Andrew Gray's travel tales

23rd July

The Peace Corps, who often seem like the only people in the whole of Vanuatu
who try to do things properly, have a book of Western recipes specially
adapted to the minimal ingredients found on the islands. However, even these
recipes assume that the book's owner has done a certain amount of shopping
in Port Vila, or has generous friends and relatives who will send boxes of
food from the States. Good cooking can achieve a lot, but it is not
biochemically possible to turn rice, sugar and tinned tuna into a steaming
Hawaiian pizza with extra toppings.

Here, therefore, is my own contribution to the literature on island cooking.
It's easy-ish, it tastes OK-ish, and after shuffling home from the kava bar
you're seldom hungry anyway...

PASTA WITH RANDOM VEGETABLES AND PROCESSED CHEESE

First step: get a packet of pasta out of its rat-proof container and inspect
it to see if it contains weevils.

Weevils are probably quite nutritious, and are too small to affect the taste
and texture of the food much, but for psychological reasons you might wish
to remove them. If you empty the pasta into a bowl and leave it for a few
minutes, some of the weevils will instinctively crawl out over the rim of
the bowl and wander away somewhere (it doesn't really matter where, so long
as the rest of your food supplies are well sealed). You can strain off the
rest with water: pasta sinks, whilst agitated weevils float. If you're lucky
enough to live in a house with running water, you can do this four or five
times. Macaroni needs extra rinsing, as the weevils hide inside the tubes of
pasta. Rinsing also removes the tiny crumbs of pasta nibbled away the
weevils, which would otherwise create a sticky mess when cooked.

If you thought the packet of pasta was sealed, it's worth investigating how
the weevils got in. Maybe your container wasn't as rat-proof as you thought,
and the packet has been nibbled into. If the rats have been at the pasta in
a serious way then you could be forgiven for throwing the whole lot out and
opening a packet of breakfast crackers (the hungry island-dweller's trusty
standby when there's nothing else in the cupboard) instead, but pasta is
hard to come by on Pentecost, and boiling will kill any germs the rats might
have introduced, right?

Having removed the weevils (and any ants that might have got in along with
them), put a couple of handfuls of pasta in a saucepan and cover with water.
Since you'll be boiling this water, you can get it straight from the nearest
tap - no need to worry about whether or not the water supply is clean. The
Peace Corps' recipe book devotes an entire page to the cooking of perfect
pasta, but when you've got home late and you're cooking by candlelight in
the half dark because the generator has already been switched off for the
evening, or when it's evening study time and you have students interrupting
you every five minutes by banging on the door to ask for help with their
homework, you won't care how many minutes the pasta is boiled for or whether
or not the water is brought to the boil first or whether or not you've added
salt or oil. So just dump the saucepan of pasta on a lighted stove and keep
an eye on it.

Now prepare the vegetables. Which vegetables you put in will depend entirely
on what the ladies who run the local market happen to have harvested from
their gardens this week. Sometimes it's capsicums (green peppers), sometimes
it's shushoots (chokos), sometimes it's snake beans. Very occasionally it's
tomatoes, but all-too-often the rats nibble those off the plants before the
villagers have a chance to harvest them. All the produce is guaranteed to be
organic (not that there's any such thing as an inorganic vegetable): the
local villagers can't afford pesticides or synthetic fertilisers, and with
their diverse little gardens growing in rich volcanic soil there's no need
for them.

If there have been no vegetables at all at the market, I generally go
outside and pluck some tender young leaves off my pumpkin plant and eat
those instead. Alternatively, you can buy tinned vegetables on Pentecost,
but they cost five times what they would in Tesco or Wal-Mart, and may have
disintegrated into mush during the two or three years that they've been
sitting on a dusty storeroom shelf.

Remove the seeds, stalks, skins and whatever other part of the vegetables
you feel like removing (some of the local vegetables are unfamiliar to
Westerners, and opinion differs as to which parts are supposed to be
edible). Throw the peelings out of the back door; something will come by and
eat them. Chop up what's left into small pieces and throw it into the pan
with the boiling pasta. Many stoves in Vanuatu either have only a single gas
ring or work poorly when more than one ring is lit, so it's best to do all
your cooking in a single saucepan. Besides, you don't want to use too much
gas, because if the cylinder runs out and there turns out not to be a spare
one in the school shed, you'll be boiling pots of tea on Bunsen burners down
in the science classroom until the next time that the ship comes.

