Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [19]
“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,