Island time

WARNING: long blog ahead which may cause major delays

The blog lost its plot. I’m sorry about that.  I had good intentions, but couldn’t beat the technical problem of no internet access. The places we’ve been to in this past month, the isolated villages where most people in Vanuatu live, are full of technical problems. Start with no mains electricity and no plumbing. It’s very unusual to see lights on land after dark. Torches, yes, fires, yes, but electric lights, no. The lights are on the water, in the boats. We live in a floating first world capsule. However we don’t have internet access and in a way, that has given us a sharper sense of being in this place. The notion of global connection is difficult to grasp when local connections remain so undeveloped. Transport between the islands costs a lot. People we met envied our ability to go places they had never been to though they were only a day sail away. When they do travel, it’s usually to the capital by one of several inter-island ships. All points lead to Vila. We’re on our way back to Vila ourselves, which is where I’ll be able to post this blog.

I’m writing from Port Sandwich, a benign and protected anchorage on Malakula. It’s Monday 6 September, and people are milling around (the handsome young men in the outrigger below included) waiting for the island hopper Big Sista to come in. There is a small pile of sacks and bags waiting on the wharf which is so rickety that when I walked out on it I thought it was certainly a condemned structure. But no.This is Vanuatu. 

For several days, it’s been blowing 25 knots from the south-east and the seas outside have been horrible. Friends Toby and Kath on the big bullish ship Solstice poked their heads out yesterday, intending to motorsail to Epi, but turned around and came back in. Head winds and big seas are a pain in the butt. It’s a mug’s game, this sailing. The obstinate plug on, but most of us stay put until the odds of getting where you want to get improve. Solstice went out again today and hasn’t come back, but tomorrow’s the day we’ll try to get to Epi, 25 miles to our east. If we fail, we’ll be left with two options – turn back into Port Sandwich, or sail to where we can sail, which is Efate. That means sailing overnight. We haven’t done that for a while. It’s not something we want to do. We’ve grown soft up here in the islands. We like to be tucked into a quiet, safe anchorage at night (in the picture below Kukka is anchored in the lagoon at Loltong, on Pentecost Island, with coral about 50 m off her stern but her anchor dug into sand and 4 m of water under her hull - perfect). 

We could have grown softer though. We could have stayed at Oyster Island, in Peterson Bay, Santo.  Some people do, for weeks on end. I don’t blame them. Peterson Bay is a pretty scary place to get in and out of. It’s tucked in behind reefs, and you go through a couple of very narrow, shallow passes, one of which is covered by only 1.5 m of water at low tide. So you need to time your entry very carefully, and even then the water is so clear that the coral beneath the boat’s hull in the shallowest part (eeek) looks close enough to touch – and that does happen from time to time (say no more, Nada). But once inside, protection from outside weather is rated cyclone proof and the holding is good (which means your anchor doesn’t drag). The lagoon is beautiful, the snorkeling fabulous, and the rainforest on Oyster Island itself easily explored on a well-marked track. It’s easy to settle in there, to make yourself at home.

Suffice to say there’s a small resort on Oyster Island, owned and managed by New Zealanders who make everything easy for yachties. There’s a pontoon to tie your dinghy up to, free wireless internet (hence my last post from there), a bar and restaurant, but best of all, the whole island is owned (i.e. leased by) the resort. It’s an enclave of Western culture and values.

You can wear a bikini (if you so wish) and take a picnic to the beach and not have to explain your actions to anyone. You can walk wherever you want, by yourself, without a local taking you in hand. That’s worth something. It’s an effort, always, to come into a new anchorage and establish relations with the people whose island you are visiting.

What pushed us out after six nights was the arrival of the 25 plus boats of the Island Cruising Association rally from Fiji (you can see how crowded the anchorage became in the picture above), plus the need to get a hurry on if we wanted make the Back to My Roots festival in Ambryn. But there was something else too. I started to miss being in Vanuatu. I was chafing inside this comfortable cocoon. Call me strange (Alex does) but I’m not out here for a holiday. I don’t need a holiday. I like traveling on a boat, even a very small one, like my trusty kayak.

We crossed from the western islands of Vanuatu over to the eastern islands on a beautiful day. Here’s the sunrise we saw as we came through Undine passage from our anchorage in the lee of Aese Island.

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The geography of Vanuatu is pretty simple – think of a Y. Efate and Epi, plus the southern islands (of which Tanna is the best known) form the stem of the Y. Malakula and Espirutu Santo are on the western (or left) arm, and Maewo and Pentecost on the eastern (or right) arm of the Y.  At the join, you find Ambryn. This major problem with this model is that it leaves out Ambae, which sits in the gap between the two arms, directly above the join. I insist on Ambae being there – think of it as an accent, or an umlaut in the Y! 

