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? 

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.