Back in town

The shock of Noumea - the noises, the abruptness, the unpleasantness of town life.- is fading quickly. I’m a town girl, after all. Nothing noble about this savage. She’s just waiting to be rehabilitated. Give her a day or two more on the marina at Port Moselle and she’ll feel so self-conscious about her hairy legs and unpainted toenails and her grown-out haircut that she’ll have to do something about them. Or perhaps take her out of the town again, send her back to sea. Now there’s an idea. Why didn’t I think of it?

We left Vanuatu on the clearest, most limpid of mornings. The Port Vila harbour entrance is wide enough, but when you are sharing the space between port and starboard buoys with the Pacific Dawn, out of London, (below), it doesn’t seem that wide.

The galleon Atlantia, out of Scotland (pictured below), was a short distance ahead of us as we cleared the turbulence around Pango Point and turned towards New Caledonia. Will and Margaret Rudd have been living aboard Atlantia for six years (come to think of it, just about every cruising yacht we’ve met, except for Nada, has been “out” for multiples of three years). Wait for this – they have a hipbath on board! Perhaps I too would sail on and on if I could enjoy a bath before bed. Banish the thought. These sleek Swedish yachts we so love are built for speed. Will and Margaret say they think of Atlantia as their country cottage, and she is in fact almost spacious enough to install an Aga stove. They haven’t, but they did offer us their homebrew beer. Everything in a boat has a trade-off though, and Atlantia is not built for upwind sailing. They had their work cut out going south in southeast tradewinds, not that they didn’t try for as long as possible. We took photos of each other as we crossed paths. But eventually, Atlantia fell away to the west. Will and Margaret took the road less traveled to Noumea, we later discovered.

Oh my, the sailing was fine that first day out of Vila. The wind blew constantly and moderately, and Kukka sliced through the waves on top of the swell. I was surprised when I saw Atlantia’s pictures (she came into the marina at Port Moselle two days after us) at how low we seem sit in the water. Actually, we don’t sit low but we have much less freeboard than many other cruisers. It looks as though we must get awfully wet, but we don’t normally.

If the day was beautiful, the night was even more so. We had thought the wind might die as it had every night we were moored in Vila, but right through the night we kept up a cracking pace, with small reefs in both genoa and mainsail. But the moon was the thing. I’ve never sailed under a full moon before. It’s something to treasure, and to hope for again and again. A full moon takes the scariness out of night sailing. There’s no colour in the picture, but otherwise it’s like sailing during the day. You can see the horizon, you can see the land if you are near land, you can see the sails. When there’s no moon, even the sails disappear into the dark and you can see them only by pointing a torch upwards. When the occasional cloud floated over the moon, the difference was as sharp as if a light had been turned off in the room. The cockpit lost its moonshadows and the sails lost their moonglow. But there weren’t many clouds that night, and the full moon, which had risen as the sun went down, stayed with us through the night, not setting until dawn. I watched it sink below the western horizon, as big and orange as the sun itself. When I came back up into the cockpit after a short sleep, the sun was high in the east but Alex, like the moon, had Gone West. That country music has really got him by the short and curlies.

Twenty-three hours after hoisting our sails at Pango Point, we’d covered 135 miles, a new Kukka overnight record. The wind shifted a little further into the east on the second day, which gave us the lift we needed to pass to the east of Lifou, in the middle of the Loyalty Islands. If we’d known what we know now, we may well have stopped at Lifou and checked in. Once we reached the marina in Noumea we discovered that it was indeed possible to do this. The rider is that one of you has to fly from Lifou to Noumea so that immigration can stamp your passports. But the upside is huge. Having cleared in at Lifou, you can go where you want – say, north to Ouvea or south to the Isle of Pines - and take your time in getting into Noumea. But the French don’t advertise these deviations in process. We had tried in Vanuatu to find out about clearance at Lifou but nobody seemed to know for sure what the drum was. Only experience, I guess, gives you the confidence to push the bureaucratic boundaries.

On my midnight watch on our second night, the wind dropped to 8 knots and shifted into the north-east. We were rolling around with boom clanging and genoa flapping like a wounded wing. So we did what you do in such circumstances, if you are us. We turned on the engine. Havannah Passage was still 20 miles away. This south-east entrance to the lagoon has a notoriously fierce tidal current, and we needed to be through it before the tide turned. Fighting an ebbing tide isn’t funny in such places.

