Getting Stoned with Savages

by J. Maarten Troost

  It certainly wasn’t unpleasant living in Vila. Frankly, I am very fond of smoked salmon and pâté. But it was strange in a way that I hesitated to define. Partly, this was due to the cost of living. New York and Tokyo are expensive places to live. This is unremarkable. But Vanuatu is firmly in the third world of nations. By every measurement—health, literacy, the status of women—Vanuatu ranks even lower than Kiribati, which is a low bar indeed. Typically, the upside to living in a poor country is that it’s cheap. But as we settled in Port Vila, I was left utterly stupefied by the prices paid for basic utilities. Though we were very pleased that, unlike in Kiribati, these utilities were at least available in Port Vila, we found ourselves gasping whenever we received a bill. We had a refrigerator and a wall-unit air conditioner that we used only sporadically, and yet our monthly electricity bill was far higher than what we’d paid in Washington, D.C. It was the same with the phone bill. Basic telephone and Internet service cost more than ten times what we’d paid in the U.S., largely because power and telecommunications contracts had been awarded to private French companies. These were monopolies, and anywhere else in the world, utility monopolies would be tightly regulated, but in Vanuatu they were permitted to charge what they pleased. Similarly, basic groceries cost a small fortune. Vanuatu may not have had an income tax, which works out very well if you have a significant income, but it did have a value-added tax, which is not so good if you don’t have much of an income. Most Ni-Vanuatu do not have a significant income. The expatriates, however, did.

  If there was one service that did provide good value, it was minibuses. Simply stand alongside a road, and just by subtly quivering a pinky, you will soon see a minibus make a dramatic U-turn, pitch itself on two wheels, career across two lanes of traffic, and shudder to a halt with an emphatic skid in the dirt to pick you up. For less than a dollar, the bus driver will take you anywhere in Vila or its environs, though not necessarily by the most efficient route. The journey from point A to point B is an ever-shifting calculation that depends on where the other passengers are going. Very often I’d find myself on a meandering dirt track that carved its way through a squatter settlement of shanties, where we’d deposit a schoolchild and pick up a young woman who’d soon be let off in front of a luxurious hilltop home with a stone fence lined with broken glass and a sign that said NEVER MIND THE DOGS. BEWARE OF OWNER.

  “Is it just me,” I said to Sylvia one day, “or does this place seem really weird to you too, like it’s forever 1900 around here?”

  “It’s creepy,” she agreed. “Have you seen the Frenchwomen shopping with their servants?”

  “And what’s up with the dogs?”

  Many of the expatriates had dogs. Though Port Vila, like elsewhere in the Pacific, had no shortage of island dogs, many of the Westerners had imported purebreds from overseas, including little yapping, quivering dogs brightly festooned with bows. If such a dog were ever to be allowed outside the gates of its owner’s villa, no doubt it wouldn’t survive the afternoon once the island dogs were through with it. But the decorative dogs were never allowed outside the grounds. Even the dog community was segregated in Port Vila.

  When explorer Pedro Fernandez de Quirós first alighted on Vanuatu in 1606, he established a short-lived Spanish colony called Nueva Jerusalema, and seeing how Westerners lived in Vila today it wasn’t hard to discern a certain continuity between the original Western settlement and contemporary Port Vila. Fernandez de Quirós, feeling very pleased with himself for discovering what he assumed was the fabled southern continent of Australia, saw fit to appoint his ship’s crew to rather exalted positions. “It was a marvelous thing to see such a diversity of knights,” wrote a priest at the time, “for truly nothing like it has been seen since the world began, because there were sailor-knights, grummet-knights, ships’ page-knights, mulatto-knights and Indian knights and knights who were just knight-knights.” For the tax evaders and offshore bankers who now called Vanuatu home, Port Vila remained a Nueva Jerusalema, a place where they felt free to carry on like grummet-knights.

