The Miss Tutti Frutti Contest

by Graeme Lay

  ‘Just let me out here, please.’

  ‘By the hotel?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  The car skids to a halt, and the woman turns and grins. She seems deliriously happy. ‘More cake?’

  ‘No thanks. And thanks very much for the lift. It was a big help.’

  ‘No worries, mate,’ says the man, raising the rum bottle. It’s now only a third full. I get out and bend down to the driver’s window. The woman gives me a dopey grin. ‘Bye,’ she drawls, rippling her fingers.

  ‘Bye. Drive carefully.’

  She giggles, puts the Mazda into gear, and they drive off slowly, both singing. The car weaves, but there’s little danger of her hitting anything, because it’s the only vehicle in sight.

  By happy coincidence Henrik, Pia, Godfred, Irene and I are all on the same flight north to Vava’u. Before we leave, the Royal Tongan Airlines people weigh not only our bags but us. One by one we step on to the scales and our body weights are carefully noted. The flight itself takes about forty minutes. Half an hour into the air and we’re all exclaiming at the beauty of the islands of Vava’u, scattered across the ocean below us.

  Vava’u is like a big piece of geological jigsaw puzzle, tilted south so that the sea has flooded its coast, turning valleys into sounds and mountains to hills. The result is a labyrinth of waterways, and ridges covered with rain forests and palm trees. And in the centre of these sounds, enclosed by hills, is the South Pacific islands’ finest harbour, Port of Refuge.

  It was the Spaniard Antonio Mourelle who, in 1781, came across Vava’u and the harbour at its core, joyfully naming it Puerto de Refugio. But the Tongans had been using it for about 3,000 years before that, calling it Lolo ’a Halaevalu, meaning Oil of the Princess Halaevalu, because of the sheen of the harbour’s waters on a still day. Mourelle claimed the islands for Spain but nothing came of that, and today the harbour is treasured as a haven by hundreds of yachties from all over the world, who sail into it gratefully and moor right on the front step of the island’s town, Neiafu. Yacht charters are big in Neiafu, too. As a result, the attractive hillside town contains an odd mix of people: Tongans in traditional tupeni (skirts), ta’ovalu (waist mats) and sandals wander about the streets, along with chic Californian couples in designer nautical gear, stocking up on their vegies, canned drinks, Chinese sneakers and handicrafts.

  In Neiafu I’m staying at a newish hotel right above the harbour. It’s a heavy concrete-block building with a supermarket on the floor above and a restaurant below the guestrooms. Remembering the seismic hyperactivity throughout these islands, I scrutinise the block walls for possible fissures and wonder about local building codes, until I’m distracted by the panoramic view of yachts, harbour, hills and forest from the balcony. My travelling companions have dispersed to other parts of the town, but we’re reuniting for dinner tomorrow night. After watching the twilight turn the coconut palms on the hills to mop-topped silhouettes, I go downstairs to watch television.

  Back in Nuku’alofa the television stations serve up a mixture of cartoons, rabid evangelists from the American South, CNN news, and sport, mainly boxing and wrestling. Here in the far north, however, they haven’t yet got live TV, although they’re working on it. There is a satellite dish on the front lawn of the hotel. A big flex runs from it across the grass and through the bar window to the TV set, which is sitting on the bar. That this is a temporary arrangement can be deduced from the ditch that has been dug across the lawn, in readiness for the cable. Keen to see what has been happening in the world outside the kingdom, I watch a tall, pale, skinny American missionary who is fiddling with the TV’s remote. He is getting jumpier by the minute and resorting to some very un-missionary language. Jamming his thumb on the remote button, he produces a picture of a very black, frizzy-haired woman extolling a brand of washing powder called, oddly, Omo. The missionary starts yelling. ‘What the fuck is going on here? Where the fuck has CNN gone? Jesus …’

  It seems that the dish outside has been aimed at the wrong satellite, so that all we can get is a broadcast from Papua New Guinea. This consists mostly of Melanesians advertising cigarettes, deodorants and Omo, interspersed with old American comedy shows. This rapidly palls, so I go upstairs and get into bed.

