background

In a successful bid to escape yet another Sydney winter, my good lady wife, Fran and I again travelled to the island of Éfaté in the republic of Vanuatu.
It was my second visit to Port Vila, and Fran's fourth - (she had been before and soon after the apocalyptic Severe Tropical Cyclone Pam).
However, never before had we both ventured outside Vila, so this time it was different.
You can't keep an old journalist down, so in the late evenings, I jotted down with an old fashioned pencil in a battered notebook some observations.
The following is an account of some of the things I saw and heard, and what I was told and shown.

Ian Craven, Sydney, 31 August, 2017.

children's day

It was Monday morning.
It was a mild and sunny day, picture postcard perfect.
The stage was set.
All the colours of the rainbow in strings of helium balloons and a handwritten banner "Happy Children's Day!"
We had stumbled into a natural ampitheatre below the Vanuatu National Museum in Port Vila and there were thousands of children and families in for the entertainment.
Arrayed around the field in front of the stage was a range of marquees, NGO's mainly, but water and food tents too, and up on the stage there were the dignitaries, including the Prime Minister, in suits and ties, while the funny ground announcer talked constantly over the music on the Tannoy in Bislama*.
I had no idea what he was saying, but the word pikinini stood out.
There is no Father's Day or Mother's Day in Vanuatu, but Children's Day has been a public holiday for yonks; decades.
That one day of the year that the young folk rule.
And they take the younger generation seriously.
On Children's Day, the front page scoop on the Vanuatu Daily Post was the huge news of free secondary education for all, from years 7 to 9.
Primary education is already free, paid for by Australian and New Zealand aid money, but now the Vanuatu Govt. had decided it could afford to pay for that, with the aid money to now fund junior high schools.
Senior high school and "college" still costs, as does attending the University of the South Pacific [the Vila campus offers arts and law]; if you want to do medicine you go to Fiji, while engineering and agriculture are offered out of New Caledonia, etc etc.
A good education for your children is highly prized.
There seems to be an inordinate number of lawyer's offices in Vila, but I digress.
A three-legged dog, and her mate, appeared at the top of the hill.
They sauntered into the bubbling crowd, but the four-legged one took off - couldn't hack it - too many people.
The hound with the missing left front leg went in and out of little groups sitting on the grass without being molested, and then sat patiently at the back of a tent in the forlorn hope of some food scraps.
The dog eventually fell asleep.
Then a bus rolls up.
It's the main entertainment - The Vanuatu Police Brass Band!
I was thinking they would march up and down playing martial music, but no, these dudes in police uniforms were a wild and wacky bunch.
The ground announcer asked for the area in front of the stage to be cleared, and they were on.
This band was a marching swing band - swing for the kiddies - an outfit that's got all the tunes and all the moves, dancing in and out of each other in choreographed style with those horns swaying up and down and all around, while out the back the policeman on the tuba was acting the goat, as the percussion guys went wild with the kit.
When the VPBB started the Macarena, the crowd went off its collective tits.
Hundreds of kids rushed forward to join in the swing, "Hey! Macarena!", all the time laughing and screaming.
Wild scenes at 10:30 am; we'd missed the parade the children did down Vila's main drag earlier in the morning.
After lunch, we joined the mass of folk enjoying themselves on the brand new waterfront, which is now about two-thirds built into a promenade and park.
Everyone seemed to marvel at the curved railing made of high grade marine stainless steel that tilts inwards at a 45 degree angle, which makes it comfortable to glide along with one hand and use your walking stick with the other.
Pause, rest your elbows on the rail and realise, for the first time, that the whole harbour sea wall in Vila was more or less destroyed in Cyclone Pam, and two years later, the rebuilding of it is still going on.
The old corrugated iron buildings that once used to stand there were blown clean away.
When it is finished, it may been a mile or so long, and all along the way are timber covered concrete blocks firmly bolted into the promenade, designed for several people to sit on at the same time, and as you do, looking out on the harbour with the "exclusive" Iririki island nearby, and parked million dollar yachts and motor launches that might have dropped anchor for a few days, you see behind them the local fishing trawlers and tugboats tied up at moorings and a rusty old hulk of a thing that Fran probably correctly identified as a harbour dredger.
But nothing seemed incongruous in this colourful crowd of families with parents proudly showing off their tribes of children of all ages, a constant stream of people; just strolling along nonchalantly and people watching.
I was drawn to the languid Melanesian eyes; some look distant, remote, others look deep with a kaleidoscope of colours, but their use of the eyebrows and eyelashes generally displays the importance of a look of dignity, which I first mistook as a sign of shyness.
Nobody was in any great hurry to do anything.
Rushing might as well be banned in this country - they know all about doing things slowly, with some method and plan.
The playground was wild with action as the children went crazy on the equipment, which included one of those rings of steel with thick spokes that was at a slight slope on a pivot, so even the smallest child could push loads of other kids perched on the ring around in circles - around and around and around we go - until they all became dizzy and fell off.
Then a new lot of kids jumped on and did the same thing.
It was a reminder of my childhood, which is more than half a century ago now, and none of it and I mean none of it would have had any hope of passing any Australian OH&S test of any sort, oh no siree, but the littlies just flew into the sandy dust, picked themselves up, and dusted themselves off, all the time shrieking with hysterical laughter.
There were no adults involved, or anywhere near it for that matter, but there was a crowd of spectators who were absolutely cacking themselves.
The laughter was infectious right to the end of the day.
ni-Vanuatu** do not mind a public holiday, and there are plenty of them.
Children's Day [always 24 July) fell on the Monday after we arrived, and the on day after we left Vanuatu, we missed what would have been the grand celebrations which were being advertised all over town to mark the 37th Independence Day - the biggest day of the year by far - which fell on a Sunday this year, with the day after off - a Monday public holiday, presumably just for recovery.
Two long weekends in a row.
Sweet as a nut.