  The most mystifying part, of course, was the reaction of the Ni-Vanuatu themselves. In America, if we were to allow a very small segment of the population to create an economic system that works entirely to their benefit while the vast majority of Americans simply scrape by, why we’d…call them shrewd businessmen and patriots and elect them to higher office. But if they were foreigners, why we’d…welcome them as investors. Perhaps, then, my feelings were misplaced. Perhaps there was nothing unnatural in the way society seemed to be organized in Port Vila, though it did seem uncomfortably colonial to me. The French were the functionaries, the Anglos the capitalists, the Chinese the shopkeepers, and the Ni-Vanuatu the hired help, admitted when necessary but otherwise kept outside the gates. Then, one morning, as I walked along the dirt road that led from our house toward the main road, I was greeted with a word that left me reeling in bewilderment.

  “Gudmorning,” I said in Bislama to the elderly man I encountered. He was shoeless, and he carried a bush knife. He regarded me with a friendly eye.

  “Gudmorning, maste,” he said.

  Master. No, I thought. This is a very weird place.

  ONE OF THE GREAT BENEFITS OF LIVING ABROAD IS DIScovering that there’s a whole new world of intoxicants to explore. And I like intoxicants. Fortunately, I realized early on that I had a predilection for chemically altering my state of mind, and so by the time my friends were snorting their paychecks up through their noses, I knew myself well enough to realize that, were I to do even one line of cocaine, I’d soon find myself on the street turning tricks for crack. Likewise with heroin. When a Bosnian acquaintance of mine in Prague suggested we shoot heroin together, I had enough self-awareness to realize that, were I to join him, I’d have to write off the next ten years of my life as I devoted myself to traveling the Needle Park circuit of Europe. Instead, I spent nearly ten years trying to quit smoking, and painful and unpleasant as each of those forty-three attempts were, I realized that it could be much, much worse.

  Still, even though I drew my line at hard drugs, there remained a plethora of narcotics to enjoy, and I availed myself of all that came my way. I like to think that I failed Algebra II in high school not because of any particular ineptitude with mathematics, but simply because of a quirk in my schedule. Algebra came after lunch, and the lunch break, of course, was an excellent time to meander over into the woods behind school, where everyday the potheads gathered to get baked. Xs and Ys were a buzz kill, so during the lesson, as I surreptitiously consumed my corn chips, I’d retreat to my own world, quietly giggling at the silliness of it all. During my senior year of college, I lived in an apartment in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, and at noon every day, when my three roommates and I woke up, the streets would become redolent with the sweet smell of cannabis as the bongs were lit for a morning pick-me-up. Wondering how else we could enliven our day, we soon discovered magic mushrooms, which we’d consume on our third-floor fire escape, and as the sunset played havoc with our sense of time and space and the people below began to resemble mutant anteaters, we’d have profoundly philosophical discussion on the nature of reality, questioning why was it that I saw anteaters whereas they saw turtles.

  By the time I turned thirty, however, I had lost touch with the people who used to call to enquire whether I’d like to drop some acid with them and maybe spend an afternoon at the planetarium, or possibly just hang out at their mom’s house and maybe watch The Wall—again. I wondered what had become of them, until I realized that they could probably still be found at their mom’s house. Smoking weed with any kind of regularity also seemed like a rather juvenile thing to do, and after I made the near fatal mistake of wandering into a hash bar in Amsterdam, where I told the pot dealer to just give me the strongest stuff he had, I was cured of any desire to ever smoke weed again. There is stoned and there is comatose, and when finally, toward dawn, I was able to pry myself upright, I stumbled into the wreckage of the r
ed-light district during the misty hour when the prostitutes and the addicts have had their fill and all that remains is waste and regret. Seeking to fortify myself, I bought a bag of frites and soon found myself greeting the new day on my knees, heaving my excesses into the gutter.