Ambae is where we met the people of Vanuatu again – in the rain mostly. The island is dominated by a massive mountain peak which is almost always blanketed by cloud. The Lonely Planet Guide (which we consult in conjunction with the Tusker electronic cruising guide) talks of Ambae having cloudforest. What a lovely word – cloudforest. We kept watching Ambae as we traveled down the eastern islands of Maewo and Pentecost. The pictures below are taken from Asanvari, at the southern tip of Maewo, looking towards Ambae.

Lolowai, the administrative centre of Ambae (how grand that sounds, and what expectations it sets up – to be dashed!), wraps around the boats which anchor inside the  encircling arms of the flooded volcanic crater which is its harbour. You pick your tide to cross the bar, the underwater rim of the crater, and follow the leads (two bold beacons on the shore which, when they line up, indicate the safest course). Once inside, you feel safe as houses

We lucked out with food in Lolowai. First up, we caught the weekly market before everything was gone. Underneath the mango tree, we were told, up by the hospital.  Women and children walk in from their villages and sit with their produce underneath the holy mango tree, so called because it’s next to the church. (What caught my eye though was the holy satellite dish, which heralds the arrival of the internet at some time in the not too distant future in Lolowai).

In the picture above, John and Ange from Nada are counting out change for a stalk of green bananas, which we shared between the two boats. Money wasn’t the issue of course – the banana stalk cost 150 vatu, or close enough to $2. It was the quantity which frightened us. Bananas ripen simultaneously and in the humidity of the tropics are banana cake material within three or four days.

There was nothing doing with a 25 kg bag of flour though. I had to take all or nothing. Ange has yet to catch the bread-making bug. But I could see the end of my flour supplies so when we found a shop in Lolowai selling 25 kg bags of strong baker’s flour, it was man up or risk a bread shortage. For Alex, the latter is unthinkable (remember the gulag). .

Provisioning is one thing, but what we didn’t expect to find in Lolowai was a restaurant! Ed and Beth, a middle-aged couple from Kentucky who are in Lolowai as  Peace Corps volunteers, told us about Celia’s “restaurant”. It wasn’t signposted so we found it by chance when we were sheltering from a downpour. There was only one dish on the menu - rice and something made with beef (island food), but the Tusker beer was cold. Oddly enough, I was more excited by the homely meal this charming young woman offered us, than by the choices in the restaurant on Oyster Island, good though its food is.

As we left the restaurant, Celia asked us if there was anything we needed on the boat. She said she’d send her son out with what she could find. Well after dark, Stephen and his cousin Donny paddled out with green peppers and spring onions, ginger, pawpaw and marrow. Both boys spoke excellent English. Stephen was at the Anglican mission school St Patricks, over the hill, which Donny had been too. High school fees are expensive, and many families cannot afford to keep their children at school beyond primary level. Somehow, having met Celia, it didn’t surprise us that she thought it was important that Stephen finish school. But then what? That’s a question parents ask themselves a lot, we discovered.

Donny works at the hospital in Lolowai as a leprosy and TB technician. There’s no doctor at the hospital, and Donny says there’s actually not much leprosy in Vanuatu. In fact, there’s probably more need for sex education than leprosy treatment. Beth is tackling the former. Women were coming to Celia wanting to know how their bodies worked - can’t you run some workshops, she asked Beth. Beth is doing her best, but she’s up against superstition as well as ignorance. The latest miracle cure doing the rounds in Ambae was a shocker even by Vanuatu standards. It involved a panty liner, soaked in water. The blue line on the panty liner leaked dye. This blue water, it is being claimed in the villages, will cure anything. Perhaps it’s reason enough to educate your children just so they know better than to drink panty-liner water.

Most yachts stop at the Asanvari Yacht Club (above) at the southern tip of Maewo. Asanvari is a tidy village, with a very pretty white sand beach and a luscious waterfall in which yachties are allowed to do their washing and fill their jerry cans.

Water is abundant on both Maewo. Like Pentecost to the south, it is a skinny island oriented north to south with a steep mountainous spine which snag the rainclouds on their west coasts. Just because there’s water, doesn’t mean the plumbing works. Joke. Chief Nelson  (pictured below, on guitar) and his son Nixon, who run the yacht club, are smooth operators. They know how to welcome yachties too – in a different way from the Oyster Island crowd. Chief Nelson asked Alex to if he could take a look at the toilet in the yacht club. We’d eaten at the yacht club the night before, and it never occurred to me that there might be a flush toilet on the premises. That would have been a first. Alex is always on for a bit of DIY, but his verdict was, this toilet needs a plumber. Chief Nelson can only hope that a yachtie plumber passes throught Asanvari, otherwise his toilet will join the many appliances and motors and batteries and buildings in the islands which, when broken, remain broken.