If you see cockroaches scuttling about while you're chopping the vegetables,
try to ignore them. If you swat at them they'll only run away and hide, and
you can't spray Mortein at them while you're cooking in case the insecticide
gets into your food. Besides, the version of Mortein sold in the local
stores is the version that merely pisses cockroaches off a bit rather than
the version that kills them dead. The good kind has to be imported from Port
Vila, and your supply will soon run out if you spray it at every cockroach
you see.

While you're waiting for the pasta and vegetables to boil, get out a packet
of Kraft Cheddar - the cheese-flavoured form of edible rubber that very
occasionally turns up in the village stores. If the packet has already been
opened, brush off any ants that have got into the container, and check if
the exposed part of the cheese has gone mouldy. (Kraft Cheddar is designed
not to be perishable, but almost anything will rot when the climate is
sufficiently damp and tropical. Even elastic bands start to decompose after
a few months on Pentecost.) If there is any sign of mould, cut off the outer
couple of millimetres; the rest will be fine.

Grate a handful of the Kraft Cheddar onto a plate. Your grater will probably
be rusty (see the above note about damp tropical climates), but surely extra
iron is good for you.

If the pasta and vegetables seem to be done by now, strain off the water
(along with the boiled corpses of any remaining weevils). If yours is one of
the houses that doesn't have a proper sink, chuck the boiling water out of
the door, but make sure you don't hurt the cats that may be hanging around
outside hoping for food scraps.

Now add in the grated cheese. Kraft Cheddar doesn't melt in the way that
real cheese does, but if you can get hold of a jar of mayonnaise, you can
stir in a spoonful of that to recreate the creamy texture. When buying
mayonnaise, try to check that it hasn't come from Australia, since
Australian brands of mayonnaise are vilely sweetened. Unfortunately, you'll
probably be stuck with whatever random brand the supplier happened to send
to the local storekeeper this month - if he has any at all.

If you can get hold of a jar of Kraft Cheese Spread, a spoonful of that will
really improve the pasta, but that's something you'll probably have to bring
from Port Vila. (One local storekeeper has been telling me for months that
"next week" he'll arrange to have a crate of it shipped to Pentecost.) The
label on the cheese spread says "refrigerate after opening", but if (like
most people on Pentecost) you don't have access to a fridge, just eat it
within two or three days and it'll probably be OK.

Many gas stoves in Vanuatu leak. If yours is one of them, don't forget to
turn off the valve on the propane cylinder after you've finished cooking,
otherwise the room will slowly fill with gas.

If you have any herbs that aren't yet stale, sprinkle them into the pasta.
Tip the whole lot onto a plastic plate, and serve with a glass of rainwater.

If you're dining with locals, don't forget to say grace. Mumble it quickly
in English (God will still understand you) and your companions won't realise
how inexperienced you are at saying your prayers.

If you have any leftover pasta, you might consider feeding it to a hungry
Third World child - there are usually plenty about - but since these
children normally eat little but rice and taro, anything that's less than
95% wet starch might upset their stomachs. Perhaps it's better to feed your
leftovers to the cats and chickens outside instead. Sooner or later someone
will eat the chickens (and possibly the cats too), so this isn't really a
waste, more a form of recycling. Maybe somebody back home should invent
recycling bins that crow loudly outside people's windows at five o'clock in
the morning to remind them to recycle their rubbish.

Finally, if anyone asks you what you had for dinner last night, tell them it
was noodles. Most islanders haven't heard of pasta, and as 'pasta' is the
Pidgin English rendering of the word 'pastor', talk of 'eating pasta' will
only confuse them. People in Vanuatu did eat pastors once upon a time, but
since being successfully converted to Christianity they've given up that
practice. However, those first unlucky missionaries sparked off a habit of
eating things that come on ships that persists to this day, and instant
noodles are now one of the country's major imports. Noodles are considerably
easier to cook than pastors, although since Vanuatu's last surviving
cannibal died a couple of years ago, nobody knows how the taste compares.