  That was some time ago, and while I have found much to enjoy in wine, I remained amenable to finding other ways to tweak my experience with the world at large. In the U.S., exploring different ways to get stoned is a cumbersome and difficult thing to do. It is generally illegal, and this lends the enterprise a furtive, desperate sort of air. It is also dangerous. I am wary of consuming a concoction of chemicals “cooked” by an emaciated user with profusely bleeding gums. That’s a red flag for me. Indeed, just about anything that involves cough syrup or complex formulas of chemical mixtures holds no interest for me. What I desired was the organic high. I think a little peyote in the desert might have worked, perhaps with the Navajo in New Mexico, around dusk, followed by some inspired drumming and chanting, but alas, the opportunity never presented itself.

  Fortunately, I was now in Vanuatu, where getting profoundly stoned every night is a venerable tradition. In the golden hour before sunset, the men of Vanuatu gather in a nakamal, typically a clearing under a banyan tree, where they consume kava, which, to the uninitiated, is the most wretchedly foul-tasting beverage ever concocted by Man. Kava derives from Piper methysticum, a pepper shrub that thrives high in the hills of Vanuatu. Traditionally, the kava is prepared by having prepubescent boys chew the root until it becomes a mush of pulp and saliva, whereupon it is squeezed through coconut fiber, mixed with water, and swallowed all in one go from a coconut shell. Pondering this, you have to wonder And whose idea was that? I could not think of any circumstance where it would occur to me that consuming some kid’s globby spitball might enhance my well-being. But we humans are a mysterious species, willing to try anything for a buzz, and fortunately for us, a long time ago, somewhere in Vanuatu, an enterprising individual discovered the secret to the most satisfying narcotic available for our pleasure.

  That I would become such a connoisseur of kava, however, was not a forgone conclusion. I had tried it for the first time in Tonga, where, in strange circumstances, I attended a kava ceremony for a visiting Fijian princess. I had made a friend in Nuku’alofa, a Nepalese Sherpa—it’s a long, digressive story—and we sort of invited ourselves and made ourselves comfortable sitting on the floor next to the princess, whom we knew only dimly. She was being honored by the Fijians living in Tonga, and unaware then what a big deal a kava ceremony was among Fijians and their aristocracy, we proceeded to make silly fools of ourselves. After a few bowls of kava, I turned to the princess, meaning to ask her how much kava, did she think, was too much kava. Instead, not yet realizing that kava’s effect upon the mouth is similar to that of a shot of Novocain, I said: “Wincess, how wuch wava is woo wuch wava?”

  My Nepalese friend thought this was hilarious. “You walk wunny,” he said.

  “You walk wunny woo,” I pointed out, as we tumbled over in sidesplitting laughter.

  We cracked each other up.

  The effects soon wore off, however, and we were left with queasy stomachs and a growing awareness that we were making a faux pas of a nature that had escaped us. Kava, it seemed to me, was nothing more than a mild euphoric. It had made me a little tongue-tied, a little giddy, and I didn’t understand what the Fijians were so serious about. All things being equal, I thought I’d much rather have a couple of beers.

  This having been my only experience with kava, I entered the world of Vanuatu kava with an unfortunate disrespect for its power. We were invited one day to visit one of Port Vila’s innumerable nakamals by Patricia, an American who worked with Sylvia, and her partner, Dirk, a Dutchman who worked as a handyman. On the outer islands, a nakamal was sacrosanct. In Port Vila, a nakamal was simply a kava bar. At the time, Sylvia’s organization was top-heavy with expatriates, and thus our early forays into our new milieu tended to be guided by foreigners. My work certainly didn’t lend itself to the rapid acquisition of new friends. Writing, of course, is the most solitary of endeavors. You simply sit inside your own head for a while—and what a strange place that can be—and hopefully, after four or five hours, you have seven hundred words to show for it and you call it a good day. Now and then you find yourself wishing you had a co-worker, someone to complain with, just for form’s sake, about the incompetent boss and the appalling work conditions, and you realize it’s time to get out more. I was, therefore, looking forward to an evening at the nakamal, to be followed by a splendid meal at one of Port Vila’s fine restaurants. I caught a minibus to Sylvia’s office, a modest house on a hill behind the town center, where we soon found ourselves piling into Dirk’s small compact. He drove us farther into the hills, and we spent the time talking about his last trip to Holland. I was born in Holland, and we reminisced about our mother country—how gray it was, how cold, how crowded, how soul-crushingly depressing winter could be, and how, despite these formidable strikes against the country, we both missed it enormously.