black mud magic

Being of the ageing aching variety, me and Fran know full well the benefits of the miracle of hot mineral springs around the world.
Fran had a hip replacement before she was fifty and waddles like a penguin, and me?...well, as everyone knows, my left ankle has been FFL'd [Fucked For Life] since I busted it to bits in a stupid accident 30 years now, my left knee is a goner, bone on bone, while both feet are riddled with psoriasatic arthritis, just for a start off, blah, blah, blah.
We moan, we creak, we shuffle along wherever we go, so a chance at a "miracle cure" never goes begging, and we seek them out wherever we go.
And we have been in some good ones too over the years, ranging from Kerosene Creek on the North Island of New Zealand [local hazard - do not put your head underwater otherwise the amoeba will come in through your ears and eyes and eat your brain out], to the famous hot springs at Pai, in north-western Thailand, way up there through the mountains close to the border with Burma.
Through some rudimentary searching for a half-way decent topographical map of the Island of Éfaté, I noticed that there appeared to be one hot spring suitable for bathing in.
But where was it?
Was it in the village of Baofatu, the village of Takara, the village of Narisu, or the village Onesua -- no two maps seemed to agree.
But in any case it was somewhere up there on the north-west of the island; about 70 kilometres and a 45 minute to one hour drive from Vila.
How to get there?
It was a very good thing we decided that local knowledge was the key to this, so we hired two charming and idiosyncratic ni-Vanuatu men, Glenn and Sonny, to drive us around the island to show us some of their favourite haunts at a leisurely all-day pace with the promise of the hot springs thrown in.
They had a rickety old six-seater mini-van with balding tyres, rusting bits of panel work, and a sliding door that needed to be very firmly slammed shut.
It would not have passed any road-worthiness test anywhere in Australia, not by a long shot, but Sonny was expert driver -- going slowly and carefully; he was a master at avoiding some of the more monstrous potholes.
We took off.
The 'ring-road' around Éfaté used to be known as the 'American road' as it was US troops who put in the graders to carve out a track big enough to take military vehicles in 1943, and it was macadamised shortly thereafter.
But it's now known as the 'New Zealand road', because it was repaired and rebuilt by NZ army engineers after being totally wrecked in Cyclone Pam, to high standards and even in some places around bends there were warning signs to slow down, and a dashed line in the middle of the road.
The road is crucial to the whole of Éfaté.
The New Zealand Govt. paid for it with foreign aid money, for which the ni-Vanuatu are so grateful that they have informally re-named the road in honour of the Kiwi's.
I digress.
After the beautiful and spectacular Havannah Harbour, we drove further north past a disused rusting old copra factory and miles and miles of cyclone devastated coconut palm plantations, before reaching the top of the island.
Suddenly we were off the bitumen, as we turned down an un-signposted sandy track with a primal aroma, and smoke.
"See there? Smoke.", said Glenn, "Spontaneous grass fire. In some places too hot. You can drive a stake one metre into the ground, pull it up, and steam comes out".
Now yr talking!
The mini-bus pulled up to a gate behind what looked like a cattle grid and there was a small white tin sign on it, hand painted in black enamel: HOLY HOT WATER.
Sonny opened the gate, but there was no village to be seen.
You would never have been able to find the place on your own.
There was a small hut with some benches, and a narrow channel where the hot spring had been diverted into two shallow concrete bowls, entirely circular and probably waist deep in the middle, and they couldn't have held more than half a dozen people.
There was a mild one to start; no hesitation, stripped off to my boardies, and in.
The exact temperature of a nice fresh warm bath, but with a distinct smell of sulphur and other volcanic chemicals and there were tiny little heat tolerant bright green aquatic plants sticking to the sides.
The legs, in particular, went "ooohhh aaaahhhh".
Then it was a hobble past an oblong hot pool full of pebbles to an area thick with rich volcanic jet-black mud.
Black as the Ace of Spades it was, sandy - smooth, but gritty as well...and if you ask nicely enough, the traditional owner will send out one his girls - in this case Natalie - to show you the intricate process of mud-bathing.
I couldn't get in the thing quick enough, but was told no, slow down, take it easy, you have time, know yr limits and relax.
Assisted I was by Sonny and Natalie - one holding each shoulder - as I gingerly navigated my way to the deepest part of the mud with my cane.
You stand shin deep in the mud, that stank to high heaven; the stench of seething minerals, and starting from the knees up you cover your entire body with a thick layer - without asking, someone else will do your back for you.
Then you just perch there, like a shag on a rock, for about five minutes to let the stinking dark matter sink in, osmosis-style.
There was much hootin' from the locals "look at you! look at you! you not white, you black like us!".
Then came the best bit as I was again helped to the edge of a drainage channel at the end of the pebble pool, which runs the spring water out to sea, which was only a hundred yards or so away, but obscured by low sand hills.
There, with a five litre plastic bucket, you dip into the warm water of the channel and repeatedly pour it over yourself to wash the black mud off [I didn't do a very good job - it was still coming out of my arse-crack and boardies days later].
Bucket, splash, bucket, splash, bucket...
Deeply satisfying.
Then for some entirely unknown reason, I decided to do a comedy act, and dragged myself along by the arse in the pebble pool to the other end - I was acting the goat and in retrospect really must have looked like some kind of complete idiot gimp.
Then we we were treated to the pièce de résistance.
The really hot pool.
And I mean really HOT, fookin' hot, hot as a freshly poured cup of coffee.
There were no thermometers to be seen, and the locals don't talk in degrees.
But they said that the hotness was hotter than usual, and it had something to do with the time of the year and the especially dry weather.
It was so hot you could only sit in it up to you hips for a few minutes at a time - get out and let the tingling, prickling sensation in the legs fade a bit - then back in again for a few minutes - repeat - repeat - complete immersion would have been taking it way too far.
Then it was time to get going in the mini-bus, so we toweled off, and the skin felt as if it was glowing like kryptonite and the aches and pains in the joints were considerably eased and soothed.
That sense of bodily well-being you only get from highly mineralised spring water...well, it lasted all day.
The whole exercise took about 45 minutes, and both of us were helped every inch of the way to negotiate the pools and mud bath by ni-Vanuatu - willing to lend a shoulder, helping you to stand, and making very very sure you didn't slip.
Seeing the sign on the gate, and always looking to take the once-and-for-all lifetime cure for my crippledom, I was hoping that this would be my Road to Damascus experience on the way to Lourdes.
But, sadly, no.
However, it is, without doubt, the best 500vt*** you can spend on Éfaté.

state, politics & church bells

One thing you learn very quickly from talking to and watching ni-Vanuatu is that they are intensely proud of their Independence from 70 odd years of the Condominium of the New Hebrides and the shit-fighting between the British and French back in 1980, after the brief "Coconut War", which was sorted out by the PNG Army of all people [Vanuatu does not maintain a standing army, or navy, for that matter] as well as the diversity of kastom throughout the 67 inhabited islands in this stupendous archipelago.
They also take their politics very seriously.
The President of Vanuatu, the Rev. Baldwin Jacobsen Lonsdale suddenly died, on June 17, just on a month before we were due to arrive in Port Vila.
On the day of his State Funeral, someone walked into Fran's inner-suburban Sydney office and said to her "the flags on the Harbour Bridge are at half mast, so somebody important must have died".
Fran, being in the know, surprised that person by saying "yes, it was the President of Vanuatu".
Dropped off the twig, he did, at age 68; massive heart attack, while he was minding his own business at the modest President's Residence [there aint no executive mansions or palaces for President's, they're through with that shit] and was rushed to Port Vila Central Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
It was a serious shock to the nation, even though the President has few powers in a mainly ceremonial position.
The Rev. Baldwin was widely admired as a stabilizing figure amid the political turmoil of the "corruption crisis" of 2015, when the deputy Prime Minister and 13 other MP's were charged with bribery after being found with their snouts in the trough to the tune of 35 million vatu.
They were duly tried and convicted; the Deputy PM got four years in the Port Vila jailhouse, while the others got between two and three years behind bars, which they are all mainly currently still serving.
There aint no parole for good behavior for these dudes.
[One day we were on a bus that drove past the jailhouse and the driver said "that's the jail there, what's known here as the Government Guest House. Free accommodation, free meals, free wifi. It's fully booked!" Boom-boom!]
The whole nation shut down for President Baldwin's funeral procession [on a specially gazetted public holiday] and it was was, by all reports, a grand affair, starting off at dawn at 6:30 with his coffin placed on an intricately decorated out-rigger barge which went all around Port Vila harbour, then he went to the Parliament Building to lie-in-state in a closed coffin, so folk could walk by and pay their respects, before he was taken to the Anglican cathedral for the State Funeral, which didn't finish until well after 6pm.
A ten day mourning period was declared, and it took several days for the arrangements to be made for his body to be transported for burial back to his home island of Moto Lavu in the Torba province, which is way way way north of Éfaté, up there in the Banks Islands, which are just about as isolated as you can get on the face of this earth.
From time to time, at appropriate moments, I mentioned "I heard that your President recently died?".
That was always met with a solemn bow of the head and down cast eyes and words to the effect of "yes, he was a very good man, but he's dead now" or in Bislama "Presiden i gud mista, i naoia blong Jesus blong long taem"
The death created a minor constitutional crisis as there was no provision in the Vanuatu constitution for a President - who is elected for a five year term - dying in office.
But, the Parliament met and quickly passed a law which allowed for the Electoral College to meet.
The choice of President is left up to the Electoral College which is made up of all 54 MP's in the unicameral parliament, plus the Council of Chiefs - an influential advisory body made of the major "big men" from the provinces.
21 candidates for President were nominated, and by some mysterious process of "validation" in smoke-filled back rooms, the final list was whittled down to 12.
The Electoral College met on the Monday after the President's funeral [ceremonial gifts to Moto Lavu, the drinking of kava, and other kastom arrangements had to be made to allow for it to happen during the official mourning period].
It requires an absolute majority of the College to elect the new President.
It was expected to be quickly decided that day, but no, nothing ever happens in a hurry in Vanuatu; the College met day after day from 9 to 5, and it wasn't until after the "seventh or eighth ballot", that on the fourth day, the Thursday afternoon of 6th July, Pastor Moses Obed Tallis, 63, of the island of Ambrym, was announced as the new President.
Phew.
According to the online versions of the newspapers, it was like waiting at the Vatican looking for the tell-tale puff of smoke, but in this case it was running the flag up the flagpole.
There was no grand inauguration.
There was a kava ceremony, Pastor Tallis signed the papers and took the oath of office, and he was in.
Down to business, son.
Vanuatu is currently ruled by an eleven-party coalition, led by Prime Minister Charlot Salwai, a French speaking accountant ni-Vanuatu from Pentecost.
You read right there -- eleven parties!.
For that reason alone the country must be unique among the world's democracies.
They certainly have negotiation and compromise down to a very fine art, as it all seems to work well - to a point.
Apart from the vote, the Miracle of Democracy in Vanuatu must also accommodate the extraordinary variety of kastom, difficult regional differences, and the absolute identification of people with their home island.
And it's also handy to have an accountant running the shop when you are openly advertising yourself as a tax haven.
That's not going to change in a hurry, but no one is now happy with blatant corruption we were told, even though it undoubtedly still goes on.
The day after we arrived in Vila we had a hankering for a lunch of the world-class Santo steak, so we jumped on a bus and asked the driver to take us to the best steakhouse in town - The Stonegrill.
He was wearing a Unity Party of Vanuatu t-shirt.
Bus drivers are a font of wisdom and information, they don't mind expressing their views and - there reportedly are ten thousand of them in Port Vila [approx pop. 65,000] - all driving six or eight seat mini-vans with sliding doors in various states of disrepair.
There are so many mini-buses, that there are no bus stops or set routes or sections.
It's very much laissez-faire.
Step onto the kerb anywhere in town [watch out! they drive on the right hand side of the road), and at least one bus will pass by every 30 seconds, pick you up as well as other passengers and take you to anywhere else in town you want to go, dropping off and picking up others on the way - it may be a circuitous route - but no one is in a rush - for a flat fare of 150vt.
In the main drag in the morning and afternoon there is a traffic jam, made up almost entirely of mini-buses.
Everybody goes by bus.
There are a few taxis and some private cars - mostly battered old utes with heaps of people and produce in the back and lots and lots of trucks - but no motorcycles at all [apart from the one Harley-Davidson we saw, roaring along the back streets!], although dune buggy style vehicles are seemingly the preferred conveyance of the young and free.
There are a some bicycles in the countryside, mainly kids bikes, but none in town.
[The sight of a man wheeling his bicycle up the main road out of the bush in the countryside with a machete in one hand and a guitar slung over his other shoulder and his young dog trotting behind him surprised me, but then the smile on his face said it all].
Seat belts are yet to catch on.
Vila is a small genuine third world city, and it's interesting to learn that hardly anyone comes from there - everybody in Vila is there for the work or to buy or sell, and are from someplace else, their home island, and the "ex-pats" of course, who all either work for the Govt. or NGO's, or are running away from some thing or someone.
The French colonial influence is still seen, the second or third generation of mixed race ni-Vanuatu/Vietnamese operate the Au Bon Marche, the biggest supermarket and one stop shop in town, and apparently own all the petrol stations.
The Vietnamese were brought in by the French colonials from Indo-China as cheap or indentured labour, and never left.
Many of the street names in Vila are still French, such as "Rue Captain Cook", "Blvd Charles de Gaulle" and "Ave Winston Churchill".
There are a surprising number of French tourists, who of course think they still own the place.
