Getting Stoned with Savages

by J. Maarten Troost

  “It’s nice like this,” she said as we rolled along a road that became progressively smoother as we neared Port Vila. The afternoon light had softened, and the colors of the island assumed a depth of intensity not found outside the tropics. We drove parallel with a long white-sand beach. The tide was in over the reef shelf, and in the distance the breakers seemed to stretch like long, unbroken lines of ivory streamers. Soon the dense forest gave way to verdant pastures where clusters of cattle, pure descendents of a French herd prized for their tender meat, milled about in the doleful manner of cows everywhere. There were signs now pointing the way to places of interest for tourists—a beach club, white-water rafting, horseback riding—and we were very happy to find ourselves on a paved road that took us past the gated homes of expatriates and the sprawling Le Meridien resort until we crested a couple of hills and found the turnoff to Elluk, the prosperous neighborhood where Kathy had a house overlooking Erakor Bay and the shimmering Pacific Ocean.

  Settling comfortably on Kathy’s verandah with a bottle of Tusker, the national beer, I decided that I liked Efate very much. Kathy was nonplussed by our misadventures with her SUV. “It happens to everyone,” she said, very gracefully I thought. Indeed, she even offered to lend us her vehicle again whenever we might have need of it. She was from Pennsylvania originally, and after twenty years in the South Pacific, she had clearly adopted the tropical temperament: Stuff happens, but tomorrow the sun will rise again. Below us, bathed in the golden hues of sunset, the catamarans that belonged to the Crowne Plaza resort were being towed back to the shore by the hotel staff, who had raced across Erakor Lagoon in open boats with outboard engines. One sensed that this was an evening ritual for them, rescuing tourists from themselves. Elsewhere on the water, the local boys had taken out a few outrigger canoes, which they were gleefully using as diving platforms, and their shrills of laughter suggested an enviable boyhood. A pontoon boat weaved around them as it ferried passengers to the Erakor Island Resort; both the boys and the tourists waved, and one sensed that they were genuinely happy to see each other.

  It seemed, for the moment, that Efate was about as agreeable an island as one could find, a perfect blending of worlds, where the comfort of the West mixed easily with the raw beauty of the tropics, and though I knew that this was a naïve and silly thought, I voiced it anyway, possibly because I was on my second Tusker.

  “Well,” Kathy said, “it’s a great view from here, but don’t be fooled by it. The government is incredibly corrupt here. Malaria is a huge problem on the outer islands. Literacy rates are among the lowest in the Pacific. The status of women here is just a fraction higher than that of pigs. And crime is a big problem in Port Vila.”

  I had figured as much. I wasn’t a greenhorn anymore in these parts. Our two years on an atoll had shattered the illusion of island life. But I was fond of illusion.

  “It’s a great view, though.”

  The hills and the islands and the sea were bathed in a crimson twilight.

  “It’s the most beautiful view in the world,” Kathy said.

  WHEN PAUL THEROUX, THE WORLD’S GREATEST LIVING Travel Writer, visited Port Vila some years ago to gather material for a book about the South Pacific, he stopped by the local library on Father Lini Highway, the two-lane road that carves through the town’s center, and discovered, to his evident pleasure, that the stacks were flush with his books. I know this because shortly after we arrived in Port Vila, I too could be found inside the library, idly perusing the scattering of books written by Theroux, one of which was The Happy Isles of Oceania. I opened it up, turned to his chapter on Vanuatu, and read his account of visiting the library in Port Vila, which left me feeling very happy indeed, for here I was now, doing exactly what Paul Theroux was doing: standing in a library looking at the books written by Paul Theroux. This pleased me immensely. Theroux didn’t have much else to say about Port Vila, and he soon moved on to Tanna Island, where he engaged in an epic battle with fire-and-brimstone Christian missionaries. I couldn’t blame him. For itinerant travel writers, Port Vila is the worst kind of place. It is captivatingly pleasant.

  Appealingly situated on rolling hills, offering vistas over the bays and lagoons that jabbed the island like impertinent fingers, Port Vila is quite likely the finest town of its size in the South Pacific. Admittedly, this is saying very little. It isn’t as if the islands are graced with their own Pragues and Romes, but then again, neither Prague nor Rome has palm-fringed beaches. Oceania is a world of villages, each with its own rules and routines. And with strikingly few exceptions, the larger urban areas like Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea are either cesspools of criminality or dissolute slums like South Tarawa in Kiribati, where the inhabitants drift ever further from the village culture that has sustained them for generations. Port Vila, then, is an agreeable anomaly in the South Pacific. It’s nice.

