Andrew Gray's travel tales

18th June

In private, needless to say, the situation is somewhat more nuanced. Teenage
boys and teenage girls are attracted to one another in even the most
straitened of traditional societies, and secret 'friending' between boys and
girls does happen in Vanuatu schools. Since such friendships are not
supposed to occur, and are definitely not supposed to be talked about, the
students are never taught about how to conduct them responsibly.

Occasionally, of course, a mishap will occur, which leads to a lot of
tut-tutting and causes one unfortunate ni-Vanuatu girl to begin her career
of child-rearing and domestic drudgery at the age of fifteen rather than the
age of twenty. (Abortion is so completely out-of-the-question that I don't
even know what its legal status is in Vanuatu.) Such accidents are
embarrassing, but there are always plenty of aunties on hand who can help
the young mother look after her baby, and plenty of uncles who can hunt down
the hapless father and force him down the aisle. For parents who worry about
the risk of teenage pregnancies, the traditional solution is not to promote
safe sex, but to redouble their efforts to keep young boys and girls well
apart.

The arrival of HIV in Vanuatu five years ago brought a change in attitudes.
Now, illicit liaisons were no longer merely a matter of loose morals and
poor family planning - they could be life-threatening. Doctors, aid workers
and the Vanuatu Ministry of Health began to put out earnest messages about
the importance of safe sex. In bashful island society, their messages did
not penetrate far. The only form of sex education given at most Vanuatu
schools is to remind the students that it's a sin.

At Ranwadi, where staff and students live together on a small campus and
there is nearly always somebody watching you, the school is fairly efficient
at finding and stamping out inappropriate friendships before they reach a
serious stage. The path between the school and its sports field, laid with
coral stones last year by boys who'd been sentenced to spend their
afternoons doing hard labour after being caught alone with female friends,
is a monument to frustrated teenage love. (The path is starting to become
slippery as the coral wears thin, and I privately hope that a few more
students will be caught making friends with one another soon so that we can
get it resurfaced.) Penitent young Romeos also supplied many of the stones
for the rockery outside my house.

Outsiders occasionally worry that the boys at the school will react to this
suppression of their instincts in the way that male prisoners sometimes do,
but as far as the locals are concerned, this isn't an issue: homosexuality
doesn't officially exist on Pentecost. (Then again, neither do teenage
romances.)

In the French-influenced, Catholic environment of the College de Melsisi,
the gap between preaching and practice is wider than at Ranwadi, and with
the school buildings scattered through a large village full of dark nooks
and crannies there is more room for mischief. After listening to some
worrying gossip about what her students get up to after the electricity
generator is shut down for the night and the lights go off, Sara the Peace
Corps volunteer decided to do something about it. A bowl of little foil
packets appeared in Sara's house. Boys who came round to the house for help
with their homework could slip one into their pocket if they wanted, no
questions asked.

I admired Sara's bravery. "You're giving out condoms to the kids on a
Catholic mission?"

"The students are already friending one another. They might as well be doing
it safely."

Sara's next step was to organise a health education workshop for the
students at the College. Local aid agencies gladly contributed a pile of
resources, including booklets explaining in Pidgin English how to use a
condom ("Step one: Find'em one partner who ee want'em make'm sex with'em
you"), and several Peace Corps volunteers from other parts of Vanuatu came
to help.

The local doctors and the Ministry of Health approved wholeheartedly of
Sara's efforts. Her Catholic colleagues, she suspected, might be less
supportive. The workshop was scheduled for a Saturday - when none of the
other teachers would be around.

I visited Melsisi late on the day of the workshop, and found the
participants gathered around the flat lawn in front of the College. Lessons
had finished, and the students were busy demonstrating their new knowledge
to their friends. Small groups of boys and girls had organised short skits,
each designed to communicate a message about being healthy and responsible,
and were performing them in front of the others. It all seemed to be going
well. The first to perform were the youngest students, the Year 7s, whose
skits dealt with uncontroversial, straightforward topics such as drinking
and smoking (don't do it, kids). After a break for dinner, the innocent
young Year 7s were sent home, and the hard-core stuff could begin.

During the break, I chatted to some of the students attending the workshop.
Compared with pupils in sex education lessons in Britain - who think they've
heard it all before, and often treat the lessons as little more than a
slightly-awkward form of light entertainment - the teenagers at Melsisi were
serious and solemn.

It's good that they are teaching these things to us, some boys said.

They said it a little nervously. I didn't know whether they were nervous of
romance, of sex, of embarrassment in front of their friends, of AIDS, of
sitting in classrooms listening to foreigners break local taboos and
wondering just how far they'd go, or of the prospect of their English
teacher being kicked out of the village by an irate Catholic priest. (The
latter, to Sara's relief, never happened.)

When I returned to Melsisi a few days later, two of the other Peace Corps
volunteers were still there. One was sitting at Sara's laptop, reading out
questions in Pidgin English that had been submitted anonymously by students
at the workshop.

"Hole b'long sex ee big one or small one?"

Sara and the other volunteer were dictating answers.

"You guys are really taking this health programme seriously," I observed.

Sara nodded. "Let me show you the sex education room."

She led me into her spare bedroom, where the walls were covered with
posters, many of them hand-written in Pidgin English. Some had diagrams,
illustrating what happens when boys and girls turn into men and women, while
others explained topics such as "sick moon" (menstruation) and
contraception.

