Travel with Indigo

Once known as the New Hebrides, Vanuatu is today a collection of spectacular, jungle cloaked islands strung out across the South Pacific lightly populated and seldom visited by tourists. It is the first place we have visited whose people are Melanesians as distinguished from the Polynesians who dominate every island east of here all the way to Easter Island. The Polys are statuesque, with mocha colored skin, black straight hair, brown eyes and a somewhat aloof air about them. Their eyes have a vague hint of the oriental. By contrast, if you can picture in your mind a National Geographic photo of a sub-Saharan African native from the deepest reaches of the Congo, you will have a pretty good idea of Melanesians. They are slight in build, very black, and have all the features and physiognomy associated with Negroes, which they are.

They are also among the most genuinely friendly people I think I’ve ever encountered anywhere. Driving along a bush road, and well away from the grimy hubbub of Port Vila, every person in every village along the way will stop what they are doing and give you the biggest most welcoming grin you could imagine, often accompanied by a fully extended arm wave and frequently a two arm wave. None of that forearm waggle wave for them. The kids, with arms fluttering like so many windmills, will yell gleefully something that sounds like yee-haa, which made me wonder if some drunken red necks had wandered this way recently. These people seem to have not a hint of animosity or a care in this world. In a commercial setting, there is no bargaining or pressure to buy and, as elsewhere in the South Pacific, tipping is thought to be an insult.

The official languages here are three: English, spoken by nearly everybody, some French and the local pidgin called Bislama. The beer cooler belongs to me is rendered in Bislama as bia cooler b’long me. Do you speak English is yu tok tok Ennglis. This lingo is a corruption of the English they heard from island traders and the 500,000 American soldiers based here during the Second World War. Unofficially, though, there are 106 different languages in Vanuatu of which 81 are still actively spoken, the highest concentration of languages per capita in the world.

Vanuatu today is an independent country and its politics and government, as common in these parts, is …well, colorful. But it has one distinction that can be said of no other country in the world that I know of. At one point it was ruled jointly by, get this, none other than the English and French. Talk about a recipe for trouble. Just to give you the flavor of events then, the Brits insisted that all cars should drive, as in all civilized countries, on the left. The French, naturally, insisted on the right. So for awhile there people drove on both! The joint agreement was called a condominium, a word whose etymology I had thought began in South Florida. After a short while, locals here began calling it a pandemonium, and with good cause too.

We elected to visit first the capital town (population 40,000) of Port Vila, another scruffy, tumbledown place but one that I grew to like very much, I think because of its tastefully planned if badly disheveled waterfront. There is a harbor front park with native specimen trees, pedestrian walk, and park benches. The park is overgrown and weedy, the walk crumbling, the benches in need of repair. Still it’s a fine place for a stroll thanks in no small part to the ramshackle cloth market, its stalls overflowing with colorful saris, sarongs, dashikis, and other wares. Crudely hand lettered signs offer hair braiding and beading and thoughtfully state the time required to complete the job. This is a nice gesture, for sure, but so far as I could see nobody wears a watch so what’s the point.

My favorite place, though, was the roofed but unwalled, dirty, and clamorous food market. Large, at about an acre, the place each day but Sunday is awash in every imaginable food item found in Vanuatu. There are rolled banana leaves for cooking in earthen stoves, bundles of gurgling land crabs and coconut crabs, taro roots the size of a child, melons of various description, unidentifiable fish fried whole, pots of delicious smelling stews, the omnipresent kava root, enormous tubers still caked in mud, bundles of peanuts just pulled from the ground, wild fruits of every possible kind found in the tropics, and much, much more. Most stalls are managed by a generously proportioned aged woman dressed in a colorful but warn and slightly soiled formless dress. She invariably smiles at you even though she knows you have no interest whatever in her wares. The whole place is alive with the sounds of a bustling commercial market, and I loved it.