When daylight broke, it was grey. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a grey sea. Truly, the sea has some lovely colours, but grey is rarely one of them. The air was cool. Alex put on long pants, a shirt over his teeshirt and shoes and socks. I picked a baby flying fish off the deck. Have I said how much I love to see a flying fish – alive, of course? They are miraculous creatures. If they’re being chased, you’ll see a group of them shooting ahead like silver bullets, but sometimes you see a solo flier skimming the waves in lazy arc and covering maybe 100 metres or more before it drops into the sea.

After we’d motored through the Canal Woodin, we dropped anchor under a ridge of wind generators. Playing by the rules, we left our dinghy on board, and settled into a game of Scrabble. The weather was grim, and frankly, the austere landscape into which we’d wandered left us cold too. The south is good for nickel mining, but aside from a few coconut palms and colonial pines (they look like yews from a distance, tall and skinny with fuzzy little branches), there’s little vegetation to catch the eye. What you see first is erosion and red mud. Even when the cloud and rain lifted the next morning, we couldn’t warm to it.

And so on through the lagoon to Noumea, and the Port Moselle marina where we have found boats we’ve met throughout the cruising season, in various stages of departure. The water smells bad almost all the time but you put up with it because the visitors pontoon is sociable, and it’s convenient. We have good internet here, finally. That’s doubly important, because this is the beginning of the end and Alex is “looking at weather”. We won’t be going out into the lagoon again to explore coral atolls and reefs, as I’d hoped, because by Friday we’ll know whether the next high coming over Australia might be one we can ride down to Coffs Harbour. If it is, we’ll get going. Everyone has their own way of deciding when to leave. Some do it impulsively, others set themselves a deadline, and still others try to penetrate the obscure science of weather forecasting. Alex has always been drawn to the science, but it’s not for the faint-hearted. Alex is not faint-hearted.

We’ll see a bit more of Noumea before we leave. Perhaps we’ll find something to cheer our souls. They’ve built a nice aquarium here. Tropical fish, and even the nasty guys with poisonous bites and spines, are never disappointing.

The trouble is that the French have spent 150 years at worst crushing the Melanesian spirit and at best tolerating Melanesian presence in this country, and that infects the air. Eau Moselle may be putrid but the smell of colonization hangs over the whole city. Melanesians here don’t walk and talk like they do in Vanuatu where they own the joint. In the fashionable beachside suburb of Baie des Citrons, you could be in Mooloolaba – white bodies in bikinis lie side by side on the sand, white bodies in fashionable clothing sit side by side at expensive waterfront restaurants. It feels odd. Not right. Wrong, actually.

There’s a small bistro called Chez Toto which we want to go back to, maybe tonight. The French may not do colonization well, but they never let you down in the kitchen.

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Well, hello, I think Agnes has got me blogging via sailmail. What a girl!

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An hour after sunrise, and the water in behind Iririki Island is glassy. Like every other boat here in the inner harbour of Port Vila, we sit motionless at our mooring. In an hour or so, the breeze will kick in , and we’ll be glad of it.  It’s already very hot, hotter than usual, the locals say. But I sleep well. On.a secure mooring, even when the air is thick with moisture and a sheet feels heavy and clammy over your body, there’s nothing to wake you except thirst and dreams. Here’s something I wrote after the festival had ended in Ambrym, when sleep was much more difficult.

September 1, Rodd’s anchorage, North Ambrym

(the picture above is taken from our boat at Rodd’s Anchorage during the festival with the British Oyster Sea Rover on the left, and the French Ovni Sea Lance closer in).

I’ve been awake for most of the night, it seems. The bully wind is rushing the boat, pushing and shoving it roughly this way and that. We are the lone yacht left on this northern coast of Ambryn now, a straggler. Every one else who came to the Back to My Roots festival has moved on, but we are delayed by a familiar cause, crippling pain in Alex’s lower back.

He sleeps in the main cabin, unable to lift his body onto the higher-than-average bed we usually share in the front of the boat, the forepeak. I am alone with the creaks and groans of the anchor apparatus, which is housed at my feet – and with my imagination. My imagination is the rogue element. The anchor, I know, is unlikely to let us down.

