

6th March

Walter Lini Day on 21st February, which commemorates Vanuatu's founding
father, caught me by surprise. Less than two weeks later came Chiefs' Day.
Later in the year there is Labour Day, Children's Day, Independence Day,
Penama Day (a provincial holiday), Constitution Day, National Unity Day,
Family Day, and an assortment of Christian holidays which will be observed
religiously in every sense of the word. Vanuatu has special days in honour of
nearly everyone and everything, it seems, except the expatriates who have to
try and plan their work around the country's many public holidays (although I
daresay that if somebody suggested adding Foreigner's Day to the calendar,
plenty of work-shy government officials would jump at the idea).

Of course, it's nice to have an occasional day off. Walter Lini may have
decreased his country's annual productivity by half a percentage point or so
when he bequeathed it a national holiday, but he also founded what was
described last year as "the happiest country on earth" by British economists
who ranked their own, more hard-working country 108th in its happiness.
However, for teachers with lessons to plan and assessments to organise, the
unpredictability of these days off can be frustrating. Consulting a calendar
doesn't always help, because it's hard to know which special occasions will
respected as holidays and which will not, and at Ranwadi decisions such as "Is
tomorrow a school holiday?" are often taken the previous afternoon.

Some public holidays are adhered to very strictly - a local person once told
me solemnly that you could be imprisoned for working on Independence Day.
Others are more flexible. People at Ranwadi take so much time off for
unofficial reasons - by my reckoning, between May and September last year
there was only one week during which there was not some sort of disruption
that caused lessons to be missed - that the Principal occasionally tries to
compensate by making them work during official holidays. Getting the students
to actually come to class on such days is like trying to round up wild cats.

Chiefs' Day, on 5th March, was most definitely a holiday - it would have been
disrespectful otherwise. I went down to Vanwoki, the local village, to join in
the festivities. Several bearded old chiefs were sitting hunched like happy
gnomes on the grass outside the nakamal. Chief Regis, the happiest and
gnomiest of the chiefs, has a reputation for growing fine tobacco in his
garden on the mountainside, and his produce had evidently been passed around
generously. The pungent, ancient smell of the fresh tobacco - a smell I will
forever associate with Chief Regis and his village - drifted through the
clearing. Two or three small wood fires were smouldering, and now and then
people would pick up the glowing logs and use them to light their cigarettes.

Nearby, a villager with a half-broken battery-powered radio had managed to
pick up Radio Vanuatu by stringing up an aerial in a mango tree. Bright, funky
music was followed by the jabbering of the local news; I was too far away to
hear what was being said. Probably an increase in the price of
something-or-other, or the announcement that such-and-such a village was
getting a new truck or a new water supply with the help of such-and-such an
agency. Or maybe the latest twist in the court case involving the men from
neighbouring Malekula Island who were accused of cultivating marijuana. (Their
defence: marijuana is the Biblical Tree of Life, and God's laws are above
those of Vanuatu.)

I shook hands respectfully with the chiefs then joined the young men who were
mashing up kava roots in preparation for an evening's drinking. A hairy,
black-and-white piglet the size of a fat rabbit trotted about snuffling at
people's feet. In the cooking pit at the back the nakamal, lumps of pig and
taro wrapped in giant leaves were roasting gently under hot stones. Dogs
loafed around outside, attracted by the smell of pork. Most of them were
either scrawny or obese: village dogs fend for themselves in Vanuatu, and some
were clearly better at it than others.

Suddenly the young men in the clearing became animated; talking urgently to
one another in the local language. I have yet to master with the arcane
grammar of Central Pentecost Language, but I can often follow the villagers'
conversations by picking up key words - much like a dog ("blah blah blah
biscuit") or a computer ("print blah blah blah") or a student at Ranwadi when
I speak to them in English ("blah blah homework blah blah Thursday").

In this case the key words I picked up were "atsi" - person - and "temat" -
dead. I moved over to the radio and listened.

Fighting had broken out in town between men from Tanna Island and men from
Ambrym Island. Such squabbles flare up occasionally between Vanuatu's
tribally-minded islanders - this is the rarely-mentioned downside of living in
close-knit communities. Witchcraft is often the cause: a member of one
community puts a curse on a member of another community, and retaliation
follows. The disputes usually blow over quickly, but this one sounded more
serious than usual. Three people were dead, houses had been burned, and 140
people (a huge number by Vanuatu standards) had been rounded up and arrested.
The government had called an urgent meeting, and a national "state of
emergency" had been in force since the previous morning. The Chief's Day
celebrations in Port Vila had been cancelled, and all other public gatherings
had been banned.