It's OK to say no if your boyfriend wants sex, said one poster. But here are
some things you can do in the meantime. The suggestions ranged from "write'm
letter" and "hold'em hand" to "hold'em titty" and "fight'em kok" (either
alone or with your partner, the poster advised).

"Don't Catholics consider that a sin?" I asked.

"That's why some of the women here are so unhappy," Sara said. "As far as
the men are concerned, masturbation is a sin, but forcing yourself violently
on your wife when she doesn't want it is not."

The following Friday night, while Sara was down at the shore collecting a
parcel off a cargo ship, two boys in her class approached her and asked for
condoms.

Nervously, as though she were a drug dealer, Sara allowed the boys to follow
her back to her house. It was late, and she hoped her neighbours weren't
watching. She explained to the boys that she would only give what they
wanted if they intended to use them responsibly. They were not to play with
them, and were not to try and use them on any girl who wasn't entirely ready
and willing.

"So who are your girlfriends?" she asked.

The boys looked awkward.

"Er, me-two-fella ee hope, say, me-two-fella ee try'em with'em you."

"What?"

"Me-two-fella ee want'em make'm sex with'em you." The boys were serious.
"You savvy show'em how you make'm sex. Help'em education b'long
me-two-fella."

Sara was still in shock when she told me the story the next day.

"What you are asking is completely inappropriate and disrespectful," she had
told the boys, as she kicked them out into the night. "There are lines,
lines that you don't cross, and you have crossed those lines."

"But you already crossed their lines," I pointed out. "You crossed their
lines by talking to them about sex, which is normally taboo here. How were
they supposed to know where the new lines were drawn?"

"But still, I'm their teacher. Their teacher! It's totally disrespectful."

Although horrified by what the boys had said, Sara never reported the
incident to her colleagues. ("Nobody in Melsisi surfs the Internet, and they
certainly wouldn't read a page in English", she reassured me, when I
mentioned this blog.) One of the boys had a record of misbehaviour and would
have been expelled if the Principal had discovered what he had tried to do
with his English teacher, which Sara didn't want. She was also reluctant to
draw attention to her sex education programme.

By this time preparations were well under way for the PISSA Games - a big
inter-school sports tournament, which Melsisi will be hosting this year -
and the College was busy coaching students and building new sports
facilities. Sara went back to her usual job of teaching students to shoot
basketballs at hoops and conjugate English verbs, and at the College de
Melsisi sex was quietly forgotten.

8th June

Fed up with students failing to do their chores because they lacked a knife
or a broom, or lurking in the bushes outside the Dining Hall waiting for
friends to pass food out of the windows because they lacked a plate and
spoon, the Deputy Principal had ordered an Equipment Inspection. Teachers
were to check that everyone in their classes had all of the seven items that
students at Ranwadi are required to possess.

1. A bush knife

Students laid their rusty, eighteen-inch blades on the desk in front of me.
Most looked as if they had been well used: trimming hedges around the
school, hacking a path through the jungle for the new water pipeline,
ploughing soil in the Agriculture gardens, carving on the bedposts in the
dormitories. (The posts holding up some of the bunk beds are so deeply
notched that I wouldn't want to be the person sleeping on top - or, for that
matter, underneath.) I've even seen students use the giant knives to sharpen
their pencils.

Everyone got their bush knives? I ticked the list. Show me your knife so I
can see. Tick. Where's yours? Go and get it. Tick, tick, tick. OK, thank
you. You can put them away now.

2. A small knife

Students came forward with an assortment of implements, ranging from pen
knives to full-size chopping knives. Not exactly small, but I know the
students are quite capable of buttering bread with them, so they'll do.
Tick, tick, blank. Where's your small knife? Sheepish look. Cross. You need
a small knife. Make sure you get one.

3. A broom

Students waved their brooms in the air. Bundles of long twigs plucked from
coconut trees, tied loosely together at one end. Tick.

4. A plate

Students showed me their plates. Tick, tick, tick. Much as I suspected,
nearly all the students do have plates. They only loiter outside the Dining
Hall because they know they're supposed to eat indoors and they want to
rebel against the rules.

5. A cup

Boys extricated cups awkwardly from the baggy pockets at the sides of their
shorts. The girls had already laid them neatly on top of their plates, ready
to inspect. A varied assortment, ranging from tall drinking tumblers to tin
mugs. Tick, tick, tick.

6. A spoon

Cutlery was brandished. Tick, tick, tick. Does a fork count as a spoon? The
students assured me that it did.

7. A Bible

Tick, tick, tick. All present and correct. These kids were good Christians.
They may have been willing to go hungry or get punished for turning up to
school without the other items, but they weren't prepared to risk going to
Hell.

"What if we don't have the other pieces of equipment?" the students asked.

"You need to get them before next week," I said, passing on what the Deputy
Principal had said. "There will be another inspection then."

Get them how? The students had no money to buy new equipment.

The Principal, always quick to spot an opportunity for the simultaneous
stoning of multiple birds, came up with the answer. "Students with missing
pieces of equipment can work for them," he wrote on the notice board.
"Carrying sand for the building of the Principal's new house."