In the city, what disturbs my sleep late at night are house alarms, drunks, car doors slamming, over-stimulated neighbours who party on at home after clubbing and, finally,  the pre-dawn rumble of the 443 bus. Those are the main culprits. There are others. I am not a heavy sleeper. The city and I co-habit uneasily during sleeping hours.

In the islands, sleep comes early and quickly. After a day under the tropical sun, whether we’ve been underway or doing whatever we do at anchor, the body welcomes the dark. By 8.30 pm, I am slumping at the table if I am not already heading towards book and bed. My legs automatically compensate for the slight motion of the water beneath the hull. Even when the weather outside is grim, we’ve rarely found ourselves rolling and pitching at anchor. The focus of cruising is to find yourself a well-protected anchorage and stay there until you’d used up its interest quotient, or you know that an imminent weather change will make that anchorage untenable so you move on to somewhere better. Experienced sailors don’t generally find themselves exposed to filthy weather at anchor.

But there are glitches. We are anchored in deeper water than is desirable for this wind strength for the amount of chain we have out. There’s a ratio, a rule of thumb to apply. It goes roughly like this. In calm weather, you multiply the depth of water you are anchored in (for argument’s sake, call it 10 m) by 3. So you put out 30 m of chain. Alex always puts out 40 m in such circumstances. He sleeps better with more chain, he says. The worse the weather, the higher the multiple. Theoretically, with scope (the technical word for the amount of anchor chain or rope you have out) at a ratio of 10 to 1, a boat will stay put in a hurricane (given that it has a solid anchor and what’s called “good holding”, of course). Last year on the Queensland coast there were a couple of occasions when we had out scope of 9:1. But we were anchored in comparatively shallow water, no more than 8 m. That’s the problem here. We’re anchored in 17 m. The bottom is good – volcanic sand is lovely stuff for an anchor to grip into. Good holding. But we have only 75 m of chain out. There’s not much left in the anchor locker, about 15 m. The wind sounds worse than it is. It always does. The rigging shakes, the wind generator rattles its blades, the boat shudders around its pivot, the bow. A gust of  25 knots which would put a smile on my face if we were sailing sounds, when you’re at anchor, like a city express roaring through the tunnel towards the platform at Town Hall, taking its punch on the nose.  

So I’ve been awake off and on all night, I swear, listening to the snubber (a heavy rope which takes the strain off the anchor windlass) straining on the cleat. The snubber shields me from hearing the rumbling chain, and for that I am grateful. There is nothing so un-nerving in the night as the rumble of anchor chain on the sea floor below you. The snubber pulls up against the force of the wind which blasts down in “bullets” from around the volcanic cone above us. It’s a dead volcano, its perfect sweeping sides covered in jungle, not ash.. The two famously active volcanoes of Ambryn are to our west, spewing out thick streams of dirty smoke and, when the clouds are set right above them, lighting the sky orange. They are bending the wind too, whipping it around their barren, ash-covered slopes and spitting it across our bow like missiles from a slingshot. Still, we are secure. The anchor alarm is silent. Alarms make me grumpy in the city, but I’d gladly have my sleep disturbed to know that the boat was dragging. A pity my imagination cannot be set to activate in the same automated way.

I’ll take up the tale from there, and lightly brush over the weeks between the festival in Ambrym and our arrival back in Vila.

With Alex’s back still in a somewhat fragile state, we picked our time between strong gusts to lift the dinghy back up onto the deck with the spinnaker halyard, and got ready to move down to Ranon where the anchorage is shallower and slightly more protected than at Rodd’s.  I was at the bow with the remote control to the electric anchor windlass when it failed to respond. That caused a moment or two of anxiety until we realized that the windlass control in the cockpit was still functioning. Alex pulled apart the remote and fixed it. Within that short statement lies so much of the measure of the man.

After a couple of nights at Ranon, Alex felt strong enough to cross over to Port Sandwich, on the east coast of Malakula. The channel between Ambrym and Malakula was a bit wild and the next day the Vanuatu met office issued strong wind warnings for the whole island group. The situation deteriorated, as they say. The seas outside Port Sandwich were running a 3.5 metre swell but inside the boisterous gusts coming over the hills barely ruffled the surface of that lovely waterway.