I had been living through a national emergency for a day and a half, and
noticed nothing.

On the radio, the announcer was reading out an urgent message from several
Ambrym chiefs, pleading with the members of their community to calm down and
"no make'm any more trouble with'em all man Tanna". This was followed by a
message informing sports teams that the national stadium would be closed all
week because of the trouble, and a message from the management of Vila
Hospital advising the public that they would only be admitting emergency
cases.

Each message was repeated solemnly, the time was announced, and the music
resumed. "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" sang brightly through the clearing
outside the nakamal.

The young men went back to their chatting and kava-grinding. The old chiefs
sat in silence on the muddy grass and smoked contentedly.

3rd March

When my flight was cancelled, I contemplated postponing my planned trip into
town. However, I had already told my students that I would be away and left
them enough work to keep them busy until I returned. The students and I both
knew that this was a meaningless gesture: the students had no intention of
doing the work and I had no expectation that they would. In a place where
staff disappear without warning any time they can find a moderately good
excuse, and supply teachers are an unknown concept, an absent teacher means a
free period and the students weren't going to let me persuade anyone
otherwise. Nevertheless, having arranged not to be needed at Ranwadi that week
it would have been a nuisance to reschedule my trip.

I therefore decided to travel the way the locals do, and boarded a cargo ship
bound for Port Vila.

According to a recent newspaper article, only four of Vanuatu's dozen or so
inter-island ships operate legally. The rest are not properly licensed,
because that would require them to get insured, and getting insured would
require them to be seaworthy. The authorities know better than to enforce the
law: there is no money to upgrade the ships, and taking them out of service
would condemn communities to isolation. People who cannot afford to fly travel
by ship to visit loved ones on other islands, and students at boarding schools
catch the ships home at the end of term. The passengers whose lives are
allegedly being put at risk would be the first to complain if safety
regulations deprived them of affordable shipping. The islanders also depend on
the ships for every imported product they buy, from candles and milk powder to
cement and schoolbooks. Nobody in rural Vanuatu manufactures metal or plastic
or glass or cloth or fuel oil. If the ships stopped coming, life on the
islands would descend back into the Stone Age.

The M.V. Brisk, which passes Pentecost on its weekly runs between Vanuatu's
two towns, is one of Vanuatu's better ships. I had high hopes that it might
even be one of the four that is actually certified seaworthy, though I didn't
dare ask. As its name implies, the Brisk is also faster than most of the cargo
ships, calling only at specific villages rather than simply meandering along
the coast and stopping wherever somebody feels like putting a parcel or a sack
of vegetables or an auntie on board. The Brisk's other advantage is that you
can usually rely on it arriving on more-or-less the day it's expected,
although predicting what time it's going to turn up is still a job best left
to the local sorcerer.

It ought to come early in the afternoon, people told me. But if you want to
catch the ship you should be waiting down on the beach at eleven in the
morning, just in case it's early.

At ten o'clock in the morning, while I was in the school office talking to the
Principal, somebody heard the noise of an engine. We looked outside and saw
the Brisk cruising past - briskly. Its nearest stop was at Waterfall Village,
a mile away.

"Another ship should be coming later," the Principal reassured me.

I wasn't giving up so easily. I'd noticed the school truck parked outside.

I ran to my house, grabbed my bag, and ran back to the truck, where the driver
had already started the engine. We raced the Brisk around the headland, and I
jumped out onto the beach just as the ship was nuzzling ashore, its propellers
thrusting in reverse to prevent the white metal hulk from stranding itself as
it approached. The ramp at the front of the Brisk didn't quite reach the shore
- maybe the water was too shallow for the ship to come closer - and I had to
wade on board. A couple of minutes later, there was another grinding of
propellers, and the ship pulled away from the beach.

Heading southwards along the coast, we made great time. Because the ship was
so early, a lot of people had missed it, which made loading and unloading
unusually quick. This made the ship even earlier, which caused even more
people to miss it, starting a vicious cycle which seemed to escape the
attention of the captain. Maybe he was just in a hurry to get to Port Vila.