It was very tempting to tell the rude bastards "you only ever 'owned' half the joint anyway, and now you don't!"
But would they listen?
I didn't even try.
I've been to Nouvelle-Calédonie, where oppressive French colonialism still survives.
I souvenired a "Kanaky" baseball cap, in solidarity with the original inhabitants and anti-imperialists.
That said, I did enjoy a first class bouillabaisse one night, chock full of local fruits of the sea, fresh tomatoes and buttery saffron juices.
A crayfish claw poking out of it was quite surreal on kava.
The Poms are nowhere to be seen, and the few Australian tourists are generally just loud and/or pissed, but largely harmless.
On our second night in town we had just sat down to dinner when an elderly white couple slurring in an Australian accent as they talked to thin air staggered by about 7:30 pm, with the woman struggling to stand up, let alone walk, and leaning on her man's shoulder did neither of them no good.
What a scene; old folk, absolutely legless they were, pissed as parrots, but it begged the question "what have they been doing all day?"
Everyone in Vila is well dressed; no one is in rags, and there are no beggars or touts, but there is poverty and a lot of hard scrabble going on for a vatu.
The cost of living with consumer goods is surprisingly high, there is a 12.5% GST, but no income tax.
But, I guess everything in bottles and cans and all the nuts and bolts are imported in an island nation.
The Unity Party Man was not backward in coming forward with his politics as we went past the brand new Chinese Embassy on the Pango Point Rd in the No.2 District [so new, it was officially opened by the new Vanuatu President while we were there].
Looking at this large, heavily fortified, brutalist piece of Maoist architecture with the unmistakable Chinese red flag fluttering from a big flagpole towering from the point of the roof, I innocently asked "is that the Chinese Embassy?"
"Oh yes", replied the Unity Party man "new embassy. Chinese very bad."
Surprised, I asked why.
"Chinese come here and try to take over. They try to line politicians pockets and build things for Chinese people. No good. You come from Australia [he picked the accent]. Australian and New Zealand foreign aid very good. Even you might not know this, Australian taxpayers don't know this, but it is your money, Australian and New Zealand money that pays for schools and hospitals and free education for the young people. The Chinese money? No, no, no. Only for them. I am worried."
Another day, we drove past the new Parliament House in Vila [built with Chinese "aid" money after the original was irreparably damaged during Cyclone Pam].
I asked the bus driver in my Australian accent what the building was, as it had no sign on it, and he took great pride in telling me "there is the Parliament Building. There are 54 Members of the Parliament in there, all elected from across all the islands, and we have, how do you say? the west-minister style of system here, so we have a Prime Minister just like you, and we are still a member of the Commonwealth, but unlike you - who have a Governor-General - we have a President!!" [smug laugh].
I thought - thanks for rubbing in our ridiculous Constitutional arrangements, mate.
Very clever.
On the hill above the Parliament is the most striking new building in Vila, a whopping great Conference and Convention Centre [built with Chinese 'aid' money, ostensibly to host the next CHOGM, which now won't happen there anyway], which for all the world looks like a gigantic funnel from a cruise ship.
Passenger cruise ships -- aka floating gin palaces -- holding more than two thousand tourists berth in the harbour, three or four of them every month for a single day, making "town" unbearable as the place is over-run with half-pissed foreigners ridiculously dressed in shorts and Hawaiian shirts; automatically increasing the price of everything by at least 200% - and why not? - these cruising people are the lifeblood of foreign exchange.
When a ship comes in, the calculators come out, and shops are more than happy to accept Australian dollars, NZ money, greenbacks -- anything you like - and your change will come in vatu.
We could have seen a cruise ship come into the harbour around the Pango point on the Wednesday from our vantage point but we didn't wake up early enough, and of course we just laid low and barely moved all day - we were told it was simply not worth going into "town" or to go anywhere that was vaguely like a tourist attraction on "dae blong bote".
Almost next door to the Chinese funnel, on the block down the hill, is the dowdy, crumbling Australian Embassy.
Another bus driver we met again picked our accent and said that he worked for three months a year as a seasonal worker on fruit and vegetable farms or the cane fields of Queensland to make enough money to send back to his home village on the island of Epi, and he could have stayed.
"My boss he say to me 'oh, why don't you stay, everyone else does'", but he went on to explain that he didn't want to be "blacklisted" and deported as an illegal immigrant so he could never go back again, could not cope with staying in Australia full-time anyway, and "I want to do right thing, for my people, for me".
I asked him if the pay was any good.
"It's OK. Enough"
He then surprised me by saying "Did you know there are about five thousand ni-Vanuatu who are living illegally in Melbourne alone?"
Seems like "black birding" never finished.
Air Vanuatu now has a snappy new advertising slogan "Wake Up in Paradise", and you certainly do when you arrive on the only direct flight from Sydney to Port Vila at 11:30 on a Saturday night.
The next morning we were awoken by the sound of church bells ringing; something we've not experienced on a Sunday morning since spending a month touring the north-west of France three years ago.
Vanuatu is deeply deeply Christian and morally conservative, after the missionaries did an outstanding job battling "hostile natives" against all the odds, again and again, decade after decade, on a Mission from God to instill The Word of The Lord.
They got ahead of themselves at times, but eventually won the day.
[Stories say that down on the extremely remote southern most island of Aneiyteum [Antom], there are the ruins of a stone Church of England cathedral, now overgrown with jungle, big enough to hold a thousand people].
Most people are Presbyterian, but there is every kind of Christian denomination known to man in the country - you see churches everywhere you go - the Church of England, Roman Catholic, Assemblies of God, The Church of Latter Day Saints, Seventh Day Adventists, the Neil Thomas Ministry (?!), Church of Christ, Uniting Church, Apostolic Church, Baptists, Pentecostals and the list goes on and on...the only people who seem to be missing are the Quakers.
Only 1% of the population declare that they have no religion.
Among just some of the animistic customary beliefs, the strange John Frum Cargo Cult still has plenty of adherents on the island of Tanna it seems, as does the really crazy secret society, The Prince Phillip Movement.
But it is Protestant Christianity that rings loud and clear.
Nothing ever happens on a Sunday, except church, no doubt about it.
Still a genuine "day of rest".
[Sales of take-away alcohol stop at midday on Saturday and do not resume until 11am on Monday, the regulations being strictly enforced].
I suppose that's why virtually every President or Prime Minister of Vanuatu has the prefix of "Rev" or "Pastor" before their names, and the national hero of Independence, the first Prime Minister who had the job for the first ten years, was of course, Father Sir Walter Lini.
I realised I'm old enough to actually remember the bloke well, even though he's been dead 18 years now.
According to the little history book - not books, there is only one† - underneath all this lies a deep and complex kastom system where people earn their place in society through honorable and charitable works...the chiefs distributing their wealth...with more than a few hog feasts thrown in for good measure, as "big men" attain further "bigness" through a series of well defined "grades" of greatness.
Whatever you think of Christianity, the mantra of Peace and Goodwill to all man has been well and truly embraced, and is clearly in operation every day of the year, wherever you go.
Everyone is unfailingly polite, with unique smiles, and are always concerned that you are OK and having a good day, ahead of themselves.
Perhaps that's why the ni-Vanuatu are so attracted to religion?
I don't know.
The question never arose.
But keeping the gods and spirits on-side, as well, has apparently been going on for centuries, way way before "civilisation" arrived.
Makes sense.