30th May

Unlike most things in Vanuatu, mourning follows a strict calendar. A
commemorative feast, accompanied by plenty of kava, must be held on the
tenth day after the death, and after the loss of a particularly beloved
figure the intervening nine days will also be devoted to soulful bouts of
pig-roasting and kava-drinking. A further ritual is held exactly one hundred
days after the death. Other round numbers, such as five days and twenty
days, may also be the occasion for ceremonies.

Ranwadi College is run by the Churches of Christ, who have nothing to do
with any figure as worldly and corruptible as a bishop, and here the impact
of the tragedy was minimal. Nobody tried to teach classes during the
national holiday, but this was simply because it was the first week of term
and half of the students had yet to make their way back to school. The day
of mourning didn't stop the Deputy Principal from ordering the students who
had returned on time to spend the morning hauling rocks for the new water
tanks.

"It's not surprising that your students come back late after the holidays,"
observed my parents, who were spending the week with me at Ranwadi before
flying home.

At the College de Melsisi, part of the local Catholic mission, it was a
different story. There, respect and tradition demanded that the school
remain closed for the entire ten days following the bishop's death.

At Ranwadi, the loss of a week or two of school would prompt nothing more
than a few mutterings followed by a long shrug. It happens regularly.
Education at Ranwadi bounces from one obstacle to another like an inflatable
raft, taking on water and capsizing at regular intervals yet always somehow
managing to stay afloat with most of its passengers still clinging on. The
College de Melsisi, by contrast, is normally an imperturbable steamship of a
school, seldom deviating from its rigid schedule. The disruption caused by
the bishop's death was agonising, and Melsisi's principal talked (to his
colleagues' horror) of taking away a week of the next school holidays to
compensate. Yet nobody would countenance the possibility of sending the
College's students and teachers back to work until the Ten Days were over.

On Day Eight, after saying goodbye to my parents at the airfield, I went to
visit Sara the Peace Corps girl at Melsisi.

On a normal afternoon, Sara's house buzzes like a honey pot with people
coming and going: students with their English books, colleagues with keys
and pieces of paper, and well-meaning villagers bringing enormous bundles of
cabbage and unappetising slabs of roasted vegetable. (Disposing of these
unwanted gifts discreetly, so as not to cause offence, is one of the major
challenges in Sara's life. They don't burn well, the dog refuses to eat
them, and the rubbish bin outside the house is in full view of passers-by.)
During spare minutes in between visitors, Sara is usually busy 'grading
papers', planning lessons, listening to music, or trying out the latest
packet of ready-made cookie dough or Betty Crocker instant muffin mix posted
by her friends back in the States.

This particular afternoon was different. Walking up to the house, past empty
lawns and deserted classrooms, the only sign of animation came from Sara's
dog, which had picked up a fresh batch of fleas during the holidays and was
rolling on the grass in itchy spirals. Inside the house it was gloomy and
quiet. With college life suspended, nobody had switched on the electricity
generator, and the batteries in Sara's laptop and her iPod had run out a
week ago.

Sara was sitting hunched on the floor, flipping idly through a magazine.

"I've never been here with no work to do before," she said. "It's amazing
how much of the day you can spend sleeping."

The kava bar under the mango tree was closed that evening, but in the
corrugated-metal nakamal next door, groups of men were hunched solemnly
around large wooden boards, working away at kava roots with stone grinders
and straining the pulp through scraps of coconut fibre to make a strong,
traditional brew. Other men were slouched on benches along the sides of the
room: smoking, snoozing, or sitting in quiet contemplation. Now and again
one of the men doing the grinding would mutter "mam sini" ("your kava") and
nod towards one of the onlookers, who would walk over, gulp down his coconut
shell full of liquid, and spit noisily to clear the taste from his mouth
before returning to his seat.

Food was being roasted in a house nearby, and leaf-wrapped packages of pig
and taro were being passed around. (People in Vanuatu use the same word for
a pig regardless of whether it's roaming in the forest or cooking in pieces
on the fire, much like the Anglo-Saxons did before the French introduced
"porc" into our language.)

I was welcomed in to the nakamal, and sat down in the corner next to Crazy
English-Speaking Old Guy, a figure whose unique command of the English
language has livened up many a visit to Melsisi.

"I am not, er, imbibing of the, er, prepared beverages at, er, the present
time," he told me. "I have, er, partaken of a great, er, quantity during
this, er, period of, er, commemoration and on this particular night I am,
er, remaining in this place solely for purposes of, er, socialisation."

After saying this, he curled up on his bench and went to sleep.

"Man here, head b'long him ee no-good little-bit," the man sitting on the
other side of me whispered, gesturing at Crazy English-Speaking Old Guy.

I nodded. We sat for a while in silence.

"Andrew, mam sini."

I got up and swallowed my shell-full. It was strong kava, and I could feel
my thoughts mellowing even before I had sat down again. Some unidentifiable
part of my brain - some part that I would probably use if caught in a big
foreign city in the rush hour, or if using a wooden spear to fend off an
angry predator on a prehistoric savannah, but really wasn't necessary on a
tropical island - was being shut down for the night.

After ten days of drinking this stuff, every bishop in the world could pass
away and you would no longer care.