By lunchtime, we had reached the end of Pentecost, and turned towards Ambrym,
the next island in the archipelago. Ambrym's black volcanoes were enmeshed
with complex patterns of cloud, where streamers of mist condensing against the
mountainsides combined with the grey strata drifting in from the ocean and the
mile-wide column of orange-tinted smoke spewing from inside the island.

>From Ambrym, getting to Port Vila is much like getting to Neverland: turn left
and go straight on till morning. Deciding that being wet and cold was
preferable to being seasick, I spent the night out on deck, hunched on a
narrow metal gangway at the stern. The Lost Boys travelling beside me were
students returning to college after the summer holidays. One was a trainee
pilot, who had yet to find the money for flying lessons but was persevering
with the theory part of his training in the hope that one day someone would
sponsor him to do the practicals. Apparently Air Vanuatu, embarrassed at
having its flag-carrying planes piloted mainly by foreigners, occasionally
offers such sponsorships. Another was a History and Politics student at the
University of the South Pacific, who dreamed of becoming a successful
businessman one day. I meet a lot of similar students in Britain, where most
are drifters, but in a country where politics and business are as unsubtly
mixed as in Vanuatu, a degree in politics is probably not a bad route to
riches.

Another of the boys spending the night on the deck of the Brisk was from Bay
Martelli, at the southern tip of Pentecost. He told me about his village's
claim to fame: seven years ago it was destroyed by a tsunami.

After the big wave came, he said, "Five man ee dead. Twenty got killed." (In
Pidgin English this statement makes sense: "kill" means to strike, or in this
context, to injure.)

The wave had struck in the middle of the night. Some of the men had been
drinking kava that evening, the boy explained, and were unable to run to
safety.

So kava-drinking is dangerous after all.

"How did the other villagers know when to run?", I wondered. Could they see
the wave coming?

"Before wave, ee got big earthquake," my companion said. "Big, big one. Man ee
no savvy stand-up 'long him."

An earthquake so big you couldn't stand up in it.

"After earthquake, saltwater ee come dry." He made a gesture to illustrate
what he meant: a terrifying undertow sucking the sea away from the shore as
the wave approached.

It was when the villagers saw this that they ran for their lives.

"After wave ee come, close-up every something 'long village ee wood, no-more."
The village was reduced to driftwood. "Church house, no-more, him ee
stand-up." Only the church - presumably the only building not made of sticks -
was left standing.

God had destroyed every house in the village except his own. I wondered what
sins the villagers blamed themselves for in the aftermath of this tragedy.

As the boy told his story, we stared out towards the ocean, which rolled from
side to side. It was a starless, moonless night. Below us, the stern of the
ship was pumping grey turbulence into evil black water. Unable to see the
horizon, we fixed our eyes instead on a patch of cloud above Ambrym's
volcanoes, where the sky was glowing red.

- - -

Lurching among islets and headlands in a grey swell, the ship approached Port
Vila early the next morning. From a distance, Vanuatu's capital city looked
small and unimposing. The cruise ship making its way into the harbour ahead of
us was another matter - it was larger than any building in the town that it
was bearing down upon, and its dark smoke smudged the sky like charcoal. The
monstrosity docked at the main wharf, beside a dreary stretch of road on the
outskirts of town where "Welcome to Vanuatu" signs were obscured behind old
shipping containers. The Brisk pulled up beside a gravely dockyard nearby,
opened its front ramp like a whale and vomited its passengers onto the shore.

"Mr Andrew!", a girl called out to me as I left the ship. "What are you doing
here?"

It was one of the Year 13 biology students who I'd taught last semester. I had
last seen her doing her family's laundry waist-deep in a muddy South Pentecost
river, surrounded by splashing children, and I scarcely recognised the urban
youth with trendy clothes and braided hair as the same girl. She had come to
Vila, she told me, to apply to nursing school. Perhaps my efforts at teaching
Year 13 biology hadn't been as much of a waste of effort as I'd thought.

- - -

My main reason for coming to town was to get my passport re-stamped at the
Immigration Office. When I had returned to Vanuatu at the end of January, my
paperwork from the Ministry of Education had yet to come through. No problem,
I had been told: you can enter the country on an ordinary one-month tourist
permit - which is given freely to most visitors on arrival - and 'straighten'
things with the authorities later.

It irks the ni-Vanuatu that white visitors are allowed into their country with
nothing more than a passport, yet Vanuatu's citizens must nearly always go
through the tiresome process of applying for a visa when they wish to travel
abroad. As a Brit, I have the luxury of being able to go on holiday to any of
128 countries without applying in advance for a visa, yet a citizen of Vanuatu
would be admitted to a mere 47. Australia and New Zealand, the major
destinations for international flights from Vanuatu, are not among those 47
countries. The ni-Vanuatu see this, rightly, as a sign of unfriendliness.

"Man Vanuatu all-ee no welcome overseas from wanem?" my drinking companions
asked me one night at the kava bar in Melsisi. ("From wanem" - literally
"because of what" - is the Pidgin way of asking why.)

This situation irks me too. My own country does let in ni-Vanuatu visitors
without a visa (though they probably don't turn up very often), yet as a white
person I get held accountable for the xenophobia of Vanuatu's neighbouring
countries. I decided to be blunt.

"Ee got some man 'long all 'nother country, especially 'long Australia, who ee
no like'm man b'long overseas," I said. "Ee no everyone, but ee got some.
All-ee fright from all-ee think say ee no good Australia ee come full-up
with'em black man."

Harsh immigration regimes don't apply only to visitors from poor, black
countries, of course. I belong to the seventh most widely-welcomed nationality
in the world (only Americans, Danes, Finns, Swedes, Irish and Germans can get
into more countries visa-free), and even I need a visa to enter Australia.

"But 'long England ee no got man who ee think all-same?" my companions asked.

"Ee got some," I admitted. Britain has its share of racists and xenophobes.

"But no too-much?" they said.

I ummed and erred. Another of the kava-drinkers helped me out.

"Time way me look'em one team b'long Europe or America play football," he
said, "Team ee got plenty black man. But time way me look'em team b'long
Australia, ee got white man, no-more. No got black man 'long team b'long
Australia."

For rural islanders, football is the definitive source of information about
the wider world. There are no black Socceroos - therefore Australia is
indisputably an unfriendly country.

Granting easy entry to visitors from another country does not, of course, mean
allowing unrestricted immigration. It is simply a show of trust that visitors
will not cause trouble or outstay their welcome. If Vanuatu is willing to
trust foreigners in this way (and I know of a few who have abused this trust),
other countries ought to be able to extend the same trust to citizens of
Vanuatu.

The irony is that, for simple numerical reasons, Vanuatu ought to be far more
afraid of immigrants than its richer and larger neighbours. If 2% of Vanuatu's
population migrated to Australia, they would not be noticed. If 2% of
Australia's population migrated to Vanuatu, they would outnumber the natives,
and the country would be changed drastically for the worse. People worry that
Third World inhabitants will flood into richer countries in search of a better
quality of life, but plenty of Westerners buy homes in Port Vila for the same
reason. In measures of life satisfaction compiled by the New Economics
Foundation, Vanuatu actually scores about the same as Australia and New
Zealand, and higher than Britain.

Back in Port Vila, I was a day or two late in presenting my passport for
re-stamping at the Immigration Office. Nobody seemed to mind.

Now that I was no longer an illegal immigrant, I visited the Ministry of
Education to formally sign up as a teacher. The Ministry occupies a bright,
modern building in the suburbs of Vila, with a couple of small courtyards in
the centre and semi-covered corridors open to the breeze. The place has a
modest, academic feel too it, and if it weren't for the plaque at the door you
might think that it was part of the French school next door. Perhaps it once
was.

I was shown the way to the office of the country's Director of Secondary
Education - there aren't many layers of officialdom in a country the size of
Vanuatu - and his secretary gave me a copy of my contract to sign. Up until
then, nobody had given me a straight answer when asked how much I would
actually get paid (I'd been told merely that it would be "enough to live off")
and I was surprised when I saw the sum of money in the contract. It was half
what I would have earned if I had kept my old job in Edinburgh, admittedly,
but by Third World standards it was an extremely good salary, and since
Vanuatu is a tax haven there would be no income tax deducted. No wonder so
many of my students at Ranwadi aspire to become teachers themselves one day.