We were very snug in there, and the days passed quickly. For us, Port Sandwich was a healing place, in various senses. The road which led away from the anchorage was well graded, the best we’ve found in Vanuatu’s outer islands. We walked long distances, up to the Catholic church at the point and around to the coconut plantation in the other direction. Everywhere we saw pigs and chickens living the good life, ranging free.

We took great pleasure in casual conversation, in the play of children, and in the beauty of the flora. Gradually Alex’s back loosened up. So did our thinking about what we should do in the immediate and long-term future.

We ate well in Port Sandwich. Perhaps that’s what helped most! Just across from the wharf there’s a small restaurant which also sells fresh produce and bread. It’s not signposted, but the locals know it as Rock and Noella’s place.  Rock and Noella Luan are about our age, with five children living in Vila, two still at school and three in the workforce (that’s called a successful family). The restaurant, which is open every day to yachties and locals, is their “retirement” project. They lived in Vila for years, shepherding the children through their education. Rock was a kava merchant, Noella cooked for other people. Now they’ve come back home to build up something for themselves on their family’s land (no individual “owns” land, Rock explained to us – they have a traditional right to use land which belongs to their clan).

Their garden is beautiful, with a big mango tree offering lots of shade but their house very basic. It has one solar panel connected to a car battery which powers three 12 volt lights, much like torch lights. There’s a gas burner but no fridge. But this is a restaurant with character. Noella serves huge helpings of good, tasty food in a covered annexe to one side of the house. The first day we ate with them, I gobbled down my plate of rice and pork stew for which she charged us 200 vatu, or $A2.20 (we urged her to increase her prices but she told us that locals find that quite expensive – so double it for yachties, we told her). We sat around their long table and talked and talked. As the days drifted by, we always either ate at Rock and Noella’s, or popped by to say hello. They had an easy way about them. We found them to be people like us – we had a lot in common. Of course, our life is not their life, but they showed no sign of wanting our life and every sign of being very happy with theirs. It wasn’t hard to wish them every success, and to hope that we would see them and Port Sandwich again.

We crossed from Malakula to the west coast of Epi island, intending to loiter at Revellieu Bay. But the anchorage was horribly rolly, so at first light the next day we set off to sail 55 miles back to Havannah Harbour on Efate. Usually we average our speed out at 5 knots, so we’d anticipated coming in through Little Passage after dark, relying on radar and the waypoints given in the electronic cruising guide (the nautical charts in this part of the world are notoriously inaccurate). But Kukka flew. She just flew. We had 15 to 20 knots coming from the ESE, and were sailing with a few rolls in the genoa and a reef in the main. By 2 pm we were entering Little Passage with the sun high in the sky, perfect light for picking out the channel, and by 3 pm we’d dropped anchor in Esema Bay, where we’d begun our island cruising two months earlier. Kukka had averaged just under 7 knots for the trip. It was an exhilarating ride. The master trimmer had our boat beautifully balanced. As always, she responded in kind. I sat up on deck, taking the spray and  watching the deep navy sea whoosh under her lovely hull. I could have cried for happiness. It isn’t often that everything comes together so well at sea. The sky was clear, the swell and current manageable, the wind constant and as we approached Efate, it shifted even further towards the east, exactly where we wanted it to come from. Alex relaxed into his troublesome spine. I pulled out the iPod (which we use much less often than you’d imagine) and selected Old Dogs, a buoyant, tongue-in-cheek country music album that never ceases to make him laugh at its smart, unconventional lyrics. “I don’t do it no more, I can’t do it no more…” It was a grand finale to our cruising circuit.

Havannah Harbour (seen at twilight under a new moon, above) is another safe haven, like Port Sandwich, and we stayed a few days there too, resisting the siren call of Vila with its abundance of food (the berries in the photo below are in season at the market, as are tomatoes – heaven), laundry service (in the photo below, Kukka gets her sheets changed), internet connection and friends already in port. But we finally allowed ourselves to be reeled in. We’ve been here just over a week (on the moorings, below) doing boat jobs, re-provisioning, eating out, saying hello and goodbye.