- - -

On Day Ten, a large crowd gathered in Melsisi for the grand finale of the
mourning. The village was filled with women in their island dresses, men in
their tattered shorts and T-shirts, children dressed in little or nothing,
and a trouser-wearing VIP who turned out to be a visiting churchman from New
Caledonia. Long, red-patterned mats - Pentecost's traditional currency -
were changing hands, to thank the people who had donated food and kava for
the ceremonies. Several men were working their way amongst the crowd making
sure that everyone's basket was generously filled with pig and taro. In both
the kava bar and the nakamal, brown roots were being pulverised by the
sack-full, and mud-coloured liquid was being decanted into buckets, bottles
and coconut shells.

I sat down in the kava bar and bought a drink, then popped over to chat to
somebody in the nakamal, where I was greeted with "mam sini" and handed
another narcotic shell-full. A couple more shells followed. Hoping to slow
the rate at which the drinks were coming - I had to walk back to Ranwadi
that night - I wandered back to the kava bar. Five minutes later, however,
there was another shout of "mam sini", and I was called back over to the
nakamal. I gulped down my shell with a polite nod of thanks, spat on the
ground to flush away the taste, and staggered back to the kava bar, where
the barman, not to be outdone, promptly handed me a free drink.

On that tenth day, the people of Melsisi were doubly keen to drown their
sorrows. Not only was the bishop dead, but that morning they had received
news of the death of the daughter of a local chief - a one-year-old child.
This latest tragedy was the chief's fault, people whispered: he had invited
misfortune by building his house on a taboo patch of land. When the baby
fell ill, she was brought down to the mission hospital at Melsisi, but the
doctor there was unable to cure her. She was taken back up to her village in
the mountains, to die.

I wondered whether a baby who lives to one year of age ever really
experiences the world into which she was born. What was going through her
infant mind as she was carried up the mountainside on her last journey? Blue
sky, brown earth, green trees, caring arms and faces, the feel of misty air
against her face, the sound of birds and water, the smell of wood smoke and
rainy soil. A succession of vaguely-connected images, their meaning and
significance never really understood, interspersed by periods of empty
sleep. In other words, a dream. A dream that she would never wake from.
Imagine if your entire lifetime was nothing more than a dream.

In a typical Western country, only one child out of every two hundred dies
in infancy. In Vanuatu, where children grow up in malaria-ridden villages a
long way from medical care and a trip to the doctor is all-too-often a last
resort after the magic leaves have failed, the figure is one in eighteen.

Welcome to paradise.

"Will there be another Ten Days?" I asked one of the men at the kava bar.

He shook his head. "Ee finish now."

The islanders had had enough of grieving. It was time to get on with their
lives.

14th May

Espiritu Santo's geography mirrors Britain's, with the north and west
dominated by wild and beautiful mountains (the tallest of which exceed
Snowdon or Ben Nevis by a thousand feet or so) while the south and east are
flat and agricultural. The island's population is centred around the town of
Luganville, built beside a reefy channel along on the southern coast.

Tourists fly from Port Vila to Luganville aboard the ATR, a comfortable,
pressurised airliner quite unlike anything else in Air Vanuatu's domestic
fleet. Having grown accustomed to inter-island journeys in tiny propeller
planes jammed with passengers, baskets, bags and occasional animals (Air
Vanuatu have recently passed a rule requiring pigs to be killed and cleaned
before being loaded onto the planes, but live chickens are still welcome),
my trip from Port Vila to Luganville was like a dream. In my dream I was on
an internal flight in Vanuatu - it must have been Vanuatu, because they'd
slapped a "Security Checked" sticker on my hand luggage without making me
take out any of the sharp objects - yet the plane had numbered seats,
in-flight magazines, and a flight attendant handing out orange juice and
snacks.

As in Port Vila, our priority was to get out of town. Luganville grew up out
of the hollowed-out remains of an American wartime base and is, quite
literally, a dump. The infrastructure left behind at the end of the war has
been upgraded a bit in the past sixty years, but you'd hardly notice. The
corrugated-metal Quonset huts that one held soldiers and their supplies
still dot the suburbs, and two of the stretches of road leading out of town
are undisguisedly the remains of old airstrips.

Luganville is noticeably nearer to the equator than Port Vila, and on
breezeless days the atmosphere is stupefying. Watching dusty vehicles rattle
up and down Main Street while youths sit boredly in the shade by the shop
fronts, you get the impression that nothing interesting has happened here
since 1945, apart from the occasional riot. By the standards of the
developing world Luganville is not a bad town - it isn't smelly or dirty or
highly dangerous or even particularly ugly. It is simply utterly devoid of
glamour. Whilst Port Vila's resorts lavish their hospitality on romantic
couples with hibiscus flowers behind their ears, government ministers with
champagne glasses in their hands and short-sleeved businessmen with tax-free
dollars in their bank accounts, Luganville's shabby hotels and cafes get
their business from beer-soaked scuba divers (the local wartime wreckage
extends far beneath the ocean) and Peace Corps volunteers from isolated
villages who come into town desperate for a pizza and an ice-cream.