  Some time in the night I’m woken by a strange sensation. The room is swaying. Nothing sudden, nothing violent, it’s just as if the building is swinging gently to a silent subterranean tune. The ceiling light swings back and forth, as if it’s conducting the Earth’s movement. Unmistakably, it is an earthquake. I lie paralysed, my mind convulsing in time to the movement of the tectonic plate. I think of the supermarket above, and the crammed shelves of canned beef and mackerel, jandals, Coke and Pepsi, Royal beer, cheeseballs and Chinese sneakers, under which I will be entombed, until my remains are dug out and displayed around the world on CNN news. But nothing happens. The swaying eventually stops and the building remains intact.

  Next day, when I mention the incident excitedly to some locals, they shrug. Earthquake? Don’t worry about it, they happen all the time. Later, back in Auckland, I see on The New Zealand Herald’s back page a dramatic aerial colour photograph of a newly born volcano which exploded out of the sea in western Vava’u the night I experienced the earthquake. The Tongans have to think up a name for the new island, but before they’ve settled on one there’s another earthquake which takes the island back under the sea again.

  As elsewhere in the South Pacific, on Vava’u the Church of the Latter Day Saints seems to be winning the competition for local souls. But judging by one of the Mormon churches I see in Neiafu, the other faiths may be fighting back. Someone – an enraged Methodist, perhaps? – has torn some of the lettering from a cream-painted wall so that it reads CHURCH OF THE LATTER DAY A NTS. Watching a group of identically clad Mormons slowly making their way up the street in the distance, it seems to me a particularly inventive piece of vandalism.

  It is, I find, an illusion that time stands still in Tonga. As elsewhere, it flees. Godfred, Henrik, Pia, Irene and I have a farewell dinner in Neiafu – a Madras curry cooked by a Cockney. We exchange email addresses and hope we’ll meet again. Henrik and Pia have met other Danes and are off to Suva to crew on their yacht, before returning to Denmark to breed. Irene is still finding family and Godfred has another wharf to design. We have had one of those travelling friendships, fleeting, fraternal, memorable. And as for Vava’u, well it’s undeniably the loveliest part of Tonga. Yet recently young men in a rugby team from these islands went on a tour of New Zealand and, on the day they were due to fly home, vanished into the suburbs of south Auckland. It appears the rugby was just a pretext for the players to emigrate illegally. When it came to a choice of whether to spend the rest of their lives on beautiful tropical islands or take their chances on the mean streets of south Auckland, they made a dash for the latter.

  A while ago, too, I had a fax from a schoolteacher at one of the secondary colleges on Vava’u. Her seventh form English class had been studying my South Pacific novel Temptation Island as their set text, and had prepared some questions for me to answer. While flattered in the way authors always are by such requests, I was also surprised: the novel is about a South Pacific island whose government is corrupt, malfeasance is rampant, aid money squandered, the civil service bloated and press freedom severely curtailed. There is violence and more than a little sex in the story. It could be seen as subversive to place such a book in the hands of young Tongans, but bravely, in my opinion, the teacher had decided that it was important to do so. I faxed my replies back to the students but never heard from them or the teacher again. Then, just a few months later, a tropical cyclone struck Vava’u. The college had its roof blown off, causing, according to news reports, ‘serious loss of school textbooks and other equipment’. To date I have not received any re-orders.

  SEVEN

  SURVIVING THE ROCK

  NIUE

  MILLIONS OF YEARS AGO a crustal convulsion beneath the Pacific Ocean heave
d a huge coral atoll and its lagoon sixty metres above the sea. In time the coral fossilised into limestone, and its surface weathered into a veneer of soil which supported tropical bush and rain forest. About 1,800 years ago people from Tonga and Samoa discovered the big uplifted rock, named it and settled it, adapting skilfully to its singular topography, living by fishing and farming.

