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By Root 883 0

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.