Staring Into the Jaws of Death

Experience teaches us a great deal about life and how to avoid its many tribulations and torments that lie in wait for the unwary. We know, for example, that when we enter a restaurant sporting chandeliers fashioned from wagon wheels a fine meal is unlikely to ensue. Similarly, we learn that when we hear the expression “Holy Shit!” nothing salutary is likely to follow. And so it was, on a lovely Saturday morning, as I helmed Indigo’s tender in toward the town dock at Port Vila, our normally unruffled engineer Seann became audibly ruffled blurting out the ominous exclamation. And sure enough no good followed it. What had attracted his concerted attention, and now justifiably panicked all the boat’s passengers, was a slithery, slimy, and quite deadly, banded sea snake, the same species as threatened us on that scuba dive back in Nuie. This is the single most venomous creature on the planet. Slithering Death. Okay, the thing was only two feet long, but what does size matter (I restrict my remarks here to the matter at hand)? I mean a 7.62 mm, magnum load bullet is no bigger than your index finger. And what about a syringe of strychnine to which this serpent is closely if metaphorically related?

Now you need to know that Indigo’s tender is a mere fifteen feet long. Subtract from this the three feet needed to mount the outboard motor and the four feet needed for helm seat and console and you are left with eight feet which, on this up to now stellar day, was cheerfully occupied by six adults and their day trip gear. Now figure that a two-foot long deadly snake has a strike radius of, say, a foot and a half, and you come up with a Circle of Death having a diameter of three and a half feet operating in a field of opportunities a mere eight feet long by four feet wide and packed as sardines with potential victims. It’s a veritable turkey shoot for the invader. As a killer snake, what more could you ask?

Upon seeing the unimposing but gruesome and execrable animal slinking over Captain John’s backpack, clearly in search of someone to kill, great shrieks of impending catastrophe filled the heretofore calm and sultry air of Port Vila and civil order degenerated rapidly. As each person sought to exchange his position for one furthest removed from the fangs of death, and as the creature’s slinking continued to compromise the newly selected safe place, a general and, it must be said uncomplimentary, pandemonium beset the tiny craft.

Your humble servant affected the air of one not at all wobbly at the prospect of a horrible and painful death by snake bite. That I was seated at the helm and behind the protecting console had no bearing on this devil-may-care, and if I may say so, rather debonair and manly pose. But as the slithery devil began to make his way in my direction there was a notable and, I am ashamed to say, regrettable about face in my demeanor, though not one accompanied by screaming or anything like that. I just scampered heartily. Relief came at last when Mate Bobby donned a rubber dry bag over a hand and arm and managed to return the beast to his watery home. Following this there was a great deal of foot shuffling and aw shucking and muttering stuff about how I wasn’t really afraid of that little old snake. Of course nobody believed a word of this, even as he spoke it.

Jungle Divers

Human folly as we know has been with us since the dawn of time and comes in two broad categories of misadventure. Perhaps the most prevalent and often humorous is that which arises from inadvertence. Sometimes it’s a mere mistake, other times negligence and still others outright stupidity, each bringing to the perpetrator an unfortunate notoriety. With this category, alcohol is a frequent companion. “Hold my drink and watch this.” The book, The Darwin Awards, helpfully categorizes only a few of these events for our entertainment. There are many, many more.

The second, and certainly the more confounding, category is purposeful acts, these undertaken by sensate humans with forethought and even a touch of planning, though often with a teen-like impetuosity. Here is included such events as, just for example, the attempt to jump a speeding motorcycle over a gaping canyon and jumping in front of and attempting to outrun a thundering herd of enraged bulls. Vanuatu, oddly for otherwise sensible people, has its contribution to this list, and it takes place only on the remote and quite primitive island of Pentecost. I refer of course to Jungle Diving.

After our near death experience with the sea snake, the crew and I, along with the latest from Deck Hand Tomas Miranda’s impressive stable of consorts, minus Stew Nina, flew one hour north to Pentecost Island using the services of Air Vanuatu, an airline whose name fails to inspire confidence. As you can tell by the island’s name, it once hosted hectoring missionaries, but the first few to arrive were eaten and rightly so. I’m not sure why they let the rest get away but they did.

