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.