Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [23]
It was as if there was a virtual wall separating us from the real Vanuatu. We inhabited the same geography, but we might as well have been on different planets. I found it most peculiar. Working on my book on Kiribati, I recalled that even though we’d had more money than the I-Kiribati—or rather, Sylvia had more money—there was no such wall. It didn’t matter if you were Bill Gates; everyone swam in the same shit on Tarawa. In Port Vila, however, one could find pâté and smoked salmon at the Au Bon Marché, the local supermarket, and in the restaurants, diners were encouraged to eat coconut crab, an endangered species. But that was solely for Westerners. The Ni-Vanuatu ate laplap, a gooey paste of manioc cooked in an earth oven, or boiled taro. Most Westerners lived on the hillsides overlooking Vila Harbor. Most Ni-Vanuatu lived on the other side of those hills in shanties built of pilfered wood and tin.
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.