  Captain James Cook and his crew sighted Niue’s rugged shores on 20 June 1774, during the explorer’s second world voyage. The next day Cook took possession of the island for Britain, somewhat unconvincingly, for on the three occasions he tried to land, coral rocks and small-arms fire were exchanged, obliging the Englishmen to sail away, although the explorer fixed the island’s position nicely. Cook had his revenge on the locals by naming Niue ‘Savage Island’, a name which to this day rankles with Niueans everywhere – almost as much as it rankles when people confuse Niue with Nauru, a ravaged heap of bird excrement 3,000 kilometres away to the north-west.

  Sailing away to the west, Cook noted of Niue, ‘To judge the whole garment by the skirts it cannot produce much, for so much as we saw of it consisted wholly of coral rocks all overrun with trees shrubs etc and not a bit of soil was to be seen.’ He then speculated on how the coral rocks, first formed in the sea, came to be thrown up to such a height: a pertinent question which had to await the following century and the new science of geology for a definitive answer.

  In the 1840s the English missionaries arrived, and with the assistance of a Niuean convert, Peniamina, christianised the island. Niue chiefs gained British protection in 1900, and in 1901 Niue was annexed to New Zealand. The island achieved self-government in 1974, in free association with New Zealand. The most significant implication of this was that Niueans had open access to the country 2,200 kilometres to the south-west.

  Niue is like a big, diamond-shaped dish raised above the ocean, in the centre of a triangle formed by Samoa, Tonga and Rarotonga. It is a rough diamond too, its cliffs battered and undercut by the sea, its ancient coral pinnacles scalpel sharp, its coastline and skirting reef providing no still-water anchorage. There is no surface water – no streams, rivers or lakes – and droughts are not uncommon. The island absorbs the tropical rainfall like a giant sponge, so the main water supply must be obtained through artesian bores.

  How does an isolated, fossilised coral island with limited natural resources generate enough export income to pay for the imports on which its population depends? This fundamental economic question is one faced by many Pacific islands. Some, such as Pitcairn, for a while went the postage-stamp way, but email and declining numbers of stamp collectors all but ended that. Tonga rents its airspace lucratively to American satellite companies, although most of the profits from ‘Tongasat’ go to the king’s only daughter, Princess Pilolevu Tuita, who is rumoured to own 60 percent of the company. Tuvalu exploits its internet code ‘.tv’. For years Niueans tried to earn an export income from their traditional occupation, agriculture – copra, coconuts, kumara, passionfruit, limes. Nothing really worked. The island’s skeletal soil, periodic storms and droughts, fickle shipping and prohibitive airfreight costs meant that such schemes, as elsewhere on remote Pacific islands, usually ended in backbreak and heartbreak. One local entrepreneur even tried freezing and exporting the excellent dry-grown Niuean taro to New Zealand, but this scheme too came to grief because of poor distribution and marketing.

  Emigration began in the 1950s and ’60s and reached a peak in the following decade. Niueans, attracted by relatively high wages and overtime in the factories of Auckland, turned their backs on their bush gardens, left their villages and bought a one-way plane ticket to New Zealand. The main export of Niue became Niueans. Whole families flew south, then wrote back and encouraged others to uproot themselves. The contemporary population figures stand out as starkly as the coral pinnacles which surround Niue: fewer than 2,000 people still live on the ‘Rock’ (as the locals call it); 2,000 live in Sydney and 20,000 in New Zealand. Most of the latter are now New Zealand-born.

  And as the people flew away, remittances from relatives who had emigrated and New Zealand aid money became the primary sources of income for Niue. Aid money from New Zealand to Niue was, in per capita terms, the highest to any Pacific country, and most of it went towards maintaining a bloated government bureaucracy. During the 1990s, however, aid was severely cut by the New Zealand government. Lay-offs of public servants began, and the Niueans were urged to get on and develop their private sector. Was there a private sector in a nation of fewer than 2,000 people? There was, but it faced formidable obstacles.