an eccentric on Éfaté

It was a simple shack on the side of the Éfaté ring-road, a one room concrete block really with a couple of windows without glass, but what marked it out was the hand-written black sign on a white wall which said 'WWII MUSEUM" and the string of flagpoles out the front that flew the American, British, French, Japanese and Vanuatu flags in various states of disrepair in a steady breeze so they waved and fluttered like the surrounding coconut palm trees.
Out the front was an unusual wizened old man, perhaps in his early 70's, small in stature, startling jet black chiselled features and dressed in an old button-up short-sleeved shirt, three-quarter length trousers and thongs.
We'd been warned that this man was "the fastest English speaker on all of Éfaté ".
And so he was.
They'd also joked that he was known jocularly as the "King of Éfaté".
He was one of the most eccentric men I've ever met; utterly and completely involved in his passions - beach combing, collecting, and yabbering.
We were told that the experience should last for about 15 minutes and no more, as he would, as we learned, eventually, run out of things to say.
After warmly welcoming us to his place, he ushered us inside and told us to sit on a bench.
In front of us were three classic examples of art-deco museum-quality wood and glass display cases full, jammed packed, with old lime green bottles.
On the shelving along the walls were stands of various sized brown bottles and around the room there were mounds and heaps of rusting old junk.
Our host then launched into his obviously long-time rehearsed spiel with thoroughly fascinating, frantic, fantastic hand moments.
He spoke in the Queen's English, but you could see it was hard for him not lapse into Bislama.
We soon learned he spoke at a "mile-a-minute" - which is the nickname for the now pest vines planted during the war to act as camouflage; fast, really fast, so fast you had to be on your feet mentally to get into the rhythm of what he was on about.
For all the world he sounded like he was trying to achieve the speed of a Gatling machine gun spitting out the words.
He took about 30 seconds to say the following introduction, that I later tried to write it down word for word as far as I remembered it.
Try saying this really really fast.
"in 1943, one hundred and forty thousand American soldiers came. Yes. One hundred and forty, thousand, here right here the Americans. Here they had Marines, you know Marines? They built airstrips to fly their aeroplanes to the Solomon Islands [flourishing his arms in the general direction of the north-west]. Yes that is it. You know where to then? That is it. Japan. To bomb Japan. There were many many ships, a hundred warships in the harbour down there, one hundred ship! The American soldiers who came here liked to drink Coke. Drink Coke. Drink a lot of Coke. They drank and they left the bottles behind and for many years now I have been finding these bottles. Yes these bottles that they threw away after drinking the Coke. The bottles they just threw away and they floated in the sea and then came to the beach and I find them. They find me. They are my the American Coke bottles! Yes!".
Phew.
He paused momentarily, and then started to reach into the display cases to get out unmistakably Coke bottles, mostly broken but some fairly complete and some wholly intact bottles and gave them to us, one by one, to inspect.
As we were looking at them approvingly with probably silly grins on our faces, he then launched into his rapid fire spiel again...
"They are the Coke bottle of Coca-Cola that the soldiers drank. Here these bottles they liked a lot of Coke to remind them of their home town where they come from in the America. The generous Coca Cola Company of America started to put the names of the soldiers home town's on the bottom of the bottles so the Americans were at home here in Éfaté. Drinking Coke! To remind them of home look! See! - [he rabbited on endlessly as he showed us the bottom of the bottles] "here! is the names. Look see, it has on it the bottom. This glass you see! [turning the bottle upside down] here this one. It says Los An-gel-es Cal-i-fornia, there! See, here's another one, Be-con-sfield Ul, Ul, Illeye-noise!! Ill-ee-nois!
And that was that in the Coke bottles, or so we thought.
He lent over and leaving the best to last, pulled a drawer out of the Coke bottle display and took another one out "Here! "This one found me about two years ago. Last One. See here, it says Al-ber-qurqe, New Mexico!".
"Any questions!", he barked.
Ah, no...we sat in stunned silence.
Then he went right on over to perhaps the best thing he'd found on the beach - a rusted out of 200lb bomb casing.
He was off again..."Anyone know what this is? A bombing casing. That is right an actual bomb casing that won't explode. Not now! Anyone know the name of bomb?"
Then he stopped abruptly, waiting for an answer.
We looked at each other quite puzzled as to what he meant: what bomb? this particular bomb? which bomb? and then Fran had a flash of brilliance with a brain wave and just blurted out "Enola Gay".
"No, that is the plane!"
Still looking for an answer.
Fran said "Little Boy!"
The King of Éfaté lept about with joy "That is right, Little Boy! Fat Boy! Bomb!. Fat Boy, you are right!".
He then went to shake Fran's hand to congratulate her on the right answer but instead placed her palm on the palm of his hand and then he used his other hand to gently stroke the top of Fran's outstretched hand saying "Yes you are right! That is right, Fat Boy! Big bomb. Japan"
"Now look!" he said with a startle as he motioned to the shelving of brown bottles, pointing out the collection by category, as he whipped through his lines at breakneck speed.
"Here are the Australian bottle, or beer, Australian, yes, you see, beer bottles. Some have dates showing us" [as he gently caressed and fondled ever so gently an old clean skin long neck] "Here! Some have dates! Here dates this one. I like it, it has the oldest day! Nineteen-thirty-seven. Look there, the date!".
And there it was, printed around the bottom of the the bottle was the bottle makers name usually of Sydney, and the date was stamped out of the blown glass in the middle of the bottom of the bottle "1937".
It looked as clear as the day it was stamped "This one is very good. The oldest one. The Australian they drank beer. Plenty of beer. They had beer bottles different from these here, they are ginger ale!"
They were darker brown stubbies of clearly what would have contained ginger ale some 70 years ago.
This bloke was utterly relentless and talk about talking the leg off a table!
I can't remember him taking a breath.
At this stage I was exhausted by the pace of the seemingly endless stream of consciousness from this wild and crazy dude.
At some point our most obliging host wandered to the other end of the room "Here is a Jeep radiator. A radiator from a Jeep. A small truck, you know a Jeep? When the American left here after the war, here they did not take anything from here, they left everything behind. Jeeps, trucks, hel-eec-olpters, planes, everything left along here - bulldozed into the sea. Bulldozed!".
We were hoping that he would leave it that, as we were "the full bottle" on the temporary invasion of Éfaté by the Americans by now.
Pardon the pun.
But on he went "I found this one here. You see you will see a coil that is from an electrical in the American for the airplanes. And here bullets. Yes, bullet too, all bullets!
They were brass .30" spent round casings that had been burnished brightly by decades of tumbling around in beach sand and crushed coral.
Taking pride of place of place on the top of the display cases was a totally corroded old M1 Carbine, "real gun", which he went on to explain was the shooter of choice for the American army in the Pacific.
In feigning a gunshot he said "Bang!"
Then he suddenly stopped talking.
We looked around for another minute or so and then he announced "Thank you very much for coming to the World War Two Museum here in Éfaté. Thank you. It is good and I am proud of it. You are welcome. Welkam to come again. I hope you have enjoyed your visit at the World War Two Museum. Thank you. Enjoy your way".
Then he led us outside to his verandah and without further ceremony bid us adieu.
As we got back to George and Sonny's mini-bus, and they had "seen it all before" smiling faces, and it was hard not to burst out laughing at this strange, eccentric man.
But then I was stopped in my tracks as I started to imagine what kind of life he might have lived out here, on the point, on his land; his plot would amount to less then an half an acre, but with three score and ten miles of coast for him to wander along without end; looking, looking, always looking.
Here was a contented man I thought, precisely because he - to me anyway - he hadn't found what he is looking for, nor does he expect to at his age, but his collection is very clearly a reflection of his entire world.
His obsession with these particular things that have no value, except as long standing curiosities, is not just happily accepted in the community, but celebrated as just one of these things.
It was never designed as a tourist attraction [there is an official WWII Museum along the road, where we didn't stop].
It's obsession without end, and to achieve it, he must have walked as relentlessly as he talked for his whole life - hundreds, perhaps thousands of kilometres through the same coastline, the same villages, again and again, looking, looking, looking, always looking for the next big thing.
The whole act really did take less than 15 minutes...about 12 and half by my watch.
At just a token 200vt a head, it is some of the best money you can spend for the entertainment value, and you'll help keep this grand old man going until he reaches his grave, where he will no doubt be given a decent Christian funeral and be very carefully buried according to kastom along with all his treasure, as a mark of respect and honour.
Drop in if you ever go by his way, it's guaranteed he'll be pleased to see you.
All power to his oars.