16th July

The few things you weren't able to make yourself could be obtained by simple
trade. In medieval Europe, the baker could obtain new horseshoes from the
ironmonger in exchange for loaves of bread, and the gardeners could obtain
protection from the local baron and salvation from the local priest in
exchange for tithes of food. However, as economies grew more complex, this
kind of trade grew increasingly inconvenient - what if you needed a
horseshoe but the blacksmith wasn't in the mood for a loaf of bread? Some
societies solved this problem by developing written systems for keeping a
tally of who was entitled to goods and services. This is the original reason
why writing was developed. Unfortunately, these systems were (and are)
vulnerable to forgery.

A better solution was to devise a system of physical tokens - some small,
valuable item of agreed worth - signifying that the bearer had supplied
something useful to somebody in the past and was entitled to something in
return. Thus money was invented.

The type of token used varied widely. In ancient empires, the prized article
was gold. In medieval England, the standard measure of value was a pound of
sterling-quality silver, which could be cut up into silver pennies when
smaller units were required. On Pentecost Island, it was pigs (and in
particular the long, curved tusks of old boars) and intricately-dyed red
mats that were prized. Eventually, all of these forms of money were replaced
by standardised pieces of paper and base metal whose value was certified by
governments and banks - and later, in some economies, by numbers on computer
screens. However, modern currencies still bear traces of their origins: a
"pound sterling" remains the standard unit of value in England, even though
today's pound coins are neither made of sterling silver nor weigh a pound,
and Vanuatu's coins and banknotes still bear (amongst other symbols) the
emblem of a boar's tusk.

In modern cities, it is possible to go through life without doing anything
for anybody else except what you're paid for, and without receiving anything
from anybody else except what you pay for - an economically super-efficient
yet rather soulless state of affairs.

In Western countries, the change from a traditional economy to a cash
economy happened a long time ago. On Pentecost Island, the process is still
very much under way. Local villagers divide their needs into two categories:
the things they can get 'free' from the land (vegetables, meat, fish, nuts,
bamboo, wood, leaves, stones, and water) and the things that must be paid
for with money (such as tinned foods, rice, petrol, candles, soap, metal
tools, cloth, nails, cement, and corrugated iron). The second category is
expanding at the expense of the first.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, trading amongst the islanders was all
about social climbing. A man could probably meet his basic needs entirely
from his own garden, but would have to borrow money (in the form of pigs) to
help him pay the bride-price for a new wife, or put on the lavish ceremony
that would enable him to climb to the next rung of the social ladder. When
his remaining assets (the pigs) multiplied, he would be able to pay back the
lender, who might now need them for ceremonies of his own.

The arrival of foreigners introduced a new reason for trading: to obtain
things that the islanders could not make for themselves. Originally it was
believed that the goods brought by white people had been given to them by
the gods, since in their world of sticks and stones and leaves the islanders
could not see how men could make such things as metal for themselves.
Various cargo cults sprang up with the aim of trying to persuade the gods to
shower similar generosity upon the people of Vanuatu; one or two of these
cults are still in existence. Today, the islanders can read in schoolbooks
about metallurgy and manufacturing, but most still lack the resources to
make metal or glass or plastic or DVD players for themselves. As a result,
many of their wants and needs must now be met by buying goods from abroad.

The first thing that the villagers switched to buying, instead of making for
themselves, was knives. Local stories recall that one of the earliest
encounters between European sailors and Pentecost islanders ended with the
natives stealing a sailor's knife and then running away into the bush,
pursued by gunfire. The islanders recognised that the metal blade was
greatly superior to their traditional stone tools, and for many years
afterwards, this one stolen knife was passed around by the entire community,
each person borrowing it whenever a particularly trick cutting job was
required. Eventually, more Europeans arrived and the islanders learned to
trade with them in order to obtain more of the precious tools. Thus ended
the Stone Age on Pentecost.

Metal was not just useful for blades. It can also be used to make heatproof
and waterproof containers, which revolutionised cooking. I was told by a
colleague that when a student at Ranwadi was once asked to write an essay on
how modern technology was changing the world, the technology he chose to
focus on was the saucepan. Previously, cooking had meant roasting; the
ability to boil things opened up an entirely new form of cuisine. The taro
that the islanders grow in their gardens is disgusting when boiled, but
coast-dwellers with access to ships soon discovered a new food: rice. They
began importing the starchy white grains by the sack full, and another
paid-for item was added to the islanders' shopping baskets.