Car hire is not big business on Espiritu Santo - the roads deteriorate
pretty rapidly as you drive out of town - but we managed to rent an old four
wheel drive in which to explore the island. The air-conditioning was broken,
the suspension was useless, and a few miles along the road one of the
windows dropped open. We returned to Luganville, where a flustered employee
at the car hire company reluctantly agreed to take back the old rattler and
allow us to use her boss's car, an enormous, shiny chrome-blue SUV of the
kind that occupies pride of place in expensive showrooms. Cruising along
inside, you could just feel yourself contributing to global warming (or
maybe it was just the fact that we hadn't turned up the air conditioning
quite high enough to cope with Santo's climate). Taking such a vehicle out
on Vanuatu's destructive rural roads seemed like borrowing your neighbour's
best suit and wearing it to go out digging in the garden. We let my Dad do
the driving.

First we travelled up the east coast, stopping for a picnic lunch at
Champagne Beach, a gorgeous palm-lined, crystalline bay filled to the brim
with sand and sunlight. The thatched Champagne Beach Bar, built for visitors
who come on occasional cruise ships, was empty and deserted; we sat under
the shade in front of the bar pouring ourselves orange juice out of the
picnic bag in plastic cups.

After a snooze under the trees, we continued along the coast to Port Olry, a
surprisingly substantial settlement of three thousand people, built on a
grassy coastal strip looking out across pale blue water and wave-splashed
islets. (Port Olry is reputedly Vanuatu's second largest village; Mele, on
the outskirts of Port Vila, is the largest.) There we spent the night in a
rustic wooden guest bungalow decorated with seashells and obscure carvings,
by the seashore in the centre of the village.

A pet fruit bat dangled in a cage under the eaves of the house next door.
When I touched the cage, the bat leaned over and licked my finger.

In Port Olry, like in Siviri, our visit coincided with a wedding: on the day
of our arrival a local boy had married a girl from a distant part of the
island. (There are plenty of eligible girls in the neighbouring village, I
was told, but the people of Port Olry traditionally regard the people of
that village as enemies. Nowadays members of the two communities can just
about bring themselves to sit down at a table together, but intermarriage is
out of the question.) Some of the young bridegroom's friends continued to
party all through the night, sending highly-amplified pop music resonating
through the village. Exotic kava, combined with a loud midnight playing of
the Eighties rock anthem "The Final Countdown", combined to give me a
strange dream whose storyline I hope to adapt someday into a bestselling
novel.
At breakfast next morning, we ate baguettes and giant pamplemousse outside
the guest bungalow, watching turtles amble back and forth in the
swimming-pool-coloured water. A group of attenuated-looking partygoers were
shambling about under the trees nearby, still clutching their CD player and
refusing to accept that it was now The Morning After. Every so often one
would collapse on the sand and lie there for a few minutes before regaining
consciousness and getting up to continue the party. It was a scene familiar
in urban Britain, yet strange on a South Pacific beach.
Youths are the same everywhere, my parents concluded.

With big co-operative stores, a glitzy little wooden restaurant (the
glitziness came largely from the Christmas decorations, which didn't look as
out-of-place as you would expect on a tropical island in May), and a fleet
of minibuses that departed at dawn every day to carry workers into
Luganville, Port Olry had a positively suburban feel. Our next stop, the
village of Tassiriki, was a very different place.

"It's like stepping back into Saxon times," my Mum observed, looking out
across the grassy clearing where cows and chickens wandered freely among the
thatched wooden huts.

Tassiriki is on the mountainous western side of Espiritu Santo, at the end
of a dirt road so bad that my Dad spent his night there lying awake,
worrying about the prospect of having to drive back along it in the hire
company boss's shiny new car. The people of Tassiriki have traditionally
earned a living by growing food in their hillside gardens and selling the
surplus at market, but with the population growing rapidly the elders of the
village's Presbyterian Church realised that something extra would be needed
to support the village's economy. Tourism, they decided, was the answer.

On a patch of ground donated by the church, fenced to keep away the
wandering cows, a small cement guesthouse had been constructed. On the wall
was a poster listing in Pidgin English the stages to be completed in the
village's tourism project, and who was responsible for each one. First build
the guesthouse, the poster instructed, then organise people who can cook for
the guests and act as tour guides, and plant a garden with food that the
visitors might like (in other words, something other than taro). Drawn up on
jumbo-sized flipchart paper in thick coloured markers, the poster was the
unmistakeable attempt of yet another Peace Corps volunteer trying valiantly
to encourage American efficiency and entrepreneurship in a place where such
things would never, ever catch on. The deadlines on the chart had all
passed, and every box appeared to have been ticked, yet several of the
things to do had clearly not been done. "Build'em one tourist bathroom," for
example. A patch of ground for the new bathroom had been cleared all right,
and the sacks of cement were there - piled up in two of the guesthouse's
four rooms - but the actual construction of the bathroom had yet to begin.
In the meantime, guests were shown the way to the local pit toilet (on the
far side of a prickly swamp), and the creek at the bottom of the nearby
gulley where the villagers go when they need a wash.

The poor woman who had been given the role of looking after the tourists
cared for them well, but was struggling to build up the confidence for her
new role. When our shiny blue hire car had pulled up in the village, it had
been a great relief for her to discover that one of its occupants could
speak Pidgin English.

"Sometimes, when tourists who only speak English come, I cry," she told us
(in Pidgin). "I go and hide in my house, and I cry. I say, 'No, I don't want
to go out and speak English to the tourists. I have too much shame!'"