- - -

Since I was returning to Pentecost on a cargo ship, I decided to bring back
some cargo. The supermarkets of Port Vila are a paradise of products that
hardly ever turn up on Vanuatu's other islands, and since it was likely to be
months before I returned to town I stocked up, filling baskets and boxes with
kilogram quantities of everything from icing sugar to cockroach poison. Five
or six times, I trekked between my hotel and the shops, and each time hauled
back as much as I could fit into my arms. Several passers-by stopped and
offered to help me carry it all (the village community spirit is surprisingly
well alive even in Vanuatu's biggest town), but if I was going to spend
another night on the deck of the Brisk I wanted to tire myself out thoroughly
first.

The following afternoon, I packed my shopping into five huge bags, loaded it
into a taxi, and took it down to the dockyard. The Brisk wasn't due to depart
until evening, but this time I wasn't taking any chances. I loaded my cargo
onto the ship, and was told I had a couple of hours to spare. I walked back
into town, visited the supermarket, and returned with yet another bag of
shopping.

When I returned to the dockyard, the place was a melee. People scuttled on and
off the Brisk like foraging ants, depositing their things on board, while a
crewman stood on the ramp remonstrating with the crowd for leaving it until
the last minute to load their cargo. Inside the ship, the passenger area was
heaped with bags and boxes, each with its owner's name and village scrawled on
it in thick permanent marker. Out on the front deck, a diverse pile of cargo
accumulated: sacks of rice and flour and cement, cartons of tinned beef and
breakfast crackers, a truck, two fibre glass boats, drums of petrol and diesel
and kerosene, live chickens, pieces of roofing iron, empty water tanks,
palettes of plywood, lengths of piping, and a bewildered-looking dog. There
was a pig somewhere in the pile, too, judging by the squealing.

At 7 p.m., the last of the cargo was heaped on board and the Brisk pulled away
from the wharf, listing noticeably to one side under its uneven load.

While the other passengers tried their best to find a comfortable spot to
sleep, I sat outside the cabin on top of the ship with James, the ship's
mechanic, drinking sweet Milo and chatting about the Second World War. James
was keenly interested in history, but having never attended secondary school
he hadn't had the chance to learn much about it. How did the war start?, he
wanted to know. I did my best to explain. You should write a book about it, he
said. Plenty of better-qualified people already have, I told him. But
presumably not in Pidgin English.

When James went away to check on the engines, I joined the passengers who were
snoozing on the corrugated metal roof above the lower deck. Eventually, the
cold wind drove the others below deck (in most respects Europeans are wimps
compared with the ni-Vanuatu, but when it comes to tolerating cold we have a
definite advantage!), and I was alone on the roof. I tried to sleep, but the
ship was now in open water and rolling drastically in the swell, and I began
to worry that a particularly big lurch might tip me off the edge and into the
ocean. After a large wave splashed across the roof and soaked me, I retreated
to the deck at the stern. The wind quickly dried off the seawater (leaving my
hair slicked with salt), but then it began to rain. Luckily, all of the other
passengers had now abandoned the chilly upper deck in favour of the crowded
heat and diesel vapour of the deck below, leaving empty a prime sleeping spot
in front of the cabin, where there was a crate to lie on and an overhanging
roof which kept off at least three-quarters of the rain. I lay down there and
watched the gyroscopic tilting of the ocean until I fell asleep.

- - -

Many astronauts say that they appreciated the wonder of the Earth in a new way
when they stepped back from its turmoils and saw their world from a distance
for first time. Returning by ship to Pentecost Island on a sunny afternoon, I
felt the same way.

Pentecost was beautiful that day. Its long skies and mountainsides were blue
and gold and immensely green, and the water reflected them in warm ripples.
The intricate slopes and valleys were overlaid with a canvas of rich forest
and dabbed with tiny puffs of white mist. Canoes paddled along the shore, and
brown children ran happily on the beach. Most of the villages were completely
hidden beneath the trees, but the white buildings of Ranwadi shone like a
little utopia in the jungle.

Somehow I felt as if I was approaching the place for the first time. This is
the sort of island where I could live and be happy, I thought.

22nd February

"He isn't a man of the people," said the voters, looking enviously at his
house and store, which sit neatly beside the main road and are surrounded by a
fenced lawn - unlike the other buildings at Waterfall, which are sited
haphazardly on the scruffy grass beneath the coconut trees. At night, a small
generator fires up and the big house hums with electric lighting, whilst the
kava drinkers in the nakamal next door shuffle about by candlelight
apologising for the fact that they haven't lit the lantern and moaning about
the price of kerosene in Jonas's store. (The cost of fuel was hardly Jonas's
fault, but why blame the global oil market when you can take out your
frustration on the local politician?)

