Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [10]
3
A Kiss from a Ghost
“Everybody in?”
Bundling ourselves aboard a white shuttle van, we bounce, suspension creaking like old bedsprings, out of the airport and onto the main road, with a second vehicle trailing close behind carrying all our camera gear.
Maybe I shouldn't be, but I'm feeling nervous. About the show generally, but also about the lack of amenities on the island.
Time has not only stood still in parts of Tanna, I hear, but it actually seems to be going backwards, with the result that there's a great big gaping hole where convenience ought to be. Everyday facilities you and I take for granted in our world are almost completely absent from theirs. Simple, fun things. Like electricity, for instance. Or fresh running water. Or technology. There are no laptops here, no TV, no cell phones, no Cheerios, no fresh water, no towels, no magazines, no Hot Pockets; come to think of it, they have no pockets, period. Because they have no trousers. That's what I'm hearing. And that's precisely why season nine of Survivor was set here.
In 2004, eighteen type A contestants were flown in and dumped on Efaté, the country's main island. The chief inducement being, of course, money: one million dollars in the pot. Which must have seemed like a helluva prize going in, but whose value diminished rapidly, I'm sure, as the full horror of what they'd signed up for unfolded. Paradise, it turns out, is not all it's cracked up to be—something the contestants quickly found out as they ran cheerfully ashore on Day One, straight into the yawning jaws of Mother Nature, who for the next thirty-nine days mauled them alive. I watched every episode. I saw the whole thing play out. The bug-ravaged flesh, the menacing filth, the starvation—ugh! How I wish I could scrape those images from my retinas. Even Robinson Crusoe would have perished.
According to the guidebooks, some parts of Tanna Island are shockingly primitive, and covered in the kind of impenetrable, steamy jungle frequently described as “godforsaken” by old-time novelists, even down to the smoldering volcano I mentioned earlier. They are so bleak, so far from civilization, that they're the very last place on earth you'd ever want to be stranded, even for a TV show.
Viewed from the air coming in, the terrain is coarse and forbidding. A verdant fist shaken angrily at visitors to scare them off. By the time we reach the ground, though, all that has changed. The jungle turns out to consist of gorgeous lush woodland filled with sinewy streams and butterfly-peppered glades and warm sunshine, like you might find in rural New England. All of which makes our twenty-minute drive to the hotel the most delightful treat, as we roar along a winding artery of dusty black asphalt that hugs the coastline, flanked by dense undergrowth through which a tangle of improvised pathways twists out of sight into intriguing leafy darkness.
Whenever we draw to a stop, which is often—once to let a family of pigs cross the road, another time because our driver spots a friend of his pushing a cart filled with strange hairy vegetables and wants to say hi—a loose crowd congregates and, for a short while, the van takes on the role of a waterless aquarium, as inquisitive faces press up against the glass, checking us out with impenetrable brown eyes.
I must say, these people don't look a bit like they do in encyclopedias—glum, hostile, naked. That's the next big surprise. Instead they're happy, welcoming, relaxed, reserved, and quite stylishly dressed in some cases. Their daywear tends toward surf-shop casual: baggy Hawaiian this, loose-fitting summer that. One kid even sports a Jackie Chan T-shirt.