The plane was filled with about twenty anxious looking passengers, half locals and half tourists like us traveling to see the big event. We landed on a strip of newly compacted limestone just days before it was to get its first coat of asphalt. Disembarking, we encountered the Pentecost Island International Air Terminal, an approximately twenty foot square abode constructed of thatched roof with walls of lateral bamboo laced together using strips of wild hibiscus bark. Its floor was bare earth. Inside was the Air Vanuatu local office, a scale where all passengers and their baggage are carefully weighed, and bench seating for those awaiting departure. Right off I knew I would like this place.

We were greeted somewhat diffidently by our guide for the day, a chap named Richard, and in due course piled into and atop his extended cab, raised chassis, Toyota Hi-Lux 4WD truck, which as it turned out is the bare minimum vehicle with which it’s possible to navigate the island’s few roads. The four wheel drive remained engaged, I noticed, for the entire trip of two or three miles over roads that were nothing more than a dense quagmire of the world’s slimiest, slipperiest, most inhospitable mud it’s possible to imagine. The stuff is bad enough in the dry season, but now, just after a monsoon-like downpour the day before, it was nearly impassable in Richard’s truck even as he tried but failed to stick to the bulldozer tracks helpfully imprinted on its surface. I thought as we churned and slid our way along that a dozer would have been a superior choice of vehicle for this ride.

At last we reached our destination, a clearing in the jungle harboring a few ramshackle concrete bunkers with rusted corrugated tin roofs. Here we enjoyed languishing in the sweltering sun for an hour or so, which helpfully melted the ice in the beer cooler so as to lighten our load though with the unwanted effect of warming the beer. We were waiting, our guide said, for the participants in the day’s activities to complete a sacred ritual which ancient custom forbids us from observing. Sounded a lot like some parties I’ve been to before.

When finally we were summoned forth, we tramped along muddy paths hacked out of the jungle until reaching a newly cleared swath about an acre in size. When I say jungle, this was the real stuff. Had Tarzan stepped out of the greenery I would not have been in the least bit surprised.

This clearing had been carefully chosen for the day’s purpose. It was on the side of a fairly steep hill and reached to the hill’s apex. This as we shall see is a far more important detail than the untrained eye might expect.

Looming awkwardly but nonetheless looming at the top of the hill is a fifty-foot tower constructed of nothing but machete chopped trees and limbs and vines. The five or six vertical columns, arranged around an earthen foundation twenty feet square, are made from trees shorn of their limbs. To these, cross members of smaller trees and limbs are hafted with vines at ten-foot intervals in ladder fashion from ground to the top. The whole dodgy looking affair is guyed to the ground using four arm thick vines extending out about a hundred feet and tied off to tree stumps. There is not a single modern device, part or piece in the whole contraption. No nail, rope, hammer, brace, screw, nothing. The single concession to modern times is the machete used for chopping. Exact copies of this tower have been built in clearings just like this all over Pentecost Island for more than a thousand years built in precisely the same manner. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.

The towers are built under the careful supervision of a master tower builder who has vast experience and was himself trained in this ancient art at the knee of an elder master. Each village has a builder and no tower can be built without one and expect to stand.

By now you are asking yourself, okay what’s this all about? Well, here comes the fun part. No one knows for sure just when or how Jungle Diving got its start but it was likely somewhere around a thousand or so years ago, maybe more. We don’t know who invented it or why, but that shouldn’t preclude us from speculating, and here’s my shot at it.

One fateful day a group of teen aged boys were sitting around with nothing to do. The trained mind will right away see that from such a gathering trouble is likely to unfold, and unfold it did. The acknowledged savant of the group, a precocious and perpetually horny lad, who we will call Oswald, complained about the dearth of eligible ladies in the village. “The geezers take all the babes leaving us nothing but sweat hogs,” he lamented. “We need to come up with something we can do as teens to prove our manhood and thus get laid a whole lot more than we do now.” Murmurs of agreement rippled among the group. “What shall we do?” asked Oswald. Thoughtful ruminations dulled the conversation for a few moments as primitive brains churned away on the matter. It was at this moment that sheer genius struck the mind of Oswald, an idea so powerful, so persuasive in its elegant simplicity that it survives to this very day on Pentecost Island. “I’ve got it! Let’s dive head first and stark naked out of the tops of tall trees.” That single stroke of brilliance, slightly modified, and I dare say improved upon over the years, captures the essence of Jungle Diving. Here’s how it goes.