Having been voted out of office, Jonas was free to concentrate on his business
as the local shopkeeper, taxi driver, tour guide, and general entrepreneur. (I
last encountered him at the waterfall, where he was showing around a German
tourist and a couple of visiting tax inspectors and pointing out how the rock
formations between the sheets of water look like genitals.) Jonas's latest
investment was a new printer and fax machine, which he had brought back from a
recent trip to Australia. One afternoon, he called me in to his house to help
set up the machine.

"You-fella 'long Scotland ee lucky," said Jonas, sweating. "Long Scotland ee
no hot too-much."

I wondered how long Jonas would need to spend outdoors in Scotland in February
to alter his opinion that its inhabitants are "lucky" with their climate.
About three minutes, I reckoned.

Nonetheless, even as a thermophile and a refugee from a colder climate, I had
to agree with Jonas: summer on Pentecost is unpleasant. Nearly every day since
I returned to the island has been uncomfortably hot.

This does not mean, of course, that every day has been the same: there are
many different kinds of hot weather on a South Pacific island. There is the
blinding nuclear heat of the mid-morning sun, which sears every surface with
gold and infuses the ocean with chemical blue. There is the savage heat of
midday, which lays you low like a fever. There is the misty heat of a calm
afternoon, when the sky fills with a luminous haze and the water turns to
molten nickel. There is the immense, moving heat of a windy day, when the air
surges with the vast energy of the tropics. And there is the heavy, sticky
heat of the night.

Occasionally something dark will come across the landscape, and there will be
a ghastly draining of heat from the air. Then a rain shower will descend like
a demon, shaking the trees, rattling the roof metal and slamming at the
windows and doors. After a few minutes, though, the apparition will pass, and
the heat will come flooding back.

Human beings, as a species, are in fact exceptionally well adapted to cope
with hot climates. With bare skin, copious sweat glands, and an upright
posture (which minimises the body area exposed to the midday sun), our
ancestors once strode under the African sun in temperatures that sent other
mammals limping towards the shade. By sweating all over their bodies - and
thus expending their excess heat energy on flinging water molecules into the
air - they were able to keep their bodies at a comfortable temperature. On the
dry, windy savannah, this method of cooling worked well. On Pentecost,
unfortunately, it does not.

The first problem is humidity. Out on the Pacific, the force of the sun
wrenches water from the surface of the ocean by the tonne, filling the wind
with moisture. The island's luxuriant vegetation contributes, drawing up
liquid and pumping it relentlessly into the air through every pore of every
leaf. Air will absorb a lot of water when hot, but nevertheless there comes a
point where saturation is reached, and the atmosphere can hold no more. When
this happens, sweat ceases to evaporate, and instead clings to the skin in a
salty slick.

The second problem is lack of ventilation. In traditionally-built
stick-and-bamboo huts, cool breezes - "fresh wind", as the local describe it -
flow freely through the walls and provide natural air-conditioning. However,
since wood and bamboo rot rapidly in the damp heat and are liable to blow away
in cyclones, such houses need to be rebuilt on a regular basis. In addition,
the holes and cracks that let in fresh wind also let in malarial mosquitoes.
When concrete and metal came along, it is therefore unsurprising that the
islanders who could afford these new materials adopted them enthusiastically.
The fact that these are the same materials that ovens are made of, and that
the tropical sun would provide a powerful source of heat for their
inadvertently-constructed ovens, escaped the builders' attention. The Three
Little Pigs may have saved their third house from being blown down by building
it out of bricks rather than sticks, but if they and the Big Bad Wolf had
lived in a tropical climate and couldn't afford to run air-conditioners then
the poor pigs would have roasted inside.

The biggest problem of all is clothing. Of the many unnecessary and dubious
things that foreigners introduced to Vanuatu - guns, brown rats, influenza,
tinned luncheon meat, the French language, papaya trees, David Beckham
posters, offshore banking, the Chinese, polythene, whisky, the mile-a-minute
vine, monosodium glutamate, Justin Timberlake songs, souvenir shops,
television - Western clothes must rank as one of the worst. Even when the air
is not insufferably humid, it is hard for sweat to evaporate if it's trapped
against your skin by layers of fabric.

