Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [12]
“You’ve lived in America for most of your life and never owned a car?”
“Or driven an SUV,” I added happily. She gave a nervous twitch, but I pried the keys out of her hand, and soon we were off, tires squealing. It was a bewilderingly odd sensation. One day we were shuffling about Washington, D.C., quietly contemptuous of our surroundings, and a day or so later, here we were on faraway Vanuatu, driving a large sport utility vehicle. This was dissonance at its best.
Within moments, we had put the paved roads of Port Vila behind us and begun our cautious circumnavigation of Efate, following a sixty-mile-long, deeply gutted dirt road that meandered around the island. Port Vila, we had already discerned, was an island within an island. It had electricity, stores, restaurants, and resorts. There was even a disco. But the moment one left the town limits, it was the raw Pacific that beckoned. Very often the road would narrow into a bush trail before suddenly widening into enormous mud pits where bulldozers stood idle and empty, parked in a remarkably haphazard fashion, as if they were forgotten remnants of some long-ago road-improvement project. The signs read COURTESY OF THE GOVERNMENT OF JAPAN. Otherwise, the road was barren of vehicles, which was just as well, for despite being in a four-wheel drive, I frequently found myself wildly fishtailing across the mud.
“Just tap the breaks,” Sylvia suggested helpfully.
“That’s what I’m doing. But if you’d like, you can drive.”
Sylvia shook her head. “I have to work with Kathy. If we’re going to crash her truck, it’s better that you do it.”
I had no intention of crashing someone else’s truck, so we moseyed on as prudently as we could. Efate, we could see, was a dauntingly lush island with a jungle that toppled over steep hillsides, much of it enveloped with the mile-a-minute vine planted by the Americans in World War II—camouflage run amok. Along the shore, there were coconut plantations and a couple of cattle ranches, where cows idled under massive banyan trees. Life on the isle, the human kind, was also largely found on the fringes. In the few somnolent villages we passed through, there were small kiosks made of clapboard and tin with shelves offering vegetables, seashells, and sixty-year-old Coke bottles for sale. Payments could be dropped inside the Honesty Box. And all along there was the ocean, the South Pacific, majestic and beguiling.
“Where is everyone?” I wondered as I deposited a few coins inside the Honesty Box in exchange for a couple of green coconuts. We were in a small seaside village. To our Western eyes, it looked very poor, with homes made of wood, thatch, and corrugated tin and gardens encased by rickety chicken-wire fences. But one’s sense of poverty becomes skewed in moving so quickly from America, where technically most people are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and even the poor have televisions, to a place like Vanuatu, where wealth is measured in pig tusks.
“I think it might be Sunday,” Sylvia said as she used our Swiss Army knife to carve holes into her coconut like an old Pacific hand.
At some point in our journey, we had crossed the international date line, that imaginary line where today becomes tomorrow, and the moment you were experiencing just a moment ago is now, apparently, a couple of days behind you. Or something like that. We stood for a long while, puzzling through the complexity of time, and just as our brains began to hurt, we heard hymns emanating from the tin-roofed church just up the road. Sunday it was.
“No wonder there’s no one else on the road,” I said. Not all Ni-Vanuatu are Christian, of course, though Efate, as the most Westernized island in Vanuatu, has largely been converted. On the outer islands, many retain the old ways and follow the dictates of kastom. How traditional they actually were was something I planned on exploring. Others belonged to cargo cults, eagerly awaiting the day when fortune would smile and illuminate