At heights of twenty, thirty, forty and fifty feet on the aforementioned tower are built tiny diving platforms, each one very carefully crafted to suit the weight of the person designated to dive from it. Stout vines are strung from the tower’s peak reaching almost all the way to the ground. It’s the almost part that’s most important. These vines are arranged such that when almost fully extended to the ground they will exert pressure on the ramp causing it to break under just the right load. The ramp, in effect, acts as a shock absorber.

To begin the festivities, a group of local village men and young boys, clad in nothing at all but a jaunty penis sheath attached to a waist band, begin stomping about and chanting ancient and indecipherable sacred stuff, a kind of fraternity ritual. Accompanying them is a small group of women dressed in grass skirts. These ladies are topless in the manner of a National Geographic photo bringing to mind the Rodney Carrington song, Put Your Clothes Back On.

Meanwhile, the designated Jungle Diver climbs to his assigned diving platform, an aide secures a vine to each ankle, and the man steps out onto the platform. As the chanting continues, he raises his arms and head to the heavens seeking, it would seem, divine guidance for the act of foolishness he is about to commit. As the chanting stops, he barks out what sounds like “what, what, what”, probably pidgin for “What was I thinking when I agreed to do this?”, slaps his bare thighs a few times and then, in the climactic moment, executes a graceful swan dive head first toward the earth below. Oswald’s moment of brilliance a thousand years ago is acted out for us in modernity.

As the Jungle Diver descends toward the ground, the vines unfold until they reach nearly their maximum extension. The Diver is about to strike the ground at what is aptly termed terminal velocity. It is at this critical moment that the subsequent refinements to Oswald’s genius intervene. The shock absorbing platform shears off with just enough resistance to dampen the fall. Here too the reason for building the tower at the top of a sharply sloping hill reveals itself. When our Diver strikes the ground, as he is most assuredly about to do, he will strike it a glancing and thus softened blow. The keen eyed observer will have picked up a further improvement on Oswald’s original somewhat crude stroke of brilliance. The otherwise very hard and compacted soil of Pentecost Island has been fluffed up to something like a downy duvet offering a more hospitable reception.

With all the modern advances upon Oswald’s original formula wisely in place, the Jungle Diver hits the ground at about the speed at which ear hair grows and so lives to enjoy the fruits of his apparent courage. The village girls, not wise to the trickery employed in the eternal pursuit of their pleasures, are amply wooed and life in the jungle goes on for another thousand or so years thanks to the genius of Oswald.

Following the Jungle Diver ceremonies, we sloshed our way to the beach through thick black gooey mud, one of us getting stuck to the knees in the stuff requiring rescue. There we lolled away some time with warm beers whose tops and bottoms had become distended from being exposed to the exertions of high altitude in the plane ride here. They also had become over excited and now badly fizzed. There is nothing quite like warm fizzy beer drunk from cans that refuse to sit flat on a beach mat. You see that life in Vanuatu has its challenges.

When at last we departed from the Pentecost Island International Terminal it was with a sense of regret. We had just witnessed a ritual that has been a part of the Paleolithic culture of these people since the dawn of time. And those who organized the event as well as its participants were as genuinely warm and gracious as people can possibly be. I liked it a lot.

On the hour flight back to Port Vila, the Kiwi pilot thoughtfully routed us over two active volcanoes. As we approached we could see great rivers of congealed lava that spread tentacle-like down the mountains’ faces and into vast lakes of the stuff. The caldera itself was puffing up clouds of sulfurous gasses whose acrid fumes we could smell in the plane. We also got to see how large and extraordinarily remote Vanuatu’s islands are. They live now pretty much as they always have, though they rarely consume each other anymore, or so it’s said.