Flour and cooking oil also came on the ships, and the villagers developed a
taste for greasy doughnuts - often twisted into the shape of a number 8 -
which they would fry up using their new pans. Sugar arrived, to the delight
of the island's ant population, and a few local women became skilled at
baking cakes on open fires. Some even iced their cakes, having sussed out
which varieties of tinned butter could be used to produce icing that didn't
taste too strongly of industrial grease. Good cake remains a rarity of
Pentecost, baked only on special occasions, but since the island has no
dentists this is probably a good thing.

A few villagers built proper ovens, and began to bake loaves of bread with a
delicious wood-smoked taste. (Fuel for cooking is one thing that is still
largely gathered from the jungle, although foreigners like me - who are
inexperienced at cooking anything other than marshmallows on wood fires, and
can't even get marshmallows on Pentecost - rely on gas-powered stoves.)
Local stores began selling margarine and jam for people to put on their
bread, and those frequented by American Peace Corps volunteers did a
lucrative trade in peanut butter.

Clothes were yet another import. In the days when it was acceptable to
wander around with only your crotch covered, it was easy to fashion clothing
using local materials, but it's hard to make a good Sunday dress that you
can wear to church out of dried leaves. Missionaries and well-meaning
foreigners organised shipments of second-hand clothes to be sent to Vanuatu.
In the early days, these brought diseases that wiped out entire villages.
Today they just bring incredibly bad taste.

Another thing the early missionaries helped to bring to the islands was
light. Not just the spiritual kind, but also the practical kind that allows
people to avoid walking into things after the sun goes down. Before the
arrival of Western technology, the best sources of light on the island at
night were burning coconut fronds, which flare like pine needles when put on
a smouldering fire and can be carried as flaming torches on short journeys.
However, coconut fronds burn down quickly, and slower-burning light sources
such as smouldering logs and reeds were inevitably dim. As a result, people
traditionally went to bed early on Pentecost, and were disinclined to wander
about in the dark. (On an island populated by ghosts and spirits - and once
upon a time by warring cannibals - staying indoors at night must have seemed
a sensible idea anyway.)

Candles, kerosene lanterns and electric torches represent a huge
improvement. However, for villagers who originally got all of their light
for free, they also represent a huge expense. Recent increases in the price
of kerosene have dimmed the island, as people turn down the wicks in their
lanterns or switch to cheap candles instead. Once I came across a group of
men sitting in their nakamal in pitch darkness, because none could spare
even the 20 vatu (10 pence) needed to buy a candle.

Electric torches were once used sparingly on Pentecost, because batteries
for them were expensive and short-lived. (The brands of battery sold in the
local stores are not the type advertised by energised pink bunnies that keep
on going and going and going, but the type made by generic companies with
names like Wang Hua Industries who specialise in the low-cost manufacture of
half-empty metal cylinders that happen to contain just enough electric
charge to be sold and labelled as a battery.) Fortunately, torches have
become cheaper to run in recent years, as fragile and power-hungry
incandescent bulbs have been replaced with bright, efficient LED lights. (I
played my own small part in introducing this particular change to Pentecost;
see earlier diaries.) I wonder if the laboratory boffins who came up with
the Light Emitting Diode ever imagined that their invention would be used to
help impoverished jungle villagers avoid tripping over fallen logs on
moonless South Pacific nights. In a couple of locations in Vanuatu,
pioneering schemes have also been set up to provide the villagers with
rechargeable batteries, charged using solar power.

The use of hard currency on rural islands like Pentecost remains limited -
Port Vila, the country's capital, is home to 20% of Vanuatu's population but
90% of its money. However, as one item after another is added to the
islanders shopping lists and disappears from the range of things that they
make for themselves, the circulation of money is inexorably widening.
Ironically, by far the biggest factor driving rural islanders into the cash
economy is the one thing that Westerners generally do get free (or at least
don't pay directly for): their children's education.

In the old days, when everyone on Pentecost did more-or-less the same job -
gardening, building houses, trading pigs and looking after the children -
youngsters could learn everything they needed to know from their parents and
the village elders. Now, though, Pentecost's parents have begun to ask their
children what they want to be when they grow up, and most of the answers
require some degree of schooling. The dream of many is that a school-leaving
certificate will be a ticket off the island, to a well-paid job and a better
life in town, but even those children with no desire to leave their villages
can benefit from going to school. Pentecost may have no real industries
other than its gardens (and a small amount of tourism), but it still needs
nurses, mechanics, storekeepers and churchmen - not to mention teachers who
can pass on their knowledge to the next generation of dreamy children.

High school education is not free in Vanuatu. The Ministry of Education does
find the money to employ a few schoolteachers, and overseas aid agencies do
their bit to prop up the country's school system, but there remain big gaps
in every school's budget. Books need to be bought, electricity generators
need to be fuelled, and broken equipment needs to be replaced. With a
finely-scattered population and no roads that a school bus could cope with,
high schools in rural Vanuatu are invariably boarding schools, so the cost
of food and housing must be added to the school's expenses. The only way
that these expenses can be met is by charging fees to the parents who decide
to make the necessary sacrifices and send their kids to school. At Ranwadi
these fees are typically about £100 ($200) a term - an awful lot of money
for subsistence gardeners who dig up vegetables for a living. Even jungle
villagers who would otherwise live happily without money will have to sweat
hard preparing sacks of kava and dried coconut and hauling them down to the
beach to be sold onto ships if they wish to avoid forcing the same lifestyle
upon their children. (Although if they live in the right part of the island,
they might be able to earn an entire term's school fees in a few minutes by
risking their necks bungee-jumping off towers in front of gawping tourists
in the name of traditional culture.)

If you're going to have to earn money to pay for your children's education,
you might as well earn a bit extra for yourself while you're at it, to spend
on a new knife, or some candles, or maybe a portable CD player. Since you've
been too busy with your cash crops to plant anything tasty in the garden,
some of the spare money will also need to be spent on food at the local
store. Do this kind of thing often enough, and the word 'subsistence' will
drop from your lifestyle, and you'll have become a fully-functioning member
of a modern capitalist society.

Sometimes shortages force the islanders to buy things that they would
otherwise grow for themselves. The men on Pentecost who smoke (the women
never do) prefer hand-rolled leaf tobacco to cigarettes, not only because
the latter are expensive, but because everybody knows that cigarettes give
you cancer. (The health campaigners forgot to add that the smoke from leaf
tobacco contains the same lung-destroying chemicals.) Some grow the tobacco
in their own gardens; others buy cheap sticks of it from stores who import
it from gardeners on other islands. However, the villagers on Pentecost
smoke more tobacco than they plant, and lately none has been coming on the
inter-island ships. (Rumour has it that the Vanuatu police - whose periodic
anti-marijuana campaigns give them a reason for existence on islands where
crimes are rare and are dealt with quite capably by the village chiefs -
recently destroyed a large shipment due to fears that other smokeable leaves
were being concealed amidst the tobacco.) A couple of weeks ago, the local
men awoke to the realisation that there was no leaf tobacco left in any of
the stores, and that they had smoked their gardens bare. Even old Chief
Regis, who has long kept his chiefly friends and numerous other satisfied
customers well supplied with fine tobacco, announced disconsolately that he
had run out, and that his next crop would not be ready for harvesting until
sometime around Christmas. The news sent desperate nicotine addicts
scrambling to try and find the money to buy imported cigarettes.

Other drug habits are also moving into the cash economy. The drinking of
kava on Pentecost is one of the most traditional of activities, originally
done only by chiefs at important meetings, where the drug's stupefying
effects would prevent them from getting angry with one another or taking
rash decisions. Nowadays it is drunk by men of all ages on all occasions,
but many of the other customs associated with kava-drinking remain. The
nakamal where the men gather to drink is usually the most traditional
building in the village, with a dirt floor and gnarled wooden posts holding
up a low thatched roof. Some nakamals are not even held together with nails.
The nakamal is the one place where you can still find stone tools being used
- sharpened, hand-held grinding stones of a sort that our ancestors a
million years ago would probably have recognised - although in some nakamals
nowadays the job of mashing up kava roots is done instead by a ram (a
section of plastic drainpipe in which the kava is pounded with a big stick),
or by a metal meat-grinder. The mashed kava is strained through coconut
fibre, and drunk out of a half coconut shell.

Money does not traditionally change hands in the nakamal. People dig up kava
roots in their own gardens, and bring them down to prepare and drink
themselves, or to share with friends and visitors. However, this situation
is changing. Pentecost has acquired a small but growing professional class -
schoolteachers, nurses, mechanics and priests - who enjoy kava and have
money with which they would happily pay for it, but do not get the chance to
grow it for themselves.

At Melsisi, where the school, hospital, and kava-tolerant Catholic church
employ many such people, there are now several kava bars where drinkers
without gardens of their own can go to buy an evening drink. Much of the
atmosphere of the old nakamal remains in these places - most are dimly-lit
and constructed of local materials, and the drink continues to be served in
coconut shells (although some kava bars elsewhere in Vanuatu now use
porcelain bowls instead). However, they are gradually acquiring more and
more of the trappings of Western bars. Some barkeepers now have electricity
generators and show videos to attract in the punters, and a couple even have
names painted above the door. High on the hillside, behind the communal taps
where local children wash, is the Sunset Kava Bar, whose flamboyant owner
promises "only the finest quality kava". Down by the shore, the new
Saltwater Kava Bar has a bedroom where customers who get too stoned to walk
home can sleep for the price of two drinks. Most Melsisians continue to be
regulars at a particular bar - the one run by their local community, or the
one that is within easiest staggering distance of their house. Nevertheless,
on an island where business strategy generally consists of opening your
doors and hoping that enough of your friends, relatives and neighbours will
come by to provide you with a good income - and shrugging your shoulders and
doing nothing about it if they don't - even the slightest hints of branding
and competition represent a major innovation.

Until recently, no other village nearby contained a high enough
concentration of potential customers to support a kava bar. One opened a
couple of years ago near Ranwadi to cater to the labourers who had come to
work on the new school buildings, but when the building work had finished
and the labourers went home the bar closed down. The local villagers didn't
want to pay for kava when they could get it free from their gardens, and the
majority of the teachers at Ranwadi belong to the abstemious Churches of
Christ, which frowns on kava-drinking.

The villagers' cousins in Port Vila and Luganville did want to pay for kava,
however. Vanuatu's two towns are home to growing numbers of affluent and
kava-loving islanders dislocated from their gardens, who have fuelled a
massive surge in demand for the narcotic root. Kava products have also found
small but lucrative new markets abroad. Since good varieties of kava take
four or five years to grow, supply has not kept up with demand, which has
had an inevitable effect on the price. On Pentecost, where men have always
planted a lot of kava, the islanders' long-standing drug habit provided them
with a financial windfall. As the price of kava surged, villagers
enthusiastically dug up their gardens and loaded sacks of roots onto ships
bound for Port Vila. With a typical lack of forward planning, many failed to
leave behind enough kava for themselves. (Others calculated, with a logic
familiar to drug dealers everywhere, that there was no sense in getting
hooked on their own product when there was so much money to be made selling
it to other fools.)

A few months ago, the villagers around Ranwadi slowly woke up to the fact
that there were now a lot of would-be kava drinkers about with empty gardens
and money in their pockets.

The kava bar near Ranwadi reopened, and did a steady business, and I no
longer have to walk four miles in the dark to Melsisi whenever I want to go
for an evening drink without impinging on the villagers' hospitality.
Villagers in their nakamals began holding 'kava nights', at which someone
who still had roots to spare would prepare an entire poubelle full of the
stuff, and sell it to customers. (People on Pentecost use the French word to
describe the huge containers from which kava is served on special occasions;
drinking out of a poubelle sounds so much nicer than drinking out of a
dustbin.) Some kava nights were held by individuals to earn money for their
children's school fees; others were held to raise money for other good
causes. At big kava nights, entertainment was laid on, in the form of a
video player rigged up to an electricity generator, or very occasionally a
live string band. While children watched the videos or listened to the
music, their mothers (and a few teetotal fathers) sold leaf-wrapped bundles
of food for the kava-drinkers to take home for dinner. (Kava, unlike
alcohol, is best drunk before food.) With lots of people eating together, it
was often worthwhile to butcher a pig or a bullock for the occasion, giving
people a rare chance to dine on good fresh meat. What had previously been a
subdued male-only ritual evolved into a night out for all the family.

The spread of kava nights was made possible by another new introduction:
plastic bottles. In Western countries, empty containers are a mountainous
nuisance, something to be crushed by the dozen into the recycling bin, but
in the days when people bought hardly any packaged foods they were hard to
come by. That is now changing. By filling up an old plastic bottle and
carrying it back to drink at their local nakamal, people can now attend kava
nights in faraway villages without worrying about the long drunken walk
home. The availability of cheap electric torches has been another factor
encouraging people to venture further from home on their nights out (as has
a decline in the belief in ghosts).

Thanks to the recent arrival of new trucks on Pentecost's roads, many people
don't have to walk home at all. Travelling the main coastal road you might
now be passed by two or three vehicles every hour, which sounds like a
miniscule amount of traffic but does in fact represent a huge increase over
the amount a few years ago. And now that the Ministry of Public Works has
belatedly begun a programme to repair some of the most treacherous stretches
of the road (for example, laying stones to smooth out some of the nastier
river crossings), those trucks will be able run for longer before they fall
to pieces. The concept of designated drivers has yet to catch on here, and
it's probably only a matter of time before some kava-intoxicated driver is
woken from his slumbers by the jolt of his truck colliding head-on with a
large tree. However, given the lethargic and ponderous way in which kava
drinkers do things (driving included), this will hopefully be a very slow
accident, and with any luck it won't hurt anybody except the tree.

Society on Pentecost is changing, and as at any such time, there are plenty
of people convinced that the change is for the worse. Not only are there
predictable moans coming from local old-timers, but numerous outsiders from
different corners of the world have added their voices of concern. Most of
these are people whose own societies successfully underwent the same changes
centuries ago and wouldn't dream of turning the clock back, yet still they
lament the sight of the islanders abandoning their happy traditional economy
(the one based on nice things like pigs rather than evil things like money)
and being lured down the path of capitalist folly. They observe that in
countries where people have to pay for their daily needs, those without cash
are at risk of hunger and homelessness, whilst in Vanuatu's traditional
village societies every single person is provided for.

Such people have a point, but not a very good one. Nobody begs or sleeps
rough on Pentecost because the islanders have strong families and
communities that look after those in need, and plenty of land on which to
live and grow crops. There are legitimate reasons for people to worry about
Pentecost's future: the breakdown of old communities under the influence of
Western ideals, the growing inequality between those who relax in coastal
villages doing well-paid jobs and those who scrape gardens in the mountains,
the risk of an expanding tourist industry exacerbating the previous two
problems, the pressure that will ultimately be put on the land by a swelling
population, and (in the shorter term) the prospect of the kava price
collapsing now that so many islanders are devoting their efforts to growing
the drug rather than growing food. However, money is to a large extent a
symptom of the island's problems rather than a cause.

In any case, it's not true to say that nobody in traditional Pentecost
society went hungry. Although the island is not haunted by the sort of
starvation seen in crueller Third World countries, malnourishment does exist
here, attested to by the grossly rounded bellies of protein-deficient
children fed on little but taro for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The
children who suffer worst from this, it should be noted, are the ones living
in those happy, traditional villages where people grow food in their gardens
in the happy, traditional way. By contrast, those whose parents got sucked
into the cash economy get small helpings of store-bought tinned meat with
their vegetables, and small spoonfuls of nutrient-enriched Nestlé milk
powder (spot the irony) stirred into their morning tea.

Money also buys such children medicines, schoolbooks, and a small measure of
protection against life's many hazards. Picture a traditional village in
which a cyclone has devastated the gardens and blown down the wooden houses.
Now picture a village in which the inhabitants sat securely in houses made
of imported cement eating imported rice and tinned meat while the storm
raged, and decide for yourself whether capitalism causes hunger and
homelessness.

In any case, the development of a cash economy on Vanuatu's islands is
Progress; it cannot be stopped. Unless one of the parties in Vanuatu's
government happens to be plotting a Communist revolution (which is unlikely,
since the country's well-salaried politicians rather enjoy the fruits of
capitalism), the islanders' new way of doing business will be with them for
a long time to come.

6th July

"You no hear'em cold?" he asked me. (To people in Vanuatu, sensations such
as cold and sadness and joy and nausea are not 'felt', they are 'heard'.)

The temperature is five degrees hotter than the average British summer day,
I said. The barkeeper shivered.

We sat in silence for a while. A draft of air was blowing under the eaves of
the thatched roof. It did actually feel cold.

"Ee got gorilla, 'long England," the boy asked, out of nowhere.

"No."

"Hippopotamus?"

"No got."

"Elephant?"

"'Nah. All animal here, all-ee stop 'long zoo, no-more."

Is Zoo a part of England?, the barkeeper asked.

"No." I tried, in Pidgin English, to explain the concept. "Fence ee round'em
animal." The boy seemed to understand.

"Oh, me want'em look elephant!" he said. "But me never look live one. Me
look inside 'long book, no-more."

In Vanuatu there are no zoos. No elephant, hippopotamus or gorilla has ever
set foot in the country.

"Ee got crocodile 'long England?"

"No. Ee cold too-much."

"You-fella ee look crocodile inside 'long zoo, no-more."

I have seen crocodiles in the wild, I told him. (Well, I've seen alligators
and caimans, but I wasn't going to bother explaining the difference.) Just
not in England.

"You-fella who ee got chance b'long go long different country, you-fella ee
lucky," the barkeeper said. "I-think by-and-by me never go long 'nother
country."

Some ni-Vanuatu do get to travel abroad, I pointed out. Even if they can't
afford the plane ticket by themselves, they are often sponsored to go
overseas for work or training. (One bonus of living in an isolated little
island country is that there are plenty of opportunities for this type of
travel.) I've even met a few who've been to England.

"But me, me out 'long school 'long Class Six," the fifteen-year-old said.
"Head b'long me ee no-good!" He laughed.

Don't put yourself down, I said.

"Some kind work 'long school, me savvy make'm good," he explained. "But
reading with'em writing, me no savvy good."

It sounded to me like a case of dyslexia. Back home, the boy would have been
given extra tuition and special allowances would have been made for him in
exams. Here in Vanuatu, he was left to flunk out of school at the age of
eleven (probably to the relief of his parents, who were no longer faced with
the challenge of raising money for the boy's school fees).

"But ee all-right," the boy went on. "By-and-by me school back-again. By me
school from mechanic." I'm going to train as a mechanic.

A good career choice, I agreed. There's plenty of money to be made as a
mechanic on Pentecost. With trucks running on some of the world's most
destructive roads (the fact that they can run for even a day without
breaking down fills me with admiration for Toyota's engineers), plus an
increasing assortment of crappy little electricity generators that the
villagers power up on special occasions (most of the time they can't afford
the petrol) and don't always maintain properly, anyone on the island with a
reputation as a good mechanic will never be short of work. At Ranwadi, the
school mechanic spends not only all day but also most evenings banging and
welding in his tin garage. When I suggest that the guy works too hard, his
friends rub their fingers and thumb together and point out that he's being
well rewarded for his efforts.

There was another silence.

"Man 'long DVD, man who ee work with'em crocodile, him ee dead, uh?"

"Steve Irwin?" Yes, he died last year.

"Him ee come 'long Vanuatu one time. Him ee come b'long catch'em crocodile."

Vanuatu's crocodile population currently stands at three: a band of lonely
individuals who migrated down from the Solomon Islands and settled in the
outlying island of Vanua Lava in the north of the country. A few years ago,
one of these crocodiles ventured further south, and turned up on an island
near Pentecost. This caused much concern, both to the crocodile's new
neighbours, whose hordes of highly-edible children spend much of their time
playing in rivers and the sea, and also to the people of Vanua Lava, who had
grown attached to their crocodile and for some reason wanted it back. Steve
Irwin was called in.

The barkeeper proceeded to give me a long and lively description of the
Crocodile Hunter's encounter with the errant reptile, which ended with it
being loaded onto an Air Vanuatu plane and flown back to Vanua Lava. (Live
pigs may be banned on the inter-island planes nowadays, but apparently live
crocodiles are welcome.)

After watching Steve Irwin wrestle down the crocodile, the boy told me, the
awestruck villagers had asked him if there was any animal he couldn't
overcome.

"'Ee got one', him ee say. All-ee call'em what.white great shark?"

"Great white shark."

"Ah yes."

Another long and complicated story in Pidgin English followed. It involved
Steve, a great white shark, and an inadequate metal cage.

But it was a much smaller fish that eventually killed the great man, I said.
"One stingray."

The boy nodded. "But 'long place here, stingray all-ee no kill'em man.
All-ee help'em man."

I looked up, interested. Help them how?

"Booboo b'long me ee tell'em story here," the boy said. (I love the Pidgin
word for grandparent.) "Time when one man ee drown, stingray ee save'm him."
Just like a barbed version of Flipper the friendly dolphin. "Stingray ee
come underneath 'long leg b'long man. Man ee stand-up long stingray.
Stingray ee carry'em man ee go shore."

I had a nice image of Steve Irwin being carried up into Heaven, surfing on
the back of a giant stingray.

3rd July

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- - -

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

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

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

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