One thing’s for sure, the bloke whose “yacht” was parked at Asanvari when we arrived didn’t get his hands dirty. Here’s the M/V Tribu, out of Genoa, pictured off Kukka’s port sid, and another shot of the owner and his wife heading out on their tender, accompanied by some of their 13 crew members.

Who were they? Without the internet, we had to rely on that old standby, gossip. Nelson told us there were only two passengers on board. He didn’t know the man’s name, but he owned Benetton. Did I know it?. Was the All the colours of the world man combining business and pleasure in Vanuatu, scouting for new campaign locations? I’m guessing, but perhaps the M/V Tribu’s annual fuel budget might fund the eradiction of malaria from Vanuatu.  

Such wealth may pass without comment in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean, but exhibiting it in a poor country like Vanuatu struck me as downright rude. Bad enough that we yachties swing by in our floating caravans, but this small ship, with a luxury car tucked in among the toys in the stern locker,  makes the average cruising yacht look like a rickshaw.

From Maewo it’s only a 10 nautical mile hop down Loltong, in the north of Pentecost. Pentecost is the island famous for land diving (said to be the inspiration for bungy jumping). Myself, I’m more interested in its basket weavers and its washerwomen.

In Loltong, I went to church. The missionaries did their work thoroughly in Vanuatu. The church is well dug in, running schools and fighting the good fight (still) against pagan beliefs. Sunday is a day of rest all over Vanuatu, except in Seventh Day Adventist strongholds, of which there are a surprising number (surprising to me, that is). In north Ambryn, there was the delicious irony of we white folk going one way to the Back to My Roots festival celebrating traditional (pagan) culture and rites, while much of the local population, neatly dressed local families, was walking in the opposite direction to the SDA church.

In Loltong there is a Catholic mission and an Anglican one (the Catholics teach in French, the Anglicans, needless to say, in English). Alex, being a good Catholic boy, saw no need to go to church but I got dressed up in a skirt and long-sleeved top and went ashore to meet the Anglicans. The Anglican church is a cavernous shell of raw concrete, with open rafters, and open windows. A lot of money has been poured into its construction. Like the cathedrals of medieval Europe, God’s house in Loltong is much grander than some inhabited by his little children

The church was empty when John (from Nada) and I arrived for the 8 am service. Another Swedish yacht, Panacea, had anchored in the lagoon at Loltong after we had come in with Nada the previous day, and Agnes and Bertil made up our group of four conspicuous visitors. A barefoot deacon in a snow-white robe in the Franciscan style, tied around the waist with a rope, knelt in the shadows to one side of the altar. We looked at each other anxiously. Just us and him? Please God, no.

By 8.45 am, the church was sufficiently full for the deacon to begin (though people kept arriving right through the service). A ragtag bunch of young men in baggy shorts and teeshirts and girls in island dresses, some carrying a baby on the hip, sat in the first three pews on the opposite side from us. The pews were low and backless, rough sawn wooden benches balanced on logs. Woven coconut fronds provided comfort against the raw concrete floor for those who knelt (I didn’t see anyone kneel).

The deacon spoke a language I didn’t understand, but I knew exactly what he was saying. The Anglican liturgy is lodged way back in my brain. I recognized the point in the service at which the youngsters over the way stood up. Sometimes a church choir will sing the responses, or a prayer. From these most unlikely of choristers came a stupendous sound, unaccompanied two-part harmony in perfect time and tune. It was a bit like the moment when an organ blasts into the vaulted upper reaches of a cathedral. It winds you. John said afterwards that he felt a chill run down his spine. The power and the depth in their voices was amazing.

Now, I’m sure a choirmaster would have quibbles – not much modulation (all loud), and probably too much bass. But hey, remember where we were. Not Christ Church, Cambridge, but Loltong, population 300.

 

Music must be in the air in Loltong. The next day, Agnes and Bertil and I were walking down the main “street”, when we stopped to talk with a young man with big tattooed biceps. Leonard is a would-be professional boxer who plans to be in Vila in October to challenge the Vanuatu-born champion Kali Jacobus.

There was a in the middle of the road, with no encouragement, the boxer began blowing into his little plastic recorder (with his mobile phone tucked under his arm), and from across the road came the soft singing of Chief Richard, a frail old man but still an important man, rising to the patriotic moment. Leonard was playing the national anthem for us.