An Inquiry in to the Medicinal Merits of the Kava Tree

Every culture throughout the Pacific drinks kava, customarily only by men in a casual ceremony whose rites vary among the islands. It is made in the classic version by having three or four men masticate sticks and twigs from the kava tree until a slimy mucous covered glob develops. Mucous is said to enhance leaching of the essential oils from the wood. This is then spat onto a perforated banana leaf over which water is poured. The resulting liquid is drunk from coconut shell halves. Its flavor, something like equal parts kersosene and Vitalis, is unappealing to say the least, like drinking aspirin.

It is not addictive in the sense of a drug but is in the sense that you will invariably want more of most anything that brings pleasure or relieves pain. It is also made, more hygienically by grinding and beating collections of kava limbs until a sort of paste evolves, which is then mixed with water. Far more conveniently, it is available at your local friendly supermarket in commercial packets of powder. One of these packets, which I have at hand, claims on its label that the brew is “ antibacterial, antifungal, relaxing, a diuretic, an analgesic, antiseptic, anesthetic, soporific, reduces blood pressure, cures congestion and pain in connection with genito-urinal complaints.” This is some stuff, an all powerful magic elixir, better than Geritol. All it needs is mixing with vodka and you’d have the world’s most wonderful, and healthful, cocktail. Well, I just had to try it, and did. Here’s what happened.

Around Port Vila alone, there are said to be over 100 kava bars! That’s about ten times the number of churches. For perspective, however, keep in mind that a kava bar reaches on the scale of commercial enterprise not much above the lemonade stand. Each of these bars but one requires that you participate in the kava ceremony, sitting around a huge bowl of the stuff, passing around shell halves from person to person, clapping once before and three times after each gulp. Well this I had no interest in subjecting myself to and so chose the one blessedly ritual free bar.

I and some of the crew went by taxi—you are advised not to drive after drinking kava, though most do—to the appointed place early in the night. It was somewhere in a neighborhood not dotted with the better homes of Port Vila. The parking lot was bare and pot holed and local guys were sitting around outside in the dark on tree stumps and fallen logs in an apparent stupor. Things were beginning to get interesting.

Inside, the bare concrete walls and floor were illuminated by a single bulb hanging from a frayed wire. The interior appointments could be rightly characterized as jungle minimalist and the atmosphere as insalubrious if not actively infectious. I recall stepping up to the battered card table that served as a counter and accepting a small salad bowl into which a helpful aide had ladled a generous portion of kava. It was a hideous brown swill that resembled the waters of the Mississippi River just below New Orleans. With one nearly gagging gulp, I consumed the entire contents of the bowl then promptly, and as matters would evolve foolishly, requested, was served and drank another. I do recall the furtive glance from the serving aide when I asked for the second. It seemed to say, just for an instant, “I don’t think you know what you’re doing, but okay, you paid for it so here it is.”

I recall standing under the lone light saying “Hey, this stuff has no effect on me.” No sooner had the last of those ill advised words escaped my lips than things began to go downhill. First, my lips tingled and my tongue grew numb and thicker than I’ve grown accustomed to it being. Speech was thus impaired and coherence suffered soon after. I recall a sort of out of body separation of mind from my physical self. I could sense my cognitive skills, such as they were at the time, turning into a gaseous state from whatever state they are customarily found. Now this was odd, but even stranger they began to escape through my nostrils and ears. My already meager intelligence was evaporating into the cosmos. Soon my IQ had plummeted to somewhere in the range of a residential speed limit.

I have to say this was a not altogether unpleasant sensation. Life at that mind speed is really very agreeable. There is little that presents you with worrisome troubles. You don’t anticipate events nor concern yourself with frivolous detail. I was pleased to be wearing loafers so I wouldn’t face the taxing demands of untying shoe laces. Ordinary walking presented no difficulty but steps up or down required forethought and focused attention.

Alcohol, as our life experience has taught us, leads to aggressive, boisterous and in advanced cases even downright unsociable behavior. Not so with kava. It induces a torpid somnolence that detracts noticeably from conviviality. There is no such thing as a lively kava bar. So, though still very much under the influence of the noxious jungle root, we departed the kava bar for a bar with an inventory of more conventional spirits, as ever in search of merriment. After that introductory experience, Indigo now includes an ample supply of kava in its essential stores.