Cruising yachts are on their way south as the cyclone season approaches. Our friends on Nada, John and Ange, left last Thursday and are en route to Bundaberg. Bertil and Agnes on Panacea left day later for Noumea. We were sitting in the shuttered shade of Au Peche Mignon, a café of sorts on the Lini Highway, as they motored out across the shallows parallel to the sea wall. The traffic between us and them was nose to tail, minivans and trucks carrying full loads of human and vegetable cargo. The heat was stifling. It would have been good to be going to sea again, but we had been waiting on parts to clear customs, and when they unexpectedly showed up on Friday morning, we’d been caught on the hop. We hadn’t done our supermarket shopping, or fuelled up. We hadn’t been to see customs and immigration. Customs and immigration won’t clear you out over the weekend. Ticking the bureaucratic boxes is a chore, but one you can’t ignore. We could have pushed ourselves, but we decided that morning that we would wait until after the weekend. We weren’t ready in other ways to leave Vanuatu.

We’ve had time to get to know Vila better. It’s a town I’m much more sympathetic to this time around. I’ve been amusing myself by reading a small self-published collection of anecdotes about pre-Independence Vila (disguised by the author, herself disguised, as Lapitaville). I met an old yachtie the other day who has been marooned in Vila for 10 years with her cats, acquired en route in Venuzuela. She was buying the same little book (called Tales from Tapahiki, by Sophie Lefroy), having promised the author, a friend, she’d try to place a review in a local paper. We met again in the market on Saturday, and I felt that if we’d had all day to talk I wouldn’t tire of hearing the gossip and scandal of this rotten little tropical port – rotten, because all ports are, and despite being the Big Smoke in Vanuatu, at heart just a village.

I was in the arts and crafts market, hunting for another basket (there’s always another basket!). In Stall 15 I met Ruth. It’s impossible to browse here without a conversation. Ruth, it turns out, comes from Loltong in north Pentecost – yes, she knows Anna, she said. Anna is married to her brother Tony. Oh, Tony – has he found a job yet? I ask. No, he’s driving a minibus for us while his party is in opposition, Ruth says. She too used to be in politics. Her husband is a former prime minister. Is his name Lini? Alex asks. Yes, she said. Ah, so it’s normal to find an ex-prime minister’s wife running a market stall? Ruth laughed. Nothing could be more normal, it seems. Half an hour later, walking along the side of the road (you’d hardly call it a footpath), I saw a face I recognized. “I know you!” The bearded young man looked surprised, but not unpleasantly so. “You’re the French anthropologist from Ambrym.” He was, and he smiled broadly, and we exchanged inconsequential pleasantries. After all, there’s not a lot to say to a man you met in a rainforest when you were both stomping your feet in the dust and swimming in your own sweat. But still, it made me feel part of the place, to meet Anna’s extended family, to bump into the French anthropologist. Almost everyone in Vila, it seems, is from somewhere else and when you have been to their island, to their village, you feel less of a stranger, and Vanuatu less mysterious. Both these states may be illusory, of course, but I hope that the shift I’ve made towards imagining future adventures on a boat is not.

Under the volcanoes

Old Vanuatu hands advised us that if we were thinking of going to only one of the cultural festivals held in the islands during the cruising months it should be Back to My Roots in north Ambrym..  

So from the time we left Oyster Island, we had a deadline – Rodd’s Anchorage by August 25. Nada was going the same way, and Panacea, the Swedish boat we met on Pentecost, was bound the festival too. We knew from the Namba Net (a daily radio schedule which links yachts cruising around Vanuatu) of other boats coming from the south. But no-one ever really knows how many boats will turn up to a festival. Marketing is next to non-existent in Vanuatu where most information travels by word of mouth.

About 25 yachts came for this year’s festival to anchor under the volcanoes which reflect the fiery glow of their molten insides up into the clouds above the island. There were a good number of foreign cruising yachts among those (i.e. not from Australia or NZ) -. French, American, English, Canadian, Swedish. Many of these yachties already knew each other. They’d crossed paths in Fiji, in the Cooks, or Whangarei, NZ, where lots of boats sit out the cyclone season. Didier Beachchene, on a large aluminium Ovni yacht called Sea Lance, reckons there are probably about 100 yachts cruising in the Pacific at any one time, so eventually they all run into each other somewhere. This was our third encounter with Didier and his wife, Chantal in Vanuatu. It was unforgettable.

Here he is, sticking out like the proverbial ….what? 

