Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [11]
THERE ARE FEW sensations stranger than jet lag. For hour after hour you sit in an airplane doing nothing more taxing than reading a plot-driven novel, periodically eating, and perhaps, if you are very fortunate, even napping, and yet despite all this pampered nothingness, when you emerge from your airplane some hours later, you inevitably feel shattered. I can never quite understand it. Typically, I am awake for about seventeen hours a day. When I am employed, much of the day is occupied by work. If I am feeling particularly ambitious, I will use an hour to exercise. The rest of the day is spent in the usual manner, and after seventeen or so hours I may feel a little tired, a little groggy, and I call an end to the day. Put me on an airplane for seventeen hours, however, and I feel as if I’ve just completed the Bataan Death March.
“So this is New Zealand?” I said to Sylvia as we found ourselves standing on a curb at Auckland Airport.
“It’s cold,” Sylvia noted.
“And gray,” I added.
“Very wet also.”
“We’ll have to come back one day,” I said. And then we turned around, marched back into the terminal, and caught the flight to Vanuatu. Five hours later, we found ourselves on the curb at Bauer-field International Airport, a few miles outside Port Vila, on the island of Efate. What a long, strange day it’s been, I thought as I wrestled with our luggage, sweating freely in the heat. When I woke up the previous morning, I had been on the other side of the planet. And now here I was on an island in the South Pacific. Look, palm trees. Were those parrots? And hey, everyone’s African American. No, not African American. Melanesian. Where am I?
Sometimes, when traveling long distances, it feels as if you have hardly moved at all, that you have simply exchanged the white noise of home for the same noise spoken in a different language. Not so in Vanuatu. The islands feel satisfyingly far away, like Lilliputian planets inhabiting the bluest of universes, distant places where, as we enviously took note of the airport workers snoozing in the afternoon shade, there is always time for a nap.
But not for us. Not yet. Still stupefied by jet lag, we soon found ourselves in the spirited company of Rex, Sylvia’s new boss, a Solomon Islander who had once served as his country’s representative to the United Nations in New York. That evening, he very kindly hosted a dinner for us at his airy home, of which, alas, I have only the barest of memories. Exhaustion combined with a glass of wine or two does not do wonders for my sociability. I dimly recall an animated discussion about the situation in Fiji that ended with me lying supine on his couch, from which, no doubt, I charmed my fellow guests with the occasional, gasping snort. Somehow, and probably with much relief, we were deposited in a motel room, where we slept for fourteen hours straight under the crisp whir of a ceiling fan.
“Did I utterly embarrass myself last night?” I asked Sylvia when we awoke the next day.
“I have no memory of last night,” she said.
“Probably just as well.”
So it was a surprise when Kathy, another of Sylvia’s colleagues, arrived at the motel with her SUV. Evidently, we had made arrangements the previous evening to borrow her truck and go rambling around the island. This struck us as a very agreeable way to begin our stay in Vanuatu, and we were pleased that we had thought of it, though a little befuddled that we had not remembered.
“Just be really careful,” Kathy warned us. “It rained a couple of days ago, so the road is likely to be dangerous.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “While it may be true that I have