Thursday, January 08, 2004
Visiting Vanuatu in the South Pacific - continued
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Coming into port at sunrise in the tropics is a cool experience. First, you get a mug of coffee from the 24-hour galley, then walk into the pool deck, where early morning smokers gather. Together you watch the pilot arrive, in a tugboat, and hop on board. We glide us into our berth, and the ship’s Philippine crew put out the gangway. Some early morning market women are already on the peer, setting their tables of colorful salu-salu grass skirts, (70 percent plastic), coral beads, glass pearls and miniature models of collapsible dugout boats with outriggers
Our 112-passenger exploration cruise liner is the M/S Clipper/Odyssey, and today’s harbor is Port Vila, Vanuatu. We are destined for an early jitney trip to the Botanical Gardens, an enterprise started by a young Australian newspaperman who married a Mele-Maat village woman, which gave him an inside opportunity to acquire tribal land. Passing through Mele village, crowded with adults, kids, pigs and dogs, we see fenced in thatched cottages, bures, walls built with air spaces for ventilation. Occasionally people are taking a siesta in their dirt yards.
Plants in the tropics grow fast, and the young botanist now he has a garden of palms, giant spiky sea pandanus, and many local varieties of colorful trees, shrubs and flowers, interspersed with cages full of chattering rainbow lorikeets, a variety of the shrike - the equally noisy myna birds are roaming free - a silent Pacific boa snake, ant lions, flying foxes, and pigs, the local currency. The grass-skirted guide taps on an Ambrym tam-tam for attention. Printed notices of local history, curious events and floral peculiarities are posted throughout. Altogether, a good beginning for a tourist attraction. The owner has turned the garden over to his wife for management, and is concentrating on developing a tourist cottage colony. An incipient local fortune in the making.
We get back on the jitneys for a trip to the Cascades, a tropical slope with a downhill spring, the flow broken by interconnected pools with waterfalls. Our members stop to cool off in the clear water. The hilltop view of the harbor and islands is excellent, but the descent is hard. Vila is a beautiful town, with neat streets, but first our jit has to navigate the pothole cowpaths in Mele Village. A broad asphalted section overgrown with foliage turns out to be American WWII landing strip, when the then New Hebrides, particularly neighