Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [55]
… represents a terrific promotional opportunity for the tourist destinations, which features the reality of an island and the experiences in Vanuatu.
Hm.
As nice an idea as this was, that's not quite how things turned out. We planned to show viewers what life was like in an unspoiled tropical paradise: exciting, dangerous, sweaty, and full of bugs. Full of bugs. Bugs that suck holes in your legs. In other words, we intended to tell the truth. What could possibly be wrong with that?
At some point I even recall giving a short interview to a newspaper in Texas, which appeared under the banner “Itinerant Traveler Has One Tip: Avoid Vanuatu!” in which I'd summed up in two words my advice to anybody planning a trip to Tanna: “Don't go.”1
Kidding, of course.
Well, okay, half-kidding.
So here's my theory: what if this silly little article found its way onto the desk of someone important in Vanuatu? Not the part of Vanuatu that's without trousers or phones, or even desks, but on Efaté, for example. The capital, Port Vila, is a modern growing city of mod cons: web access, cars, and refrigerators, food that doesn't run away as you're trying to fry it, and electricity. They also have lawyers—uh-oh. Lawyers who, because they're not fleeing in terror all day long from erupting volcanoes, have plenty of time on their hands to read foreign news articles about their country, which everyone is desperately anxious, for economic reasons, to promote to the rest of the world as a must-visit tourist destination. And what if this unnamed, and possibly nonexistent, lawyer discovered that I'd told people “Don't go!” to his lovely country (or, worse-case scenario, he'd watched the actual Vanuatu episode on his magical flickering light box), and freaked out? The way the people of Solvang freaked out.
“Hey, wait a Wuhngin-damned minute!” he may have said to himself in Bislama. “This program, she is not ‘a terrific promotional opportunity for the tourist destinations, which features the reality of an island and the experiences in Vanuatu.’ No, man, this is bullshit.”
And, oh my God, what if he instigated a top-level inquiry and Joe spilled the beans that I'd not spent the whole night in Yakel Village, only part of a night, and the nonexistent lawyer had threatened to reveal this to the world?
As I say, it's all guesswork and I could be way off the mark. But even if it wasn't that, something serious must have happened to compel us to play by these new sleeping rules.
While the crew is packing up outside, Jay and I hold an impromptu meeting.
“So how long do I have to stay here, d'you think?” I ask, wriggling to find a comfortable spot on the hard floor. “How many hours?”
Through the veil of my tent, Jay, a mercurial wisp of a man whose face in repose invariably sags into gloom, stands like a red-haired phantom against a darkening sky. “Five,” he volunteers.
“We're saying a night lasts five hours? Really?”
His eyes sparkle mischievously. “Well, some people only sleep for five hours a night, don't they?”
Sure. Parents of newborn babies. People passing kidney stones. Fugitives.
It's an audacious stretching of the truth, but we're running with it. From now on, all I have to do is sleep or rest in a place for five hours, and that apparently counts as the whole night. Agreed.
Cambodia is not what it was. And thank God for that! Because what it was, and we're talking only a few years ago, was a bottomless swamp of Communist tyranny, war, and genocide; a place you could fly to and, within a short time of your arrival, pretty much count on having your ass blown off.
In the early 1970s, the political situation here was ugly. Not only were they having serious problems controlling an unruly group of rebel commies called the Khmer Rouge, but there was also a right-wing military coup going on, trying to declare Cambodia a republic, a move planned and funded in part by the U.S. government.
As you can imagine, this coup was a source of major upset to their neighbors, the North Vietnamese, who were enraged. “How dare you!” they fumed, and straight