the fear

The baby was seven days old.
Seven days - not weeks or months...
Category 5 Severe Tropical Cyclone Pam (March 12-14, 2015), after forming in the Coral Sea, rat-fucked the Shepherd and southern islands of Vanuatu as it barreled almost directly from north to south , smashing Éfaté [90% of buildings in Port Vila were either destroyed, damaged, or otherwise bagarup] at 260kph.
Pam then went on to devastate the island of Erromango, before utterly destroying the isolated island of Tanna, at wind speeds estimated to be more than 280kph, until slowly dissipating over open ocean , with the after effects of heavy rain also hitting the north island of New Zealand.
Have you ever seen a Formula One car starting to roar down the main straightway in driving rain?
I have, and it's very scary.
It's a miracle that only 16 lives were lost, while the damage bill was put at about $US300M.
And yet, the largest island of the archipelago, Espiritu Santo, 275km to the north-west of Éfaté, was virtually unscathed, just a little stronger breeze than usual there.
Six months later, with all crops, foodstuffs, the airstrip and telecommunications gone, and water in critical short supply, very serious consideration was given to evacuating the entire population of Tanna to Éfaté, but that was averted when a small supply ship arrived to save them from literally starving to death.
Excuse my French, but they were completely fucked.
The only thing they had left was the most active volcano on earth.
Tanna lost 80% of their coffee trees, the island's main cash crop and export, after kava.
Coffee takes years and years to mature.
One day we dropped by the ramshackle Tanna coffee roasters outside Vila; before the cyclone they were roasting 80 tonnes of Tanna coffee per year, after the cyclone it fell to 15 tonnes, and they were hoping to get 35 tonnes this year.
Never mind the tremendous cost of destroyed infrastructure, the psychological scars run very deep, and will for a generation,
I was sitting with Glenn...on the trunk of a fallen coconut palm tree...looking out towards his home island of Nguna, which would be only a few nautical miles away across a shallow straight at low tide to the fringing reef with breakers to his village which is in an eastern cove.
Also nearby were the islands of Kakula, Pele, Emao, and in the distance rising above the horizon is the almost perfectly conical outcrop of Wot Rock.
A spectacularly beautiful scene.
We were waiting for our lunch outside a dinky little local restaurant [mornay fish in clam shells, local steak escalope in red wine sauce, rice and local greens] and I told him I had noticed plenty of still unrepaired cyclone damage - two years on - all up the west coast of Éfaté, and asked him if he was here at the time.
"I was at home. The baby was seven days old".
There was pain in his eyes and then he looked down as ni-Vanuatu do when they talk of unfortunate business:
"I was lucky, my daughter now is two years old. We put the baby under a strong table with blankets and I only lost the roof of my house. I have been looking for it, but I have never found it. I don't think I will. My family was not hurt. Where the village is, we are in that cove there, you can see there at the bottom of the island, so we were sheltered a bit by the mountain. Very lucky"
"that is an extinct volcano there?"
"yes, dormant for many many years now".
"the wind always blows from the south-east", he said, "what they call the 'trade winds', but after the cyclone, we now fear the north - the north. Terrible."
He was quiet, slow and measured in the delivery of his words, so I was surprised by the sudden emphasis he placed on the word "fear".
"It was the worst night of my life, but I was lucky. Many many others, not so good. Even today, on some islands, people do not have enough to eat".
He told me the cyclone went bang! about five o'clock in the afternoon and by three or four the next morning it was all but gone, taking much of the countryside and everything on it with it.
"We had no choice but to stay".
I asked if the baby had been born in the Central Hospital in Vila.
"Born at home" he said.
He then went on to tell me how important it was that the Govt. was slowly rolling out a program that would have a nursing station, "ditric medikal", near every main village just for primary health care.
There are no ambulances outside the capital.
On leaving Vila for Sydney, I noticed a small display in the corner of Bauerfield International Airport [named after some US Marines colonel who had the airstrip built from scratch and operational for military aircraft in 28 days] and there was a copy of the original flight paths and instructions on how to land a plane there.
Under weather it read: "May-Oct: Sou'East trade winds. Nov-Apr: Variable. The New Hebrides is in the hurricane zone".
For a long time now the boffins down the weather bureau have been talking about how the extremes of climate will get more extreme and more frequent, as global warming begins to really ramp up.
The ni-Vanuatu know that climate change will eventually see their string of islands become known as "cyclone alley", now they have the fear, real, genuine, fear.
They never ever want to experience another cyclone like Pam again in their lifetimes, but they know deep down the chances are, they will.
No one voluntarily tells you about it, but if you ask in a correct manner, everyone you meet has a Cyclone Pam story.
We drove past miles and miles and miles of cyclone devastated coconut palm plantations, that would have been dense and rich with palms, but was now like a moonscape, flat eroded ground with some clumps of palm trees still standing, but most of them were busted off at he base by winds - the amount of damage has been enormous - and two years later only the stumps are covered in second growth vines and weeds - just stumps everywhere.
There are still fancy signs that say "Éfaté Coconut Plantation Company", but the place has been abandoned.
There has been no attempt at replanting.
Occasionally you will see a single coconut tree standing, but twisted and bent permanently at a 40 or 50 degree slant, after being smashed by the terror of the arse end of the cyclone.
We ran into a water tester on Children's Day.
He was a small nuggety type of white man dressed in a khaki shirt and shorts [you wouldn't catch a ni-Vanuatu man dressed in shorts in town, they all wear trousers].
Fran spotted him on the end of a boat pontoon off the sea wall with what looked like a large underwater microphone on a long cable attached to a thing that looked like an iPad.
She said "that must be a water tester".
He was dropping the thing to the bottom of the harbour and then hauling it up and having a look at the computer screen.
As he walking up the gang plank I said "are you testing the water?"
"yes".
"what are you testing for?"