  “It’s the pubs that I really miss,” Dirk said. “No one knows how to do a pub like the Dutch do. Even in the godforsaken villages of northern Friesland, you will still find a great pub.”

  I was in emphatic agreement. There is not a finer place to drink than in a cozy Dutch pub. On many a winter’s eve—and there is not a crueler winter than those experienced in Northern Europe—when the wind and the bleak melancholic darkness left me trembling in despair, I only had to step inside a pub, almost any pub in Holland would do, where I would soon feel revived, not solely by alcohol—the Dutch have an unfortunate tradition of pouring their beer into pitifully meager glasses—but by a convivial atmosphere that I have not seen replicated anywhere else. And if that didn’t work, there was always the hash bar next door.

  We spoke for a while longer about what a fine country Holland was, until Sylvia asked whether he envisioned returning for good one day.

  “Never,” Dirk replied. “There is no kava in Holland. And there is no kava in the U.S., so I won’t go there either.”

  Patricia rolled her eyes and sighed. Possibly an issue here, I thought. It was a curious reason for not going to Holland, of course. Never before had I heard anyone decry the lack of good narcotics as a reason for avoiding the Netherlands.

  Dirk parked the car on the side of a dirt road, and we followed a narrow path to a clearing on a ridge overlooking the harbor. There was a breathtaking view of Iririki Island, surrounded by sailboats and the resort’s catamarans. Farther on lay Ifira Island, home of the landowners who owned most of Port Vila, and even from a distance, the island exuded a prosperity not typically found on offshore islands in Vanuatu.

  “What a stunning view,” I said.

  “It’s even better after a few shells of kava,” Dirk added.

  In traditional Ni-Vanuatu culture, the nakamal is sacred ground. It is where inspiration is found for elaborate dances and rituals. It is where a man goes to speak with an ancestor or two. It is not a place for women. Until fairly recently, on many islands, if a woman stumbled into a nakamal, she would be punished by death. This is because women are impure. On this point, most cultures agree. From Eve onward, women have always been designated the impure ones. I’ve always found this curious. Compared to what? Nero? Attila the Hun? Dick Cheney? Me? They must be very impure indeed. Even more tragically, from a traditional Ni-Vanuatu point of view, the kava too would have to be discarded, and the men would have to wait a long time, upwards of twenty minutes, for the boys to chew and masticate another batch of kava roots. Things have changed, of course. Women are no longer killed for sullying the nakamal with their presence, though very often the kava would still be tossed.

  In Port Vila, however, which is not at all like the rest of Vanuatu, no one even pretends that the nakamal is somehow holy ground. They are simply kava bars, and many will happily serve women, particularly foreign women, who are not bound by island tra
dition. The nakamal that Dirk had selected consisted of a corrugated tin shed and a couple of dusty wooden benches standing on a ridge overlooking the harbor. A half-dozen Ni-Vanuatu men sat there contentedly, now and then emitting a murmur or a great hork of phlegm.

  “So what will it be?” Dirk asked. “Low tide or high tide?”

  “Whatever you’re having,” I said confidently. I like to think that, when it comes to intoxicants, I can hold my own with just about anyone. Now and then, of course, this assumption has proven to be false, and I find myself keeled over, begging for mercy, as men with names like Ivan and Vladimir insist on just one more toast. But this was kava. Everyone in the South Pacific drinks kava, I figured, and based on my experience with it in Tonga, I saw no reason to be wary. Dirk asked the proprietor of the shed for two half-shells for the women and two full shells for us manly men. On the outer islands, a shell would be a coconut shell. But here in sophisticated Port Vila, our kava was served up in a glass cereal bowl. The proprietor dipped the bowls into a plastic bucket brimming with kava, and we brought them back to where Sylvia and Patricia stood.