(The Pidgin word "shame" covers not just shame in its Western sense, but
also the deep shyness that sometimes afflicts the ni-Vanuatu in public,
particularly in the presence of foreigners and members of the opposite sex.
When a boy at Ranwadi who turn up late to class is reluctant to come into
the room because of his "shame", what he means is not that he is ashamed by
his lack of punctuality, but rather that he does not want the sensation of
the entire class watching as he walks in.)

The young men of Tassiriki, by contrast, were only too eager to talk to
visitors and to show us round. One took us down to a cove on the shore where
a tree jutted out from a cliff over the sea, as high as a multi-storey
building.

"Don't you dare encourage the tourists to jump off that tree," his mother
called out as the young man led us down to the base of the cliff. "If you
want to risk your neck with that silly jumping trick of yours, go ahead, but
I don't want the tourists getting hurt!"

She was speaking in the local vernacular - one of the fourteen unique
languages spoken on Espiritu Santo - in which I know nothing except the
obligatory "good day" ("ran bani") and "good night" ("won bani"), but I
discovered afterwards what had been said.

The young man did as he was told, showing us the best spot from which to
watch as he clambered alone up the cliff, strutted along the tree like a
displaying bird, and dived into the water. Unharmed, he swam ashore and
proudly watched his performance on the screen of my Dad's digital camera.

On the black-sand beach, other villagers had strung a net out into the
water. A group of small boys waded towards the net, splashing and slapping
the water to drive the fish towards it. Some of the fish managed to jump the
net, but others were less lucky. The net was pulled around into a circle,
and hauled ashore, with a couple of little silver bodies entangled in the
meshing. It wasn't a spectacular haul, but for the boys it would make a nice
change from taro.

In a hut by the shore, an electricity generator was powering an icebox
containing more of the fish, along with the previous night's leftover kava.
(Pidgin words have a habit of working their way into the vocabularies of
expats who spend time in Vanuatu, like invasive weeds slowly displacing the
native species. Freezers are now iceboxes, just as cattle are now bullocks,
cloth is now calico, chickens are now fowls - though their cooked limbs are
still 'chicken wings' - and containers are now plastics.) Two of the village
boys and I filled up a plastic with the chilled kava and drank it back at
the guesthouse, where my Mum was trying to take action photos of geckoes
hunting insects around the fluorescent light. Chilled kava is much nicer
than the fresh drink, I discovered - the coldness dulls the awful taste.

With tourism still a new idea in Tassiriki, the villagers were anxious for
advice on how to make white visitors welcome.

Don't butter their bread on both sides, I advised, after an exceptionally
messy and greasy breakfast. "Some white misses all-ee worry from body ee
come fat-fat too-much". And get some mosquito nets for the rooms. "Some
white people all-ee worry b'long catch'em fever".

The villagers took our advice on the butter, but reassured us that
mosquitoes are not a problem in Tassiriki. Once upon a time they were, but
when the first Presbyterian missionary came from Scotland he brought a curse
down upon the mosquitoes and cast them out of the village.

Get some mosquito nets anyway, I recommended.

9th May

My Mum had decided to come for a holiday in Vanuatu, to see for herself the
islands for which her son had abandoned his home country. Having spent part
of her own youth teaching in Belize, a tiny tropical country with many
similarities to Vanuatu, back in the 1960s (long before most people had
heard of gap years), I had little doubt she'd enjoy the place.

My Dad spent his youth (and pretty much all of his life since the age of
about five) immersed in electronics. He travels only when there is a good
reason, usually accompanied by computer magazines and an assortment of
hi-tech gadgetry. (The gadgets get smaller and more efficient each year, but
their battery chargers don't.) He dislikes heat, reacts badly to mosquito
bites, and (like me) has legs far longer than airline seating was designed
for. Bravely, he agreed to come along too.

Rain threatened to close the local airfield in the run-up to my parents'
arrival, so I left Pentecost on the roof of a cargo ship under the stars,
sleeping on top of a pile of iron bars. (This was more comfortable than it
sounds - the iron bars filled in the grooves on the corrugated metal roof -
although it left horrible rust marks on my clothing.) I arrived in Port Vila
with three or four days to spare, by the end of which I had so thoroughly
exhausted the list of interesting and affordable things to do in town that
on the day of my parents' arrival I walked the four or five miles to the
airport in the rain to relieve the boredom.

When my parents decided to fly out from Britain to visit me in Vanuatu
during the school holidays, and asked whereabouts in the country we should
go, I had one overriding suggestion: get out of town. Port Vila is a
pleasant enough place for a short holiday, but gets boring quite quickly if
you're not wealthy enough to enjoy the cocktails and cuisine or
easily-amused enough to spend the day lounging beside the pool. My parents
fall into neither category. Besides, they were coming largely out of
curiosity to see what had motivated their son to abandon his home country
for a dot on the other side of the planet. A fortnight in an air-conditioned
hotel would give them a very inaccurate impression of what my life (and the
life of most other people) in the South Pacific is like.

