Travel with Indigo

Located far to the south of Port Vila, Tanna is at once the most remote and primitive of all Vanuatu islands. Its people live today as they have always lived. Those in the bush have one-room huts with a thatched roof and woven grass mat or bamboo walls. Some have floors raised above ground to deter the rats that are a constant bother.  Though the men no longer go about dressed only in a penis sheath and the women bare naked, that feature, along with the ubiquitous machete and a single earthen road, is about the only difference between their life as it is today and as it was during the Bronze Age.

The tiny villages, each with no more than ten or so huts, are squalid and their occupants are filthy. There is no electricity and so far as I could tell no candles or lanterns. When the sun sets that’s the end of light until dawn. There is no running water other than what flows through nearby streams. Sanitation is a pit for each gender. Their first white man was seen in 1983. On the island of Tanna alone there are twenty-nine different languages—not dialects mind you but languages—which I presume is one per village. That likely makes inter village dating problematic.

The local word for the penis sheath is namba, yet intriguingly there is a tribe on the island called the Big Nambas and another called the Small Nambas. With a less than desirable cachet, I would have thought the Smalls would have petitioned by now for an official name change or else deserted their tribe for another, one with a more encouraging name.

We have come here to see one of the South Pacific’s most remarkable attractions, Mount Yasur—a word for God– said to be the world’s most accessible active volcano. I considered this a dubious distinction as accessing an active volcano is not something that should be high on the itinerary of the prudent traveler. And as you will see we chose a route that belied the claim to a considerable degree.

We piled into a dilapidated Toyota 4 WD pick-up truck, owned by our guide, the laconic Yobill, to begin our journey. I chose the right front seat, which turned out to be a mistake. Its adjustable mechanism was stuck in the most forward position so that my knees were pinned to the dash. The window was stuck half open thereby precluding me from hanging a casual arm on the sill and blocking much of the fresh air needed on this sultry night.

What was recently a fairly decent dirt road, one vehicle wide, was now a considerable mess. Torrential rains a few days before had washed deep gullies, sharp edged craters and corrugated chasms into its surface limiting our speed to about five, maybe ten miles per hour (the speedometer didn’t work so I couldn’t say exactly). These surface conditions jostled and bounced us with a vengeance for the entire distance and turned what should have been a forty-five minute pleasant excursion one way into a an hour and a half of sustained misery. To compound the matter, our driver had for some reason badly over inflated the truck’s tires, so it was as if we were riding on iron rimmed wagon wheels.

We arrived near the volcano just at dark, forded a small stream and traveled across a mile or so of gray volcanic sand fields. In the middle of these there loomed into view in the headlights a man standing by the road dressed nondescriptly and toting a machete. Yobill announced that he is the volcano gatekeeper appointed by the chief of the tribe that owns the surrounding land and demands payment of $25 per head. Unfortunately we had no funds with us but persuaded him that we would leave money for the chief in town next day and he relented.

As we were chatting with the gatekeeper, the night clouds, smoke and fumes hanging over the volcano’s crater were lit up by periodic flashes of brilliant red, and the sound of thunder rolled at us down the mountain slopes. It was at once ominous and exciting.

When at last we reached the end of the wretched road, the last quarter mile over terrain I thought only a tank could manage, we were in a wide field of volcanic waste. We parked the truck and hiked two hundred yards up a trail littered with detritus thrown there by recent eruptions.

On reaching the pinnacle, we peered cautiously over the crater lip into what can only be described as Hell on Earth, the wrath of Satan, the place Baptist preachers harangue their flocks about. Indeed it looked like the place my dear mother once told me I’d go if I didn’t change my ways. Well I didn’t change and sure enough here I am. Mom, you were right.

All around the steep conical slopes of the crater laid chunks of fiery glowing embers that moments before had erupted into the cool night air. At the pit of the crater cone, was a roiling amorphous mass of molten rock that had oozed its way up from the earth’s mantle far below. It was a thermo luminescent quagmire in constant motion. Every few minutes there would come an eructation of smoke and steam and poisonous fumes so powerful that we felt its shock wave standing there on the rim. Following the explosion, an enormous geyser of globular molten rock would spew wildly into the air high above where we stood, getting and holding our attention.

Our guide cautioned us not to wander far because should the wind direction shift unexpectedly, as it often does, the light blobs of superheated viscous fire that lit up the sky would be blown in our direction with deeply painful and maybe deadly result. Needless to say nobody wandered. Just a week ago an unfortunate Japanese tourist had been struck and sustained quite serious injuries. It will not surprise you to learn that medical facilities on Tanna Island are not all that one could hope for. There are band aids, I believe, but not a whole lot more.

Once we had absorbed the arresting scenery offered by this glimpse into the bowels of earth’s furnace, we took our leave lest the winds change. We were over-awed by Mount Yasur and grateful for the experience, never to be forgotten.  Even the one and a half hour night ride back to Indigo could not dampen our spirits.

The John Frumms of Tanna Island

In a world with no shortage of offbeat religious sects, tiny Tanna Island is home to what must surely be one of the most bizarre. It is a cargo cult. These are systems of belief—almost hallucinatory it would seem—all in Melanesia, in which it is thought that the subject of their worship would one day come to them bearing a plentiful cargo of useful goods like home appliances, never mind that there is no electricity with which to operate them. You can laugh, as I’m sure you are prompted to, but I’m not making this up. The world’s last remaining cargo cult is right here on Tanna Island not far from Mount Yasur. Their messiah is a white guy who they call John Frumm, a name I’m guessing that is a corruption of something like “Hi, my name is John from California.”

The story as I gathered it is that a small, slight white man with green eyes landed here at a place called Green Point in 1938, probably an island trader. At that time the island was beset with charmless, sanctimonious missionaries who strictly forbade those in their thrall to practice any of the fun stuff they had been practicing for a thousand years. Talk about party poopers. No longer could they drink kava, dance, worship any of their pantheons or, most distressingly, swap women for sexual purposes. Well, our man Frumm shows up and says lose the Bibles and go back to your ancient practices and as a reward I’ll return with an immense cargo of material goods that will make your life a whole lot better. Within just three years half the island had forsaken Christianity, and no small wonder they did.

Another John Frumm, this one a mountebank, appeared in 1943 proclaiming himself King of America and Tanna, clearly a man with a gift for self promotion, and had an airfield cleared from the jungle to accommodate his cargo planes that he said would soon arrive with all the promised goods. So far no such planes have arrived, but who knows? Again, in 1945 a Navy Seabee from Florida arrived claiming to be a John Frumm emissary and had himself a fine old time with the island at his feet. Today the believers dance and sing and drink kava and I suppose swap women, and they pray for the reappearance of John Frumm. He is thought to be an American and so the worship practices include iconography like American flags and such. This annoys the Vanuatu government who have tried but failed to eradicate the religion.  Getting rid of the missionaries would be far easier and humanitarian too.