Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [42]
I said a quick prayer to the Mormon god—why not? It couldn’t hurt—and soon we were high above the ocean, where the pilot steered a course toward every squall in the greater Vanuatu area. It was remarkable flying. I could see through the cockpit window, and I noticed that if we flew just a little to the left, we would avoid flying through a billowing black cloud, the kind of ominous dark mass that would give even a 747 a good shake. Instead, we plied right through it, lurching wildly, and when we emerged, the pilot immediately turned his plane toward the next squall. Indeed, I believe we may have even turned around to fly through the same squall twice. Needless to say, I had curled myself into a fetal position, closed my eyes, clasped my hands, and spent a long hour muttering, I am in my safe place, until the pilot, with a move that would make a kamikaze pilot proud, took us into a steeply pitched dive, engines screaming, and aimed the plane toward a mountain on what I took to be Malekula. Then up we went again, barely cresting a dense growth of trees, thumping in the turbulent air, until suddenly we were following the coastline toward the airport at Norsup, where we landed on a slab of jagged coral. Emerging from the plane with trembling knees, I felt immeasurable relief that the ordeal was over, and then it occurred to me that in five days I would have to do it all over again. This better be an interesting island, I thought, and when I noticed the airport building, I realized that it would be.
The building, which had once been a tidy single-story cinder-block structure, had been reduced to a slab of stones and burnt embers. It was not decayed. It was destroyed, though this did not prevent the Vanair representative from conducting his business. He had set up a table in a roofless room, surrounded by rubble and clucking hens, and there he checked in the passengers who were continuing on to Santo. If this had been the scene in Port Vila, I would have turned around right then, my confidence in Vanair shattered, but this was an outer island, said by many to be the most “primitive” in Vanuatu, and now that I was here, with the terror of air travel behind me, I was feeling positively ebullient, eager to experience the raw Pacific.
I grabbed my backpack, made my way past the chickens and assorted onlookers, and immediately wondered how I was going to get myself to Rose Bay, where I had made arrangements to stay in a guesthouse. There were a couple of battered pickup trucks idling beside the airport, and seeing that there was no one here to take me to the guesthouse, which was some twenty miles north of Norsup, the main village on Malekula, I asked the drivers in my rudimentary Bislama if they were heading in that direction. I knew enough about the outer islands to realize that if there’s a vehicle going in your direction, get on, because it could be days before there’s another. Soon I found myself in the back of a pickup truck, holding on for dear life as we careened along a gravel road. Past the coconut plantations that surrounded the airport, the gravel gave way to a deeply gutted dirt path, and as we barreled over every pothole, I found it was all I could do to remain inside the truck. How do they do it, I wondered as we passed another pickup fully laden with people. There I was, tucked into a sort of Ninja crouch, my arms encircled around a steel rail, and still I flailed alarmingly, whereas the locals managed to sit on the rim, and not only did they not fall out but they weren’t even holding on, just leaning their bodies in accordance with the truck’s movement.
After about a half-hour of this, the driver suddenly came to a stop, which nearly sent me hurtling over the hood. His other passenger, a barefoot, bearded man carrying a bushel of yams, emerged from the passenger seat, disappeared up a footpath, and was soon swallowed by