The majority of the visitors who come to Vanuatu never leave town. Their
experience of the country is confined to the few-mile-square enclaves of
paved roads, mains electricity, piped water and supermarkets that surround
Port Vila, the capital, and Luganville, the country's other main town. The
few tourists who visit the rest of the country typically do so on day trips
choreographed by tour operators who do their best to ensure that their
guests don't have to eat the local food, drink the local water, shit in the
local toilets, sleep in the local bungalows, or try to talk to anybody
except the English-speaking tour guide. The number of foreign visitors who
spend time in rural Vanuatu is less than the meagre number who read about
the place on my web site. These travellers talk smugly of 'the real Vanuatu'
as we settle down in our candlelit bungalows with flasks of lukewarm
drinking water fetched from the village tap, watch the day-trippers being
flown back to town in time for a hot shower and a sunset cocktail by the
poolside, and lament that the ordinary tourists don't know what they're
missing out on.

I was determined that my parents were not going to miss out. As a first step
we hired a car (actually a minibus - the extra ground clearance was useful
on the uneven dirt roads) and drove around to the rural side of Efaté, Port
Vila's island. (There are plans to pave the round-island road later this
year, to make rural Efaté more accessible to day trippers from the town.
Enjoy the tranquillity while it lasts.) Stopping en route, we saw beaches
tinted blue-green by the rounded shards of a million Coca-Cola bottles
discarded by the Americans in the Second World War, and beaches of volcanic
pumice where the stones were lighter than the water and floated in the surf.
On the north-eastern side of Efaté, we saw hillsides so smothered with the
alien mile-a-minute vine (another thing that the Americans introduced during
the war and neglected to clean up afterwards) that from a distance the
landscape appeared to be wrapped in green tinfoil. We saw forests overhung
by giant banyan trees, shorelines lined by wind-tasselled pandanus palms,
and pigs wallowing in puddles on the road. We were taken to see pygmy bats,
crawling on our hands and knees across the floor of caves chocolate-coated
with the creatures' manure. We watched villagers weaving a basket from a
single coconut leaf, and using a hammer to crack a nut. In exchange for a
small fee, one man showed us his collection of wartime artefacts; another
showed us his collection of banded iguanas. My parents watched and took
photos as two men hoisted me into the air on a pile of small leaves that
were not tied or glued together in any way, holding together under my weight
seemingly by magic. (A Pentecost islander who once described this trick to
me claimed that it actually was magic. To Muggles it's all a matter of
friction.)

Coming from Scotland, a nation in which fried potato chips are officially
the number one source of Vitamin C, the thing that most appealed to my
parents about Vanuatu was the delicious abundance of tropical fruit. Looking
around the market in Port Vila, the names of most of the fruits were
familiar, but the produce on display bore little resemblance to the
groceries in a British superstore (and not just because of the live chickens
and dead fruit bats being sold amongst the piles of fruit and vegetables).
Bananas, a simple product back home, come in half a dozen varieties here.
(When Peace Corps volunteers on Pentecost were demonstrating the use of
contraception to local teenagers, using bananas as props, an amusing debate
ensued about which kind of banana was the most appropriate.) Lemons in
Vanuatu are green, limes are yellow, and oranges can be either green or
yellow but are seldom orange. The succulent, sweet pamplemousse that weigh
down the local trees are so different from the acid yellow mush served with
continental breakfasts back home that it had never occurred to me that the
two were related until my Dad (who paid more attention in French classes
than I did at school) pointed out that "pamplemousse" is merely "grapefruit"
by a foreign name.

Not all the fruits were so appealing. May is the season for nakatambol,
bunches of golf ball-sized yellow fruits that grow on giant trees in the
jungle and have absolutely no flavour whatsoever.

"What do people do with these things?" my Dad asked.

"Eat them," I replied.

"They must be bored."

Vanuatu's vegetables, too, were an exotic bunch. My parents' opinion of taro
was the same as that of most foreigners confronted with Melanesia's
swamp-grown staple food: it may be good for supplying cheap calories to
hungry Third World farmers, but you need to fry the mushy purple root pretty
heavily before it makes an enjoyable meal. (Some anthropologists actually
blame a diet of taro for Melanesians' historical failure to develop advanced
civilisations.) Fortunately the local yams, a more potato-like vegetable,
met with my parents' approval, and in the restaurants that served chips made
from kumala (sweet potato) my Mum ordered extra helpings.

At the suggestion of a hotel receptionist in Port Vila, our first night out
of town was spent in Siviri, a quiet Presbyterian village on the north coast
of the island. My parents smiled bravely when they saw the inside of the
guesthouse. The corrugated-metal hut was utterly bare, except for the old
pandanus mats covering the coral floor. The bathroom was a concrete shed
beside a neighbouring house, with a cold shower that barely worked and a
yellow-stained toilet that could be flushed only by the old-fashioned method
of chucking down a bucket of water.

"We're planning to build a new guesthouse," the villagers told us, gesturing
to an empty patch of ground beside the nearby church.

As usual, the message that we were coming had not been passed on, but we
were nonetheless welcome. Within an hour mattresses had been laid on floor
of the guesthouse, mosquito nets had been rigged up (supported by sticks
freshly cut from the surrounding trees), a lantern had been hung from the
ceiling, and the place was looking positively comfortable. The villagers
cooked dinner and brewed cups of tea while chatting to us about their
families, and asking about our lives back in 'England'. (Ni-Vanuatu, like
many careless Englishpeople, don't usually distinguish between 'England' and
'Britain', and trying to explain in Pidgin English that actually my parents
live in Scotland, which is part of the same country as England yet is also a
separate country from England, is usually more trouble than it's worth.)