Yes, that’s a 60-something Frenchman, dressed in penis sheath, called a namba,  which is what men wear when they do kastom (traditional) dancing, give or take a bit of luxuriant foliage stuck into their waistband at the back, pig tusks around the neck and/or wrists and for some, face paint and feathers adornments to the hair. As he told it afterwards, his surprise appearance on the dance floor was by accident rather than design. He asked the men to show him how they got themselves up in the namba and they agreed to show him, but only if he danced with them. The honour would be theirs, they insisted. Chantal has been married to Didier for 30 something years. Her only comment was, “Didier has no fear of ridicule”. It gave him a unique perspective, I guess.  

We punters put up 7000 vatu (around $A80) for the three days, or 3000 vatu a day. That’s a lot of money in Vanuatu, but for a ticket into another world who is counting? The festival site had been beautifully prepared. No lights, no sound system, and naturally-derived props  – and the monumental presences of the tamtams, carved wooden drums made from hollowed out trunks of breadfruit trees (above).

The players in this outdoor theatre had their green room, an area of forest behind the tamtams, hidden from the spectators’ view by partitions woven from fresh palm fronds. We, the yachties plus a handful of other visitors who must have flown in from Vila, sat on wooden benches, The many local people who came to watch, especially on the third day, filled in the spaces under trees, sitting or standing.

Around the perimeter of the festival site were four or five freshly-woven stalls where women sold grapefruit, drinking coconuts, bread rolls with canned tuna or canned meat filling, laplap – which is The Vanuatu Dish, a kind of fried stodge made from manioc, with toppings sometimes – and for the quick, rice with some kind of vegetables mixed through. For the white guests, there were were special toilet facilities - some women complained of the smell, but the logs were sturdy over the pit, and all four sides were sheltered from public gaze. There was even a bowl of water outside for washing your hands. I’m not sure the water was ever changed, but it’s the only toilet I’ve used so far in a village in Vanuatu. I liked it.

A lot of what happened during those three days went over my head. Part pageantry, part carnival, part deadly serious communion with the ancestor spirits, part pounding of broad feet on dirt and warlike chanting (how would it have felt to be waiting in the pot, knowing you were dinner once the singing was over?), part a demonstration of virility, part monkey business. The men dominated the dance floor, their brute energy and vivacity of song and laughter completely overshadowing the tedious shuffle of the women dancers (sorry girls, the grass skirts are attractive, but someone’s got to get you a better choreographer). We saw magic performed (the weight of a child supported by fleshy leaves which we saw piled one on top of the other, and “glued” by a man’s spit – huh?), we watched men kneeling in the sand to create beautiful geometric designs and other men playing melodies on bamboo “flutes” with only two finger holes, we watched the sport of throwing coconuts and fruit at the “monkey man” on his jungle platform, and finally, the Rom dance.

What was it all about?  With only a brief introduction to each “item” (given in both French and English by the MC Norbert, whose picture opens this post – he’s the principal of the local Catholic mission school), I found it best to abandon understanding. If you can do that at the Adelaide Festival for a Japanese noh play or a Peter Brooks theatrical marathon, why not in the rainforest where, as my neighbour on the front bench whispered to me, “I’m having to pinch myself to remember that this isn’t National Geographic.” I gave myself over to the pounding and whirling of bodies and voices, to the building momentum of the chants, to my own body’s sweat and dirt, to the inevitability of rain and to the wonder of being in place so strange, so far from what I know. And I played the flute, and I danced. Why not?

Putting Didier aside (and frankly, I wished him aside on that second day, but the dancers themselves drew him into their midst), this was an exhibition match, put on for commercial gain as well as… all the familiar reasons for keeping culture alive. No-one was getting an anthropological treatise out of it except the earnest young Frenchman who has been living with the village for four months, and will do the same again next year. He will return to the Sorbonne with his immersion experience, and document what’s left of kastom life and be much the wiser than I am, but never the right colour to blend in with the dance either.