  It wasn’t always so. Like all large towns in the region, Port Vila is a town built by Westerners for Westerners. Indeed, until the 1940s, the Ni-Vanuatu were not even allowed to live in Vila, as the locals call their town. Any Ni-Vanuatu men found wandering about after 9 P.M. were arrested. This, remarkably, was an improvement over the state of affairs that prevailed in the 1880s, when Port Vila was little more than a debauched port for planters, beachcombers, ex-convicts, and blackbirders—rapacious labor recruiters who plied the South Pacific, filling their holds with bodies to send to plantations and mines throughout the Southern Hemisphere. One hotel in particular came to be known as the “bloodhouse.” R. J. Fletcher in Isles of Illusion (published in 1925) described an evening at the inn:

  I have seen recruiters playing poker after a successful season. The drink is champagne…ordered in cases. The regulation method is to shout for a case, kick the lid off and open the bottles with an 18" knife. The stakes are merely the recruited niggers who are ranged solemnly around the wall of the room and change hands many times a night. Fancy the excitement of a jackpot of four stalwart niggers and two women (total value 92 pounds) in the pool.

  It is difficult to imagine what Vanuatu must have been like in the nineteenth century, when everyone from unscrupulous sandalwood traders to zealous missionaries began to appear, uninvited of course, on islands whose inhabitants had developed a fine appreciation for the culinary possibilities of human flesh. The Ni-Vanuatu ate a good many of the foreigners among them, but it wasn’t long before the tide had turned and settlers could be found posting signs that said DOGS AND NIGGERS ARE FORBIDDEN TO ENTER INSIDE THE PORTALS OF THESE GATES. ANY DOGS OR NIGGERS FOUND THEREIN WILL SUFFER THE PENALTY OF DEATH.

  The settlers were just as charming toward other settlers. By the turn of the century, there were 55 British settlers and 151 French. “We have just celebrated Christmas,” wrote one observer in 1888, “and Christmas in the New Hebrides is a fearful and wonderful sight. Thank God it only comes once a year. The French and the English had a pitched battle but luckily they were all too drunk to shoot straight.” Port Vila’s days as a distant backwater eventually took a turn toward the farcical with the establishment of the Anglo-French Condominium, one of history’s more peculiar colonial arrangements. This joint rule represented an attempt by the British and French governments to restore some order to the islands. The Condominium, which was established in 1906, could best be described as a petulant compromise between the French and the English. Anyone who has ever watched two cranky toddlers argue over an Etch A Sketch can envision the result. You can’t have it, said the French, who wanted to annex the New Hebrides to settle their ex-convicts from New Caledonia. Well, you can’t have it either, said the English. England, of course, couldn’t have cared less about the New Hebrides, but its little brother Australia did, and so the Condominium was proclaimed. The French busily drew plans for the islands, and then the English erased those plans and created their own, which were then scribbled over by the French, and so on, until finally, exasperated, the two countries drew a line down the middle of the Etch A Sketch. The result was two high
commissions, two governments, two official ruling languages, two flags that competed for the loftiest perch, two currencies, two postage stamps, and two educational systems. Depending on where they lived, the Ni-Vanuatu found themselves inhabiting a world that leaned either anglophone or francophone, and each group was told to mistrust the other. As one can imagine, this did nothing for the subsequent stability of independent Vanuatu. In any given year, the government is likely to change as the francophones topple an anglophone government, who then spend their time plotting to remove the francophones, and so on. On the bright side, in Port Vila one can now begin one’s day with a flaky croissant and a steaming bowl of café au lait and end it with a heaping platter of fish and chips washed down with a frothy pint of lager.

  Today, some thirty thousand people live in Vila, and while the vast majority are Ni-Vanuatu, the atmosphere, by Pacific standards, is decidedly cosmopolitan. The center of town reflects a fading colonial heritage and a rising future in banking. There are fifty-five banks in Port Vila. As far as I could tell, only three were banks in the traditional sense, bricks-and-mortar buildings containing vaults and money and tellers and ATMs. The other fifty-two banks were a little more ephemeral. Vanuatu is a tax haven. Inevitably every year or so, it is listed as one of the top ten go-to destinations for money launderers and tax evaders. This confers a certain air of intrigue to Port Vila. Sitting in a café, I’d find myself wondering about the man at the next table, reclining there with his pipe and briefcase, picking at his croque monsieur. A missionary? Or an international supercriminal?