I met Anna (above) outside the church that Sunday in Loltong. I recognized her at once for what she is - a city girl. Anna is smart, in the way we understand smart –  alert, articulate, thoughtful, curious. She worked for a long time for the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Vanuatu, then became assistant registrar. It’s eight years since she moved to her husband’s village on Pentecost. Her friends in Vila don’t understand what she’s doing still living in Loltong, she tells me. Quite aside from her city ways, she’s an outsider here. Her people are from Ambae, the island under the cloud. Her late father refused to attend her wedding. He was an inter-island ship captain and he didn’t like Pentecost men and they way they treated women. I guess he was upset to see his beautiful bright daughter throwing her life away, I suggested. “Something like that,” she replied. .

Anna’s husband Tony works in politics. He’s an advisor, or he was until the prime minister he worked for got thrown out. So now he’s unemployed. He lives in Vila, picking up bits and pieces of work – Vila is a tough town, people say. Their eldest daughter lives in Vila with him, going to school, and she has their two younger daughters with her in Loltong.

It’s her choice, she says. Tony lets her make her own decisions. She likes living in Loltong. It may not look like it, but it’s a life of luxury here, she says. In Vila, as she and many others tell us, you need money for everything from the time you get up in the morning until you go to bed at night. In the islands, most of what’s necessary for living comes into your hands a different way. Tony would like her to come back to Vila, and perhaps she will. She’ll get a job again and spend everything she earns on supporting the relatives who come to stay. Sound familiar? She’d rather work like the villagers in the gardens high up in the steep mountains behind the village. She grows the food which feeds the family. But she has her other work, call it her missionary work. There are always women at her door, she tells us, asking her the things they cannot ask their husbands who do not treat them the way Anna’s husband treats her. They watch her, and they see different possibilities. From small things, bigger things grow – or something like that. You have to admire her tenacity. Do you have enough books? I ask. She says she’s read everything she has. I bring her in a thriller and a copy of Vanity Fair, and Nada bring her books too.

We talked a lot to Anna, under the giant banyan tree on the beach, near the leads which Alex and John fixed (see picture below).  It was hard to let her go. It was also hard not to think that she has done her time in the village, and that she should considering heading back to Vila and taking on a political role herself. Anna Nari for Prime Minister, we say!

Now, if Anna, who is already in her mid 30s, doesn’t become Prime Minister, we’ve found a younger candidate. We set off from Loltong hoping to make it to an anchorage called Waterfall further south, but we left late, and the wind was blowing hard in our faces (on the nose) and the current was running against us and….well, these conditions get very frustrating. We were motoring, which was worse. I have limited tolerance for motoring, although of course a motor is a very useful thing to have on a sailing vessel. So at 1430 when we were looking at another two hours of motoring to get to Waterfall, we called it quits and ducked into Bwatnapvi which offered the same degree of shelter from the SE wind. Actually, this was a much better anchorage than we had expected, and when the roll subsided in the early evening we were snug.

By then I’d met my junior prime ministerial companion, Jeneli. I’d hoped to sneak in for a quiet paddle up the river, but such a thing is not possible in Vanuatu – or rarely. There is always someone who sees you, and wants you to make yourself known. Fair enough. A girl frantically beckoned me to come around to the beach and “sign the visitors book”. First I’d ever heard of such a practice, but off I went, following Jeneli (below) home to meet her mother and her brother Frederick. They invited me and Alex for breakfast the next morning at 7.30 am. Panacea were already invited.

The arrangement was that we bring in what we would normally eat for breakfast, and share their breakfast table. Bertil and Agnes brought northern European fare (muesli, ham, cheese, juice) and I baked date scones. We took in a flask of filtered coffee too. We arrived to a beautiful spread of platters of pancakes, fried bananas, fresh bread rolls, and flowers. Two brothers from the Melanesian mission, very serious young men, joined us. Frederick and Jeneli and the brothers welcomed us in song. Welcome, welcome to Vanuatu. We felt so so welcome. We ate, we danced (well, I danced – so early, but there was a woven dancing skirt which had to be bought, this being Pentecost and Jenali’s grandmother being a very fine weaver) and we drank hot water infused with lemon leaves, then the coffee. We admired the baby turtles which Jeneli keeps in a bowl. The village protects turtles. Then we followed her to the mission (school and church) and met a priest, who was grateful for our conversation. Jeneli, self-appointed greeter of visitors, is a clever girl, he says. Her grandfather, who was a chief, died a month ago. Her mother, who is a teacher, works on Santo. We gave Jeneli pencils and an exercise book but what I really wanted was to give her the life she deserves. 

After breakfast, we sailed away. We’re always sailing away.  We had beautiful wind, and Kukka, as she always does when she’s given her head, sped away. Unfortunately, on the way to Ambryn, a bolt escaped from the pole which supports the wind generator and the whole heavy contraption tipped wildly – and Alex lunged for it, quite understandably. By the time it was lashed to the pushpit (the railings on nthe stern), he could have quite happily been lashed there too. He’d twisted his back, and those of you who know Alex know his back, and twisting is not a good thing.