The French anthropologist insists, when we talk, that the spectators are an essential part of what we are experiencing here. Without us, the paying audience, there would be no reason to for the villagers to strip down to their nambas, to rehearse their dance steps. Money is an important incentive. Custom dances and rituals were an integral part of the society, but they aren’t now. The Rom dance, which was the climax of the festival, belongs to Ambrym’s tradition of sorcery and magic. The missionaries came to convert the heathen, and they succeeded. The old ways are museum pieces now. The young men participate in the Rom dance but they also take photos with their mobile phones, and they spend six months a year fruit picking in New Zealand to bring home money to raise their status by building a concrete block house. Besides, you can’t believe in sorcerers and in the Christian message, can you? That doesn’t mean that all kastom (tradition) is dead. It isn’t. Most especially, pigs are still the currency which men in Vanuatu have to spend to attain a higher rank and pig killing ceremonies are still integral to village life. The most prestigious kind of pig to kill is one with curly tusks like the one on the flag of Vanuatu and on the Tusker beer label – and around this man’s neck. Apparently they’re sold for big money – around 50,000 vatu (more than $500).

It’s more complicated than this, but basically, because pigs are expensive, the more pigs a man kills at one time, the greater the demonstration of his wealth. We were told in Loltong of a chief who had killed 100 pigs at once. It was the brother of chief Richard’s wife, a marvelous old woman who came across as more than her husband’s equal. I asked her if it was true about her brother and she snorted. Yes, but it was quite unnecessary for him to do that, she said. In other words, what a show off. She also had killed three pigs. Some women, she explained, are permitted to gain a rank.

Here’s a drawing of a pig-killing ceremony that we came across in Asanvari, on Maewo.

The Back to My Roots festival has included pig-killing every year until this one. There had been complaints from white women last year. So, in deference to the sensibilities of the white women, this year the pig was brought in (see picture below) and ceremonially poked, and then taken offstage to be slaughtered. We heard the pig’s agony, but we did not see it. There were grumblings from some male cruisers who felt they’d been short-changed.

As for the festival’s showpiece, the Rom dance, well, Alex’s pictures tell the story far better than my words can. I can’t even tell you about the origins and meaning of this dance – look it up on Google! I will when I get home. Norbert’s explanation was sketchy, and unsatisfactory. The Rom dance is secret men’s business when it’s done properly, and I don’t know if it still is. It is deeply mixed up with magic and sorcery. I guess we saw an abridged version. The cloaks are made from banana leaves, by the way, and the masks are made by the men who wear them, who pay a lot for the privilege of dancing in them.

Reality check - a dancer steps out of the Rom dance and snaps it on his mobile phone.

Reality check 2: There was no shortage of young men in the namba line-up, but only one of the women dancers had a young and luscious body, and she looked decided uncomfortable out there in her grass skirt. For three days she held her elbows close to her sides to keep a necklace of thick leaves pressed tight against her décolletage. I asked Vanessa, the bright-eyed beauty who works behind the counter at the “bank” (open Wednesday and Friday), why there weren’t more girls who wanted to dance. She looked at me as if I were stupid. No way. They’re too embarrassed. She wouldn’t be seen dead in a grass skirt.

Postscript:

Alex made a friend at the festival, Chief Justin (above). It was a friendship based on the one-way exchange of cigarettes! Justin is the tam tam player in the middle of the Rom dancers. He is a ranked man. He took us on a short cut through the forest and coconut plantations, through to the road, and while he was walking he asked Alex very discreetly if he wanted to buy his Rom mask for 8000 vatu. Now, Kukka is too small to carry a Rom mask, but that wasn’t what stopped me in my tracks. I’d been warned off touching a Rom mask at the conclusion of the second day, when they were brought out for a first viewing. “Taboo,” growled a voice from the bushes. So how could we own one? Justin also asked Alex, again very discreetly, if he wanted to buy his pig tusks, the symbols of his status as a kastom chief.

This is the conundrum of Vanuatu. Money has little intrinsic value in the kastom system. But if people want what the Western world offers in the way of goods and services – including education and communications – they must pay for them for them with money. Justin undoubtedly values his pig tusks and his Rom mask, but he has five children at school and at university. Education is shamefully expensive here, as I’ve mentioned before. Kava root and copra earn enough money for tin roofs, bags of cement, rice and sugar, tea, biscuits and tinned food, LPG, pots pans and batteries and a very basic wardrobe. But everywhere, people want money for school fees. We don’t know if Justin found a buyer for his pig tusks or his Rom mask. We hope not, for our reasons, but then again who are we to deny him a man what needs and wants for his future and his children’s future?