There was a lively atmosphere in Siviri that week. A local man was preparing
to get married, and piles of vegetables were accumulating in preparation for
the wedding feast. A prayer evening was being held in the local church,
which we were welcome to attend. We were introduced to the chief, the
minister, and numerous passing sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, aunts and
uncles.

At the end of the evening I asked how to wish our hosts goodnight in the
local language.

Trying to exchange pleasantries in their native languages with the people I
meet has become a hobby of mine recently, mainly because in a country with
over a hundred languages it's such an interesting challenge. It's a mission
even to remember who speaks what where: the map of Vanuatu is a convoluted
jigsaw-puzzle of different linguistic areas. Sometimes the boundaries are
logical - the people on one side of the island speak this language, and the
people on the other side speak that language - but in many cases historical
movements of people from place to place have contorted a language area so
that it resembles a gerrymandered electoral district. In a few places, the
villages that share common tongues are scattered as though their languages
were dropped on them from the sky like bombs.

Pentecost Island is chopped like a sausage into four relatively neat
language slices, some of which are subdivided into further slices
representing dialects. The boundaries between these slices have slid up and
down over past centuries, as neighbouring languages expanded and contracted
their share of the Pentecost pie. The central slice - Abma, the language now
spoken around Ranwadi - has spread in recent times to cover half of the
island, squeezing one southern neighbour down to a few square miles and
overrunning another completely. However, Pentecost's language map has
remained fairly straightforward. Depending where on how far north or south I
am on the island, I might wish the passers-by in the evening "bung mwamak",
"bontavuha", "bong avwis", or "ranlopas entu". Unless, of course, I
recognise the person as a visitor or a student from neighbouring Ambae
Island, in which case it's "bon karea", or as a history enthusiast who still
remembers a few words of Sowa language (the almost-forgotten fifth slice),
in which case I can really show off and say "bung awe".

In Port Vila, which is populated by immigrants from all over Vanuatu and
must have one of the highest language densities of any town on Earth (a
hundred languages among 40,000 people), the speaking-their-native-language
game is trickier, but sometimes it can be done. The ladies at the food stall
where I often buy dinner come from Tongariki Island; I can greet them in the
evenings with "em bong". At the nearby kava bar run by Paama islanders it's
"morray vongien" - or "morray vizokon" if I run into the same people the
next morning - and at the bar run by North Pentecost islanders it's back to
"bontavuha" or its shortened form, "bongi". The Australian tourists in Port
Vila speak more-or-less my own language (although to indicate that I'm
addressing them formally as a polite stranger I must remember to include the
word "mate"), and I can attempt half a dozen or so phrases in the languages
of half a dozen or so European nations. (However, in practice I don't
normally wish "good evening" to white strangers on the streets of Port Vila,
because if they haven't been in Vanuatu for long they might consider it
weird.) To French expatriates, as a matter of principle, I speak English.

The locals' reactions to my efforts range from appreciation ("Thank you for
taking the time to learn our language," one man said to me recently) to
utter surprise. An old woman in South Pentecost once reacted with such shock
to a phrase in her native language that I stopped using the phrase until I'd
had the chance to double-check that it was a greeting and not an obscene
swear word that somebody had taught me for a joke. The phrase turned out to
be perfectly innocuous; people in Vanuatu simply don't expect outsiders to
speak their indigenous languages.

In traditional Vanuatu society, individuals would have learned the languages
of neighbouring tribes as a way of acquiring influence and demonstrating
skill. Nowadays the ni-Vanuatu do this by learning English and French
instead, although knowledge of multiple vernaculars is still common among
people who live in linguistic border zones, and people whose relatives come
from different parts of the country. Those who know a second indigenous
language generally pick it up at a young age, and therefore speak it like
natives. The ni-Vanuatu are not used to hearing their languages
mispronounced, so my stuttering Anglicisations amuse them a lot. (Their
amusement turns to horror when I point out that the way I sound when
speaking their languages is much like the way people in Vanuatu sound to me
when they are speaking English.)

The most entertaining moments occur when somebody in town, taking me for a
tourist, happens to mention to me that he comes from Pentecost Island.
Casually inquiring what part of Pentecost, I can ascertain whether or not
his language is likely to be the same as the one that the villagers around
Ranwadi have been trying to teach me.

My native language is known by over a billion people, and there is no corner
of the world where I would be surprised to be spoken to in English. However,
if your language is used only by a tiny community of a few thousand people
living on a isolated island, meeting a foreigner from the other side of the
world and finding him suddenly start to speak in it is like receiving a
message from aliens thousands of light years away and finding them talking
in Cockney rhyming slang. Watching the expressions on people's faces, it
seems appropriate that Pentecost Island is named after the day on which the
apostles started speaking in tongues.

Back in Siviri, it turned out that I knew a phrase or two of the local lingo
already: the language spoken on North Efate is the same as that spoken on
neighbouring Nguna, an island where I spent a week six years ago. (This
language, which is also spoken in the northern half of Tongoa Island - I
occasionally use it with Tongoans at bars in Port Vila - goes by the name of
Nakanamanga.) The Nguna phrase for "good night" originally stuck in my mind
because it sounded a lot like the French, although the similarity is
coincidental; here "bon" means "night" rather than "good":

"Bon wia."