He then reeled off a list of scientific terms that meant nothing to me.
Turns out he was an Australian working for some kind of private oceanic company on contract to the Govt.
"what's the results showing?"
"ah, dunno yet, we'll work that out when we take these numbers back to the lab".
"are you testing for micro-plastics?"
"no, not here. but we have a limited program going on some of the outer island for micro's, we hope to get the funding to expand it, because they're going to be a problem".
I then airily waved towards one of the two islands in Port Vila harbour, Iririki, which was long ago turned into condo's and a four star tourist resort.
"I suppose there wouldn't be any sewerage out there on Iririki, all septic tanks?"
"what do you mean?" said the water tester "there is no sewerage of any kind anywhere in Port Vila".
"well, there's a problem for you, right there".
"look, I'm sworn to secrecy on this and I'm not meant to say; but i wouldn't swim in it".
He wished us a good day and said "gotta go and check out what my colleague's doing along the way there" and he disappeared into the crowd.
A little further along was another pontoon obviously built for swimming with three levels of wooden decking, and there were dozens of kids of all ages having a great time splashing, screaming, doing water bombs and somersault dives into the harbour and having a ball, and, of course...swimming...
Vanuatu is the only country in world with a Minister for Climate Change which ipso facto must mean they have a Department of Climate Change.
That's as well as the usual portfolio's of Environment, Water, and Agriculture.
Vanuatu has too many coconuts, we were told - even with hundreds of thousands of trees gone in the cyclone - and it was explained that now that the arse has fallen out of the copra market, a small generator has been built which runs on the extract of coconut oil for power generation, in the hope of completely replacing diesel sometime in the future, for when things get really dire.
Bottled Origin labelled gas imported from Australia is everywhere, but in front of the Mama's Market in Vila you will see great stacks of firewood neatly bundled up into large faggots at 500vt a faggot, so there's still plenty of demand for firewood for cooking, even in the capital.
Driving up the west coast of the island I noticed that about every third power pole was virtually brand new after being shattered by Pam, but the power-line suddenly stopped as we reached the north of the island, so I asked Glenn how they got their electricity.
He said there is one almighty diesel generator that powers the whole of Vila, while some little solar panel farms and wind turbines that we'd seen, power the west coast [so they only have power during the day and when the wind blows at night], then it runs out, and the entire east coast remains un-electrified.
There are some fairly large cattle ranches inland from the villages out there, but no power.
There is talk of building a small thermal power station to bring electricity to the east coast, but that would all but destroy the black sands and thermal pools forever and bagarup the ecosystem and there is no real call for it anyway - when you are a subsistence farmer, fisherman and hunter with a family history going back centuries, there aint much use for it, and who would pay for it anyway?
Everyone complains about how expensive electricity is.
Thermal will be an ongoing debate for years to come, not the least of which will involve highly complex kastom land arrangements, capital investment and who gets the profits [if any].
Glenn had a look of "they're dreaming" in his eyes.
We hired a car one day to go back to Havannah Harbour [named after the ship some grandee missionary arrived in there], the most gorgeous spot in Éfaté; can hold a hundred ships of the line, deep water with the islands of Moso and Lelepa sheltering the harbour, which is a rain shadow anyway.
We went back for lunch and to snorkel again.
First time in the water, we saw many fish but only dead, bleached coral and it was the same the second time around off the pontoon at the laid-back fisherman-owned Wahoo Bar.
Admittedly we did not go out on the "turtle" tourist boat to the fringing reef off-shore in the national marine park or the dugong sanctuary, so I have no idea what it is like out there.
But it reminded me of 2012, when we spent a day snorkeling off Atauro island near Dili in East Timor, where it was like swimming in the most extraordinary tropical aquarium that you could possibly ever imagine - walk 20 yards off the shore and you are among incredible beauty in the coral gardens.
Blew my socks off, and still does today, but our next swim was near the Low Isles in the Great Barrier Reef, which even then, was a wasteland of bleached coral in comparison to the starting pristine waters of East Timor.
"We used to eat turtle, yes. It was very good, but now, no longer, finis - very bad fine, big fine, from the Government now for killing turtle", we were told.
With Vanuatu being volcanic in nature with a fault line just to the west, there are tsunami warning signs, in Bislama, English and French everywhere in Vila.
There are three tsunami warning colours, yellow, orange and red, and the signs have detailed topographical maps of the "safe zones", and the quickest & easiest escape routes when the balloon goes up and Radio Vanuatu stars broadcasting "run for the hills! run for your lives! head for the hills!"
We were staying on the absolute waterfront, so the joint had it's own evacuation plan that read something like this: "Leave the property immediately. Go to the entrance and turn right on the Pango Point Rd, walk for about 100 metres, then turn left up a dirt track, and walk 35 metres. Remain there until you are told it's safe".
What does it matter that the last really big tsunami came through Vila in the 1927 completely flooding what would then have been a really small colonial outpost, and fark me, why are you banging on about it, and what has tsunami warning signs got to do with climate change, I hear you ask?
Who knows?
The Shadow knows.
Ask the gypsy what the future holds.
But the sea level is slowly rising, that's the truth, no doubt about that - just ask those living in Kiribati and Tuvalu - and Vanuatu is also just about as vulnerable to natural forces as you can get, and they know that when we finally cover the planet with our own shit and everything really goes arse-up and pear-shaped, they'll be the first ones with their backs up against the wall.
They know.
In the grand scheme of things, when the earth starts to return to primordial slime, because my generation did nothing about it when we were told that "something's going on" - an island nation in the middle of nowhere, with a population of little more than a quarter of a million, all living at sea level, is not that hard to wipe out.

kava kastom

"what happens at this place?" we wondered as the buses we were on, went on by.
Fran had seen some cars and utes parked out the front of the joint down the Pango Point road there towards town in the No.3 district about a hundred yards from where we were staying.
On inquiry, a random barman tipped me into it.
There was nothing on it that said what it was, just cyclone fencing about ten feet high which was covered in dense vines and creepers which made it impossible to see what was going on inside, so at the end of a long day it was about 5:30pm, right on sunset, when we were told kava should always be drunk.
So there was nothing for it but to pull up the hire car and after some fiddling about managed to squeeze the car in to find a park near the start of the dirt track up the hill.
In a corner of this small block of land surrounded by this fencing, was a narrow entrance, and we sort of stumbled in knowing that it was some kind of kava bar [some have poor reputations], but having very little clue as what to do when you got there and what the kastom was.
In a shack with a single light bulb hanging from a strand of electrical wire - which had cage-like meshing on the front of it - was a small middle-aged woman who appeared to be serving kava.
There were no other lights, and twilight never lasts long in the tropics and by now it was fast approaching darkness.
Clueless, I was lucky enough to spy a couple of old westerners who were clearly hippies in their past lives [and still were], and it looked like they were here to stay in Vanuatu, so they should know what's the go.
I wandered up to one and chanced my luck "how much is it"?
"what do you want? a 50 or a 100?"
Quickly put two and two together and realised somehow that, as it turned out, half a 'shell' of kava cost 50vt, but a full serve was 100vt.
There was a line of half a dozen blokes waiting to be served, and even though the queue was moving quickly, I presumed that they saw in me an unusual white cripple, so they motioned me to the front of the line.
I shook and nodded my head to mean "no, no"...but without me saying anything a couple of blokes motioned towards my walking stick and said "no, you go first".
Realising I was now obliged, I went to the counter and put my 100vt gold hexagonal coin down and said "I'll have a hundred", and the woman served me what looked like a plastic miso-style bowl full of kava.
She took the bowl from a big stack of bowls and first gave it a quick rinse in a 44 gallon drum of water, and then with her small soup ladle, ladled two ladles of kava from another drum next to it, and gave it to me.
I took a sniff and it smelled, excuse the cliche, very earthy [ever tried grating a fresh horseradish or ginger?], with a distinctly sweet peppery aroma, which I found quite pleasant.
But I had made a faux par and should have immediately moved on to allow the next person in the queue to get their shot, but I was laughingly dismissed as a newby.
It was pretty clear to them that this was my first time, so allowances could be made for me - they already had been.
Stepping back from the bar not knowing what to do, except that I had gleaned that it was best but not compulsory to drink kava in one shot, I looked to my right and saw a row of taps above what looked like a long tub which was made of concrete painted with now chipped white enamel, it may have been a urinal or communal washing tub in its former life - and another half a dozen blokes were standing along it, sculling their kava and then spitting the taste out into the tub, expectorating loudly several times.
You are not there for savoring the taste of kava.
Here goes nothing I thought, but lucky it was dark, because there was too much kava in the bowl for me to take it all in one gulp, so I did two embarrassing slurps, and finished the bowl.
That's where the reality of the day stopped for me, right there.
The effect was instantaneous; a spin of the head, increased heart-rate and some shortness of breath for just a minute or two before a quite easy sense of intense calmness - if that makes sense - begins to set in.
Around the bar were benches arranged in three sided rectangles on which people were sitting, smoking, maybe drinking VB which was being sold at another hut on the block, along with some local snacks, eating, and talking in murmurous hushed tones.
And there were lots of dogs.
Fran had decided not to partake.
With one shell down, my lips tingling and my tongue numb, my old alcoholic brain said to me "that was so good - I'll have another one of those!"
A dreamy-like clarity had taken over my head and it suddenly dawned on me that folk were simply taking their turn - ponying up, drinking their kava, and then rejoining the back of the queue and getting another in quick succession until you know you've had just enough.
So I stood in the queue - now feeling supremely confident with a full shell in me, that I knew exactly what I was doing, slapped down another 100vt coin, and repeated the process.
This stuff was certainly the goods - strong gear.
Two shells was enough.
Another evening I was too late, just after 6pm, and got just one shell away, before they put up the handwritten notice on a piece of cardboard reading "sorri kava finis".
One night I was walking back to where we were staying [which took twice as long than getting to the kava bar] and I looked up.
Most nights in Vila are humid and cloudy, but tonight it was a cloudless sky and it was true what they say about kava! - it certainly makes the stars shine brighter.
Coming from the light pollution created by a city of five million, I never see stars.
But I sort of swiveled to look up towards the north, orientated myself again, found the pointers and the Southern Cross and the Milky Way stood out like dogs balls.
I stopped and stared for a while, and could have begun to contemplate the meaning of the universe, but didn't, and pressed on.
I floated through the entrance to the joint we were at, everyone from the security guard to the kitchen hand seemed to have the broadest smiles on their faces, even if they didn't.
Made my way to out to our little faré bungalow in the bush behind the beach, and collapsed into my usual chair on the veranda.
We had some baguettes and cheese, [we lucked into the only boulangerie in town out in the back blocks in our hire car], Fran had some French wine.
Talk, and there wasn't much, turned to things philosophical such as "what is the purpose?", "why are we here?", " why is 42 the answer to life, the universe, and everything?" - the sort of things that have no answer, but don't bother me.
Especially on kava.
You can Google "kava" and find out all about its botanical properties, the laborious process by which it is prepared, why it is never drunk before 5pm except at ceremony, the complex different kastom surrounding its use, how it became a drink that women could, were "allowed" to imbibe, after it being exclusively reserved, probably for centuries, for the men alone, as well as its intoxifying/hallucinogenic effects, but it later became apparent there is an ongoing fierce debate about which island has the best.
Is it Tanna? Or does the best kava come from the gardens of east Pentecost?
Even the tourist brochures can't agree on that one.
It's down to the last two, but it will be an argument with no end.
I didn't know what I was drinking, so I'm in no position to join the debate.
All I know now is why it is so highly revered, and why it is so much an integral part of everyday life
They brochures laughingly refer to kava as "the anti-energy drink".
But it is much much more than that.
Nambawan.

notes

* Bislama. A fascinating pidgin-English which is the lingua franca of Vanuatu, and one of the three official languages, along with English and French.
Bislama contains about 95% of words derived from English, with the other 5% made up of French and native language words, with a phonetic spelling and loose grammatical structure
Vanuatu has hundreds of local languages; in days gone past people of one side of an island spoke a different language which was unintelligible to the folk on the other side of the island.
These native languages are now endangered, with many having less than 100 speakers, and will die out over time.
However, Bislama allows anyone from any island in Vanuatu to communicate with each other.
English is widely spoken on the island of Éfaté, however French is the dominant other language spoken on the islands of Espiritu Santo and Pentecost.

** ni-Vanuatu is the Bislama word for a Melanesian inhabitant of Vanuatu. It is used as both the singular and plural.

*** Vatu [abbreviated as vt] is the currency of Vanuatu, at the time of visiting 100vt = approx. $A1.15

† Jeremy MacClancy, To Kill a Bird with Two Stones - A Short History of Vanuatu, [Vanuatu Cultural Centre, Port Vila, 2002], 159pp.