Pentecost's traditional inhabitants realised this, and dressed appropriately
for their climate, covering only their genitals (the only part of the male
body, incidentally, that lacks sweat glands). This left sweat free to
evaporate from their skin, or at the very least trickle away unimpeded.

Fashions changed dramatically when Europeans turned up. The newcomers wore
clothes not just out of habit - in their chilly native climates, clothes were
a survival necessity - but because their white skin could not cope with the
Melanesian sun and their immune systems could not tolerate the ravages of the
mosquitoes. In spite of these weaknesses, the white people never doubted for a
second that they were superior to the natives, and since white people wore
clothes, it followed that wearing clothes was the right thing to do. For
evidence, as if evidence was needed, they pointed to their Holy Book (whose
authors, it should be noted, were lucky enough not to live in a humid
climate). Conceal thy nakedness, it said. As far as the missionaries were
concerned, grass skirts and penis wrappers were not up to the job.

The missionaries, for the most part, were lonely, single men. Finding
themselves isolated on islands full of bare-breasted, grass-skirted women -
and fearful that too many lustful thoughts and sinful temptations would lead
them to Hell - it is hardly surprising that one of their first acts was to
force the local ladies into the frumpiest, most unattractive clothing they
could find. The missionaries even convinced themselves that they were doing
this for the islanders' own good, overlooking the fact that the locals had
managed to go half-naked in front of one another for thousands of years
without descending into orgies of carnal sin.

Men, too, were told that in order to be considered civilised they would need
to put shirts on (perhaps the sight of their bronze torsos also inspired
un-Biblical thoughts among one or two of the more repressed missionaries),
although they got off much more lightly than women under the new clothing
regime. Here at Ranwadi, professionalism demands that I put on a shirt in the
classroom, but at my house I have long since overcome my reluctance to answer
the door to visitors while wearing nothing more than a pair of shorts. Nobody
would mind if I dressed like that down at the nakamal, either, although there
I usually keep my T-shirt on for fear of standing out like a luminous ghost in
a dark brown hut full of dark brown men.

Shirts and dresses, unlike grass skirts and penis wrappers, cannot be woven
from leaves hacked out of the jungle. Fortunately, thanks to the
capriciousness of Western fashions and the industriousness of Asian
manufacturers, there is always a supply of outdated, second-hand or surplus
clothes that can be shipped to Pentecost and sold at prices the islanders can
just about afford. These clothes are then worn until they disintegrate, or
until the holes in them become so large that what is left resembles a Miss
World ribbon. In the hands of people who spend their days hacking gardens out
of the jungle, and then wash their clothes by soaking them in corrosive Third
World detergents and battering them against rocks in the river, this rarely
takes long. Around Ranwadi, you can tell the villagers apart from the teachers
by the holes and stains in their clothes.

The positive side of all this is that virtually nobody on Pentecost is
tormented by a need to be well dressed. When it comes to fashion, anarchy
reigns. I came across a respectable (and non-English-speaking) middle-aged man
in a pink top with "Bad Girl" written across it in sensuous white lettering. A
ragged and discoloured T-shirt is quite acceptable attire for a high chief, or
for the best man at a wedding party. Only in church do people make any real
attempt to dress decently, and even here there is pragmatism. If the only
unstained shirt you have is a fake Uruguayan football top, and the only clean
trousers are striped pyjama bottoms, those will have to do.

(A slight exception to the local fashionlessness is the girls at Ranwadi, who
put on trendy Billabong and Quicksilver T-shirts when not in school uniform -
young people everywhere are conscious about their appearance in front of their
friends - although these T-shirts are mostly outdated designs from several
years ago, or are cheap fakes. When they go home to their parents' villages,
where they have no need to impress anybody, the students quickly revert to
their old, ragged clothes. I do much the same.)

Vanuatu gets the clothes that nobody else wants, although naturally they only
arrive here years after they became unfashionable in the rest of the world.
When I first visited in 2001, Pentecost was full of Princess Diana T-shirts.
Most of these have now disintegrated, but they still turn up occasionally.
Titanic movie T-shirts, from the same era, are also disappearing. New
unfashions will soon arrive to replace them.