  One tends not to think of the South Pacific as a particularly diverse place. People tend to be attracted to the center of things, and no region is more peripheral. Yet, in Port Vila, one finds a town inhabited by daring French fashionistas clicking down the sidewalks in designer heels alongside plump Melanesian women in modest flower-print Mother Hubbards. There are Australian tourists, all inexplicably wearing cornrows on reddened scalps, wandering through the covered market alongside ink-dark, barefoot men from the outer islands. Every couple of weeks, a cruise ship disgorges a thousand gaping visitors, who spend their day in Vanuatu buying trinkets in the market and perfume in the duty-free shops, but mostly drinking beer, before returning to their ship and continuing on their journey exploring the sights and sounds of the South Seas. There are also semi-tame frontier men from the Australian outback who have settled in Port Vila, where they pass their evenings at the pub complaining about what a good-for-nothing dirty sod your Ni-Van is, as all the while their Ni-Vanuatu girlfriends twitter beside them. There are Chinese merchants who have established a veritable mini-Chinatown on the streets above Father Lini Highway. There is a Vietnamese community, descendents of Tonkinese laborers recruited by the French to work the coconut plantations. And there are the missionaries, in town for a few days, splurging on lemonades, awaiting a flight to the outer islands, where they will try to convince the many who retain kastom ways that they really, really need to put some clothes on.

  During our first few weeks in Port Vila, we simply absorbed this odd tableau. From the terrace of Le Café du Village, a dockside restaurant where we’d linger after sumptuous seafood meals, there was an appealing view of the harbor, with several dozen sailboats anchored in the safety between town and nearby Iririki Island, a green-domed isle that in colonial times served as the home of the British high commissioner and now held a high-end resort. Since we were now in the summer months—a relative term, of course, in the South Pacific—the sailboats were riding out the cyclone season in the splendid shelter of Vila Harbor before moving on in their rambling journeys to who knows where. Graybeards, I called their captains, for nearly to a man they sported proud whiskers. There must have been a rule about it, I figured, one decreeing that men sailing the South Seas are required to look like dissolute buccaneers. One Frenchman, who was refurbishing his two-master for the entertainment of the diners at the Waterfront Bar and Grill—or so it seemed to me—wore a resplendent white beard, a braided ponytail, and a golden loop in his ear (to pay for his funeral, of course), and spent his days ambling up and down his gangplank, flexing his tattoos, wondering how he might be able to say Argh, matey in French. During the sailing season, the harbor was dense with boats from New Caledonia, a French colony about a three-day sail away, and the colonists from New Caledonia would spend their days pretending to be colonists from Vanuatu, barking orders at waitresses and maids.

  It wasn’t long before I began to envy the yachties. The ones who had crossed an ocean or two invariably had boats notable not only for their size but for their homeyness. And well they might, since for many of the yachties their boats were the only home they had. It had taken us the better part of a month to find a house to rent. This is because Port Vila is an astonishingly expensive place to live. We had thought, foolishly perhaps, that as Westerners with Western money, we would be able to afford a relatively sumptuous abode, a house with a view and a garden, we hoped. Vanuatu, after all, is one of the poorest countries on earth, with a per capita income of about $700 per year. Surely, we thought, the cost of living would reflect that. And so when Madame Poiret, a real-estate agent and property manager, began to show us the homes available for rent, we sputtered in disbelief as we contemplated paying the equivalent of our rent in Washington for a derelict cinder-block structure just one small earthquake away from collapsing down a steep cliff.

  “Le paradis est cher,” said Madame Poiret, dragging on a cigarette. I hadn’t been in Port Vila long enough to determine whether this was paradise. But it was certainly expensive. We were trying, uncharacteristically, to be fiscally prudent. I had invested the money I’d saved from my time at the World Bank, and being a savvy investor, I had put most of it in tech stocks. I had one year, one last year, to write a book that someone would buy, and in the meantime, we planned to live off Sylvia’s salary. Eventually, we swallowed hard and moved into a small bungalow that offered a sweeping view of Vila Harbor. Of course, between the house and the view there stood a three-story apartment building. We couldn’t afford the million-dollar view, but if we stood on chairs, which we did daily, we’d just manage to see the waters of Mele Bay and the verdant hillsides that stretched toward Devil’s Point. It was a modest house, nicely furnished, with the notable exception of the bed, which had a mattress that looked as if it had been the scene of a horrifically bloody crime in a brothel. We turned it over and concluded that there had been at least two crimes committed on it.

  “Do you think six sheets are enough?” Sylvia wondered. She had divested a Chinese shop of its stock of sheets, and if one looked closely, one could see the overlapping contours of a Buddhist temple, a wooden bridge spanning a waterfall, a panda grazing on bamboo shoots, a pagoda, and a strutting peacock, a jumble of Chinese shadows.

  Once moved in, we soon settled into our routines. Sylvia managed a few development projects for FSPI, which now and then took her far and wide around the region. Whereas in Kiribati she had dealt with excrement and disease, now she found herself involved with coral-reef restoration and promoting good governance. I worked at my book, and when I managed to reach my daily word count, I’d catch a minibus into town and spend the late afternoon walking around, idly wondering when I might feel at home here. Typically, whenever I move someplace new, which I have often enough, it takes me no time at all before I feel as if I am somehow a part of the world around me. Even when I had no desire to be a part of that world, as periodically happened in Kiribati, the circumstances of place, the peculiarities of geography, ensured that, like it or not, this was home. Port Vila, however, simply felt strange to me, and with each passing week, the town felt odder still. I’d find myself at the Rossi Restaurant, next door to the lingerie shop, sipping an espresso, idly perusing a faded Paris Match or Le Figaro, listening to the perfumed Frenchwomen planning a dinner party and the men discussing Marseille’s prospects in the French soccer league, and I’d think, okay, this is where the French people hang out. Now and then, I’d meet Sylvi
a for a drink after work at the Office Pub, where we’d watch with mouths agape as the other customers, middle-aged Australian men, downed their stubbies while watching the footy on the telly and hurled the most startlingly colorful invectives at the cowering barmaids, whom they referred to as “darkies.” All right, we thought, it appears that Australia has rednecks too, and this is where they gather. Some weekends, we’d find ourselves at Le Meridien resort, at the far end of Erakor Lagoon, where we’d rent a catamaran and sail the length of the lagoon, about two miles, and just as we’d near Erakor Village, a community off the electricity grid, a powerboat would be sent for us. “Shall I tow you back?” asked the resort employee. “No, it’s all right,” I’d explain. “I can sail, and the wind is fine, won’t even require any tacking.” But he’d be politely insistent, and I’d politely decline the rope, not because I was rude, but because I was prideful, and we’d compromise and I’d tack, turn the boat around, let out the sail, and glide under escort away from the men fishing in their wooden outrigger canoes and back toward the French teenagers waterskiing behind speedboats until we were safely docked at the resort, a gilded enclave lavishly decorated with the artwork of Vila’s most prominent local artist, a gay Russian émigré. At dinner parties hosted by those employed to do good in Vanuatu, namely aid officials from the United Nations and the Asian Development Bank, I’d be asked, as a former employee of the World Bank, for my opinions regarding Vanuatu’s development. I had some, and I offered them, feeling very self-conscious not least because I had hardly met any Ni-Vanuatu, except, briefly, for the servants who were silkily moving on the periphery of the dining room, clearing dishes, filling glasses.

  It was as if there was a virtual wall separating us from the real Vanuatu. We inhabited the same geography, but we might as well have been on different planets. I found it most peculiar. Working on my book on Kiribati, I recalled that even though we’d had more money than the I-Kiribati—or rather, Sylvia had more money—there was no such wall. It didn’t matter if you were Bill Gates; everyone swam in the same shit on Tarawa. In Port Vila, however, one could find pâté and smoked salmon at the Au Bon Marché, the local supermarket, and in the restaurants, diners were encouraged to eat coconut crab, an endangered species. But that was solely for Westerners. The Ni-Vanuatu ate laplap, a gooey paste of manioc cooked in an earth oven, or boiled taro. Most Westerners lived on the hillsides overlooking Vila Harbor. Most Ni-Vanuatu lived on the other side of those hills in shanties built of pilfered wood and tin.