The blue hole

The thing to do here at Oyster Island, a bit north of Luganville on Santo's east coast, is to take your dinghy up the river to the Blue Hole, a deep, clear freshwater spring. We haven't done too many touristy things yet, but the mouth of the river is just opposite where Kukka is anchored. It would have been perverse to have ignored it.

If we'd never got to the Blue Hole, the sleepy, slow tropical river would have been enough. John and Ange, from the Hobart yacht Nada, offered to take us up in their hard-bottomed dinghy (oh, do we love a hard bottom when we can find one!). The river winds through rainforest and coconut palms. Huge thick-thighed trees with tangled veins drop down into the water.

We did get to the Blue Hole. The water was soft, limpid and, in places, the most exquisite acquamarine colour. You could see all the way to the bottom, way way down. There was a rope waiting to be swung on - here's John doing something he said he hadn't done since he was a kid. Good for body and soul. 

Hunting and gathering

“Two young green coconuts in the cockpit, three pawpaws in various stages of ripening in the vegetable crate and on deck, ripe bananas bursting their skins. Grapefruit, capsicum, kumara, mandarin….all given to us, offered freely. And I worried when we left Vila how we would find food to eat.” Note to self, July 27, at South-West Bay.  

As we’ve island hopped our way north to Luganville, each place we’ve stayed a while has had its own food story. Probably my favourite comes from Leman Bay, a pretty bay at the northeast corner of Epi, known among yachties and the few backpackers who venture there for its friendly dugong. It flops around munching sea grass on the sandy bottom into which we gratefully lowered our anchor, still scarred from that morning’s wraparound a coral head off  Emae Island.  Some people like to swim with dugongs. I’m not so keen, but in the four days we spent in Lamen Bay, I often watched him lolling around close to the boat. My best memories of Lamen Bay though revolve around bread.

Ah, bread. I haven’t lost any of my enthusiasm for bread-making, though I am sorely conscious of my diminishing supplies of gritty flours. Here in Luganville I’d hoped that at the very least we might buy strong white baker’s flour, but all I can find is no-name white flour. I bake bread every second day, as a rule. I’ve found a great corner in the saloon for the bread bowl to sit securely even when we’re under way. Bread, bean sprouts and the muesli I make up in a jumbo plastic tub are the on-board staples I feel most attached to.

Because my bread flour is a non-renewable supply (as I’ve discovered), I tend not to be as generous with my baking as I would be in town. I gave a loaf to Sara in South West Bay after she told me that the foods she missed most were not sweet treats (which her friends send her), but healthy stuff like granola. So we brought her in a care package – muesli and bread. I also gave a loaf to a baker named Joseph who lives in Leman Bay (below).

We met Joseph at the end of on a long hot walk we’d taken out of town, looking for the gardens. Every village has its gardens and people work in them all day, like going to the office. The gardens feed their families. Lamen Bay has an odd set up (to our mind) where most people live on Lamen Island about a mile offshore. There are no gardens on the island, we were told, because they have a lot of pigs over there, and pigs and vegetable gardens don’t mix. So every day a boat brings people over to work their gardens on the mainland. We encountered something similar in Esema Bay in Havannah Harbour,  where each morning and evening there was a peak hour rush of canoes as the people from Moso Island came and went from the “job” – working in their gardens on the mainland.

In Esema Bay, we were anchored just in front of the muddy mangrove “beach” where the villagers beached their canoes. The people there do a brisk trade in selling vegetables to yachts. The deal is they sidle up to the boat on their canoe, ask you if you need anything, and if you want what they can supply, they would bring it out in their canoes. Then you talk money. It’s all a bit hit and miss – “whatever you want to pay”, is the standard response. But that’s not what they mean. Somehow you arrive at a price which makes both of you “happy”. I’m still feeling my way with this system. Sometimes I have paid through the nose, other times I seem to get a “good deal”. Trading is more fraught than paying cash I’ve found since people who don’t run a cash economy don’t have much of an idea of the cash value of the goods we carry on board. Still, we’re the rich ones. It’s impossible to forget that.

One of the men at Esema Bay, an entrepreneurial fellow called Carlos, took Alex and me to see his garden in behind the mangroves. There must be many gardens in there, because there were crowds of people coming and going, but they’re well hidden. Carlos’ garden appeared suddenly out of a tangle of banana plants, coconut palms and lots of other trees whose names I couldn’t even guess at. He had no stakes, no rows, no straight edges. In the picture below I’m among his tomatoes which were just beginning to ripen. He picked us snake beans and sweet corn, and then plunged even deeper into the forest to bring something he called a yam. It’s big and brown and hairy, and it’s still sitting in a milk crate on the stern deck, along with other sundry nuts which we’ve been handed, and I have no idea how to cook. 

 In Lamen Bay, there were no obvious sellers to strays like ourselves. There was stuff being grown, but the distribution channels were different  – for example, we saw bags of kava, a valuable crop, stacked on the beach, waiting for the boat to Vila (below). Also waiting to go into town was a pig whose days were definitely numbered.

We set off to look for the gardens at Lamen Bay, and ended up on what seemed to be the only road heading out of town. At the point where it began to climb steeply, we noticed a neat compound of huts. We were taken with the collection of  mobile phone solar chargers on the slab among the hibscus (pictured below), and a miniature rose in bloom. Who plants a rose in the backblocks of Epi, we wondered? Epi, like just about everywhere in Vanuatu, is mountainous, and we were in meltdown very quickly. The heat and humidity in Vanuatu are intense, similar to February weather in Sydney.  At the top of the hill, we took in the view of Lamen Bay, admired the good sense of the people living up there whose very tidy village caught the cooling breezes, and walked back down. 

As we again passed by the place with the phone chargers, a man ran out, calling to us. He had lived and worked in Sydney, as it turned out. He was a friendly kind of bloke, on his way to make kava (the picture below is of a kava grinder – these gadgets sit outside many houses in Leman Bay). 

The kava maker took us inside the compound to meet Joseph, the baker, who was married to his sister. I’d heard there was a baker in Lamen Bay, but didn’t expect we would connect in quite as vital a way. Joseph took me into a shed where he had several dozen tins of risen dough ready for the wood-fired oven out the back. He’d have bread ready in 30 minutes, he told me. 

 

Joseph bakes every day. He doesn’t have a shop. His customers know where to find him. I think he expected that I had come to buy bread like most yachties. I told him that I had just made a loaf. He asked me how I made bread on a yacht, and as I told him that I left the mixture to rise for 18 hours, his eyes widened. Why did I do that?  What did I put in my bread? How much yeast did I use? When I told him about cooking the bread in a covered pot inside the oven and the effect that had on the texture of the bread, he got very excited. He asked me to write down the recipe.

Alex and I decided to go back to the boat to get a loaf of my bread for Joseph to touch and taste. When we came back with bread and Jim Lahey's bread book (which has great step-by-step pictures demonstrating the method), a small crowd was waiting for us at. Everyone was curious. Joseph took my bread into his “bakery” to carve up and distributed it in thick slices to the children who had stopped by on their way home from school to collect bread for the family. I'm not sure if they liked the taste of the brown flour, but Joseph was intrigued by the seeds and by the bread's texture. He said he would try to bake my bread, and I believed him. 

His wife Ellen meanwhile was picking for us a massive bunch of  bok choy, and a bag of limes, and as a gift she shyly offered us three eggs (a big poultry fight broke out in their house while we were outside talking). We’d offered to bring back two loaves of bread for Liz and Keith Post who had arrived in the anchorage on Najat, and they too got bok choy and limes. Oh, and we brought back a paw paw too, a gift from a woman we passed on the track. She wouldn’t hear of taking money for it.

We had another few nights with Liz and Keith at Awai Island in the Maskelynes, a gorgeous collection of little islands, reefs and lagoons tucked in the south-east corner of Malakula. Najat, pictured below at Awai Island with visitors, is not your usual cruising yacht. Liz and Keith took her to Antarctica 10 years ago, and now they are heading off for a few years, in the direction of Borneo.

 

I bought a mudcrab at Awai from the most beautiful woman I’ve yet seen in Vanuatu. She came towards us purposefully in a canoe paddled by a small girl, her eldest daughter. She had a baby at her breast, and another little one in the canoe. They’d been in the mangroves and had two mud crabs to sell. I tried to tell her that I had no idea how to cook mudcrabs, but she looked puzzled. It was simple, she said.  Just put a knife through its underbelly and and boil it in a pot. Food preparation in these islands isn’t sophisticated, I gather. Her daughter had a live bird, a pretty little thing, tucked in the front of the canoe, also found in the mangroves, a type of pigeon which was certainly destined for the pot. 

Liz and Keith had also succumbed to this beauty's charm, and bought her last very small mudcrab (ours, as it turned out, had only one pincer, so we weren't talking about a lot of meat). They knew what to do with mudcrabs, as I thought they would, and since it made sense to throw them in the same pot, they ate with us on Kukka that night. I made up Jamie Oliver's fine tomato sauce (with dried red chilli) and we added the crab meat. Liz brought over banana cake, and Alex and Keith swapped stories of childhood pranks with chemicals and old Balmain (wouldn't you know it, they used to own a house in Birchgrove Rd). 

We ate well in the Maskelynes where foraging on the reef and in the mangroves seems to go on all day, except Sunday (the missionaries did their job well around here). As in Havannah Harbour, we were approached very soon after we’d dropped anchor, and various people, all related, brought us out grapefruit, beans, pawpaw, sweet potato. (We were by then appreciating that the tomatoes we’d bought from Carlos might be the last ones we would see for a while. Fortunately we’d bought them green.). As much as the fresh food,  however, I loved watching how men, women and children in this lovely tropical backwater handled their canoes.

 

There have been very few days when I’ve struggled to make a meal out of what we’ve had on board. Sometimes I don’t know exactly what it is I’m cooking with – if in doubt, stir fry, I figure. We have a good supply of vacuum packed steak in the fridge which, sliced finely, and cooked with the usual accomplices (onion, ginger and garlic) is very tolerant of exotic green leafed vegetables. In Malua Bay a cheeky young lad called Ilton (his brothers were Wilton and Nilton) brought us “lobster”. We decided they were fresh water yabbies, since he told us he’d caught them in the river. He delivered them to the boat in a banana leaf, and they were definitely still alive. A teacher at the Seventh Day Adventist college there, called Javen, brought us a bunch of bok choy, and later that day I went to his house and got a bunch of spring onions and a marrow. The marrows were hanging down through a pergola, just as we grow grapes. All that, the yabbies, the marrow, the bok choy, the spring onions, went into a stir fry that night.

There may be the odd person reading this who is thinking of the F word. And yes, you have every reason to do so. Don’t we live on the sea? Where are the fish soups, the fish risottos, the pan-fried fillets? That’s what I say too. Patience. Alex bought a small machete in Luganville, in anticipation of landing a tuna or a mahi mahi. It would help if we put the line out more often, but the winds have been strong, the seas big, and the last thing you need on the back deck in such conditions is a flapping great fish, we’ve told ourselves. On our last run from Malua Bay to Santo we thought we’d had a strike. You’ll hear about it when we do. 

A look back from Luganville

Three weeks is long enough to make a start on knowing a country. We’ve made a start on knowing Vanuatu. I can’t say that we know what we’re doing here yet – and yes, that can be read in two ways, and both are correct. But we’ve been moving slowly and in a direction of our own choosing, which suits us just fine. We’ve come north to Luganville, on the beautifully named island of Espirito Santo, via a route less traveled, the west coast of Malakula.

We shared the wide sweep of South West Bay with only one other boat, a large NZ-registered catamaran called Koncerto.  Anna and Clyff are old Vanuatu hands, hard-core cruisers. Though the weather was moody, as west coast weather so often is, we grew fond of seeing Koncerto, anchored at the other end of the bay opposite the village of Lembinwen, framed by a rainbow each morning, and at our end of the bay, opposite the village of Wintua, we watched fine misty rain fogs sweep down from the dark rainforest-clad mountains day after day..

We spent a week anchored in this remote corner of Malakula, where the Namba tribes are famously fierce, and only one or two generations away from cannibalism. In South West Bay we stayed still long enough to find our footing, to adjust our thinking and our attitude towards Vanuatu. And we stayed still long enough to meet some very interesting people. People who are not afraid of solitude, for South West Bay is truly remote. There are no roads in (or out), and supply boats call in only sporadically. The airstrip, often reputedly under water, is being upgraded, and has been out of service for eight months.

The path between Wintua and Lembinwen comes around the red cliffs off which we were anchored, and where it meets the beach it ducks underneath the most beautiful old shade trees. Then it passes in front of Lamango. Lamango was once a French-owned coconut plantation. But those days are gone, and the place was derelict when a Kiwi butcher from Whakatane, Kevin Muncanster, and his wife Brenda, took a 75 year lease on it about five years ago. They hired local men to clear the overgrowth, and brought in stock from New Zealand – pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, horses, and chickens too, for the lucrative egg trade. We came in from the boat to buy eggs and meat from them, and ended up sharing their table and hearing their story.

Like all the best stories, it hinges on a friendship -  in their case with a young man called Simon who was working in the Meridien hotel in Vila where Brenda and Kevin used to frequently holiday. The Muncasters took a shine to Simon, and sponsored his first visit to NZ. Simon stayed nine months, and became part of their family. When it was time for him to come home, he insisted that they come and meet his family in South West Bay. They ended up building themselves a holiday house on the lagoon which backs onto Lembinwen (Simon’s village) and holidayed there with their two young sons for several years. Then came the opportunity at Lamango, and now 20 years after they first met him,  Simon runs the finances of the South West Bay farm and lives in the house on the lagoon with his wife and children. There’s a new village grown up around that first house of Kevin and Brenda’s. When a cyclone ripped through Lembinwen several years ago, leaving several of Simon’s relatives homeless, Simon asked Kevin to help build more houses by the lagoon for his uncles. It turned out there were quite a few of those.

Brenda and Kevin come and go from South West Bay half a dozen times a year. Simon’s brother James lives and works on the farm too with his wife, but Kevin’s right hand man is Albie who lives with his family in the old plantation homestead. He manages the farm, and slaughters the beasts. Albie displays his NZ certification in the Lamango butchery, where I was delighted to learn I could have my meat vacuum packed. 

As for what Kev and Brenda get out of this, well, they say that money can’t buy the kind of fun they have at Lamango. They built up a chain of 52 butcher shops around New Zealand, but sold it and have kept only their first shop in Whakatane, which their younger son manages, and a farm, which his parents help with when they are away. They’ve put a big house on the beachfront, built to Western standards. They are not embarrassed by their wealth. They like the people in South West Bay, they say. They want to help them, but they’re not missionary types.  What they’re doing at Lamango is offering work, and decent wages, and even more importantly than that, demonstrating an alternative to the subsistence economy which traps ni-Vans in poverty.

 

As I said, we’ve met some interesting people. At each anchorage though, you start again, because at each anchorage there is a village, maybe several. Vanuatu may have just celebrated 30 years of nationhood, but it’s a nation of 83 islands, and many villages. Every village has its own protocol and often its own language. In Malakula, there are 30 different languages, I’ve read.  In South West Bay, Wintua and Lembinwen each have their own language. The people in Wintua people are from a different tribe. It’s quite usual apparently for people from Lembinwen and Wintua not to visit the other village for years at a time.

Jolly (Simon’s father) explained to us that in the 1940s the missionaries told the tribes to come down from the hills and live on the coast. His parents’ tribe came to Lembinwen, where he was born. “Were your parents cannibals?” we asked, boldly. Yes, said Jolly, his parents were heathens. He described for us various traditional (or kastom, as they say) rituals to do with marriage and pigs which were, and are still, intimately linked. I though they sounded pretty limiting, from a woman’s point of view, but Jolly, who is nearly as old as Alex, is of the opinion that life was better up in the bush. Here he is below in the rainforest behind the lagoon,
with the water supply for Lembinwen behind him.

 

Jolly took Alex and me, and Anna and Clyff into the lagoon, and from there, quite a long way into the forest behind it, which is lush and moist, with vines twisting up every tree, and strange fruit hanging in unexpected places. Pawpaws wind down tree trunks like strands of Christmas baubles. We ate raw cocoa seeds, and they tasted tangy, juicy. Under the trees were big piles of cooked and halved cocoa shells, the nuts harvested already. I am definitely not an into the wild kind of girl. I found myself thinking how little I would like to be left alone in this tropical wilderness, though it is bursting with life and nutrition. I was glad to get back to the dinghy on the lagoon shore.

It rained all day at Wintua on July 30, Independence Day, a filthy day with no sunlight getting through the thick low cloud cover. Humidity on the boat measured around 85%.  The big wet was unfortunate enough, given that this was the biggest party that Vanuatu expected to throw this year, but an even darker pall was thrown over festivities because the previous day a man had dropped dead on the beach. He, like us, had been watching soccer at Wintua. It was a big day. The teams were kitted out in brand new uniforms. The field had been freshly marked. 

This was on Wednesday, the first day of a three day soccer tournament which was to climax on Friday, Independence Day. This was big, like the Easter Show. There must have been about 500 people or more watching the boys playing soccer. In a corner, there was a girls volley ball tournament going on, and scatter about in specially constructed thatch huts were women selling food,  like  local “icecream” (coconut milk mixed with shaved pawpaw and the soft slimy flesh of green coconut), and rice. And of course, there were games for the kids. 

But the man dying put paid to all the fun. We got the details on Wednesday evening, when we were invited for dinner at Lamango (“we haven’t had a white girl for dinner for a long time,” Kevin joked with the boys making up kava outside the butchery. Only on Malakula…). We sat at a long table outside, with the wind rushing through the coconut palms, keeping the mozzies at bay, and drifts of dark men coming in and out like the tide, drawn by the kava bowl. They made little sound, even among themselves. Young men in groups in our culture are rowdy, shouting over each other, puffing themselves up. These men seemed to hang in the air, like birds. When Kevin gave them the ok, they came, one by one, to take a shell, or a plastic bowl, and dip it into the kava bowl.

Apparently, they told Kevin, the deceased wasn’t very well liked. In fact, the young men who were asked to take him back up to the village on a stretcher first tossed his body into the water, and let it roll onto the beach. Eventually the body was carted up the slippery mud cliff, and the next day, as we expected, the soccer and associated activities were cancelled.

We didn’t go into Wintua on Thursday or on Friday because by then we’d had our lagoon adventure and our dinghy was out of action (suffice to say, we went fishing in the lagoon, and landed a fish-hook in Clyff’s finger and in the floor of the blow-up dinghy. And yes, he caught a fish, a big one, but nobody much cared about the fish by the time he’d pushed the hook through his finger). Back to the narrative. The next time we went to Wintua was on Sunday to collect Sara. Sara Anderegg  (above) is  a 23-year-old Peace Corps volunteer from Savannah, Georgia and she’s been living in Wintua since November.

I’d met Sara on Tuesday when I’d visited the school in Wintua with Anna and Brenda to deliver a box of children’s books. Sara is the school librarian. She is the only white person in the village. Her life there is mind-boggling. I still can’t come to grips with it. She has her own little house in amongst the school buildings (there are about 100 children in the primary school, and 100 in the secondary school – most of them are boarders). Like every other house in Wintua, it has no electricity, and no running water. Her toilet is an outhouse up the hill. She is trying to make a vege garden, but it keeps getting washed away. People give her food, but aside from fruit, her diet is mostly starch and the few items – rice, tinned fish – she can buy at the village “shop”. She’s put on 15 kg since she arrived in Wintua in November. For several months she ate mostly with her “host” family. Her “mother” took me into their eating house and showed me where she cooks – on the ground, over stones, using a wood fire.

Sara has a hammock outside her house where she likes to read, but it’s rare for the children to leave her alone. Privacy is not a village thing. She has her bolthole, the library. She came to Wintua on a two-year teaching contract, but she has made the revival of the library, essentially a disused storage shed, her project.  What she’s achieved is miraculous given the lack of resources. She pushes open the shutters with poles, and behold, a light, bright, well-organised room, with books catalogued on shelves, sets of encyclopedias, posters, tantalizing invitations to read and to learn.

The bottom line though is that Sara is a single white girl living among people who have very strict traditional customs. She doesn’t speak the local language, though she has learned Bislama, or pidgin English, which is Vanuatu’s official language. She has little in common with most of the women, who are either married or at school, and she doesn’t talk to any of the men, ever. She can’t afford to cross that line. There are no police in the village. The chiefs enforce law.  If she were a white man, her situation would be very different. She has seen that from the few times another Peace Corps volunteer, a young man from New York based in a neighbouring village, has visited her.  He spends a lot of time in Vila, she says, but when he’s been to Wintua, he’s treated respectfully by both men and women. Women in Vanuatu have no status, white or brown. Girls are educated to be married and stay in their villages where their work never ends. Very few girls ever leave to take a job in Vila. Hers is a very odd position – and she’s seems completely committed to it.

On Sunday, when we’d fixed the dinghy and the skies had cleared, we brought Sara out to Kukka and fed her up on olives and fresh wholemeal bread, feta cheese, salami, bean sprouts and beer. Then we motored over to Koncerto, the palatial catamaran, and whiled away a couple of hours drinking tea and eating scones with Anna and Clyff.

I doubt that we’ll visit South West Bay again before Sara leaves, but I know I won’t forget her. It’s her solitude that staggers me. As we sat out at anchor on Independence Day, listening late into the night to the whoops and calls of men who had spent several days drinking kava, I worried about her. When I asked her on Sunday if she’d felt safe then, she didn’t answer me directly. She said that she had gone to the library to get away from the noise, and that this was one of the few times she’d seen alcohol in the village.  Men had gathered in the middle of the soccer field late at night, she said. She didn’t elaborate. I couldn’t imagine my daughter in her shoes. Now I’ve seen what the Peace Corps asks of its volunteers, I know that if I were an employer and I saw Peace Corps on a resume, I would ask no further questions.