  Niue is separated from its nearest neighbour, Tonga, by 500 kilometres of open ocean. Its soil is so thin and its bedrock so hard that a compressor and pneumatic drill are needed to dig a decent grave and bury the dead. Goods imported or exported by sea must be loaded or unloaded laboriously at the small, exposed wharf. Then there were the airline woes. A scheduled air link with the outside world is an isolated island’s life-support system, but Niue’s air links with its neighbours and with New Zealand have been tenuous. For two years in the late 1980s almost all air services to the island were suspended, meaning that the only regular way in or out was the once-a-week flight by small plane via American Samoa – a circuitous route which was an impediment to all but the most determined of travellers. Then, on 4 February 1990, the west coast of Niue was blitzed by Cyclone Ofa, which inflicted grievous damage on the island’s food crops and one hotel. Even though the hotel was situated twenty-five metres above the sea, coral boulders were hurled at it at point-blank range, like mortar bombs.

  As the jet does a low sweep over Niue, the raised atoll’s geographical features stand out vividly: a notched coastline and close-in reef to the west; a jagged makatea of coral to the east; an expanse of rain forest and scrubby interior; an encircling road punctuated by a few tiny villages; and a small cliff-top capital town, Alofi. On the plane with me is the viceregal party from New Zealand. One of the quaint legacies of Niue’s close political ties to New Zealand is that the governor-general of New Zealand is also the governor-general of Niue. This means that at some time during each New Zealand governor-general’s tenure, he or she will pay an official visit to Niue and exchange assurances of goodwill. I have been fortunate enough to be invited, along with other guests, for the visit of the current incumbent who, among other duties, is to declare open a new hotel.

  At the airport the white-suited governor-general is garlanded and welcomed with due ceremony by the Niue prime minister, his cabinet and other dignitaries, including Miss Niue, winner of the local beauty pageant, before the rest of us are collected and driven away to our accommodation – in my case, a motel to the north-west of the island.

  Although Niue lacks the spectacular peaks of a high volcanic island, there are panoramic views of the Pacific almost all the way along the road, which encircles the island some thirty metres above the sea. And the road is a good one: wide and well surfaced, undulating gently as it passes through stands of coconut palms, plantation plots and scrubland vegetation, following the island’s perimeter, which was in pre-uplift times the rim of the former atoll. The centre of the island is bush-covered, but even here the old coral protrudes like harrows through the farmed plots of land. And all around the island, where the rim dips or plunges to the sea, the landforms are a wonder.

  Rainfall permeating the coral rock forms a lens of fresh water metres underground. Around the edges of the island, at sea level, the water leaks out, sometimes forcefully, sculpting the rock into a karst landscape. The coastline is particularly spectacular near Avaiki, where I’m staying. A track from the plateau descends through a sloping cavern, before emerging on to the reef. The cave is festooned with stalagmites and stalactites, pale brown in colour, their ends dripping like old men’s penises. On the cave walls and ceiling the rock is smooth and tactile, shaped into fantastic patterns. In places the stalagmites and stalactites have met, forming fluted columns of stone like petrified tree trunks, and at the base of
the caverns are blue-green pools, part fresh, part saline, where tiny fluorescent fish and sea urchins make their home. Slipping into one of the pools, I’m refreshed immediately, by sea water on one side and fresh water on the other. Underwater the visibility is utterly clear, unclouded by sand or silt – a snorkeller’s heaven.

  When I snorkel off the wharf near Alofi, I can see for nearly forty-five metres. Although I’m stuck near the surface like a fly on a ceiling, every detail of the sea bottom far below is visible, every rock, every reef fish, even the outline of a sunken boat. I can see canyons of coral rock and the sinuous movements of a small, white-nosed reef shark as it patrols the sea bed. Then, just 100 metres from the wharf, there is a sudden fall-off and the purple of the ocean’s abyss. In parts of Niue you can stand on a cliff, cast a line just metres out and it will land in water over thirty metres deep. And for that reason the island’s fishing is uniquely accessible.

  Every man on Niue fishes – with a bamboo rod from the rocks, a net from an aluminium dinghy, or a prong-like device from a traditional canoe. The Niuean canoe – the vaka – is a small, light outrigger whose hull is hewn from the trunk of a moota tree and whose outrigger is made from a fou sapling. The canoes have to be small and light, as they’re carried down the cliff on their owners’ shoulders. They are kept in the many storm-proof caves which pock the coastal cliffs, and are launched at dusk. Bigger fishing vessels have to be launched from the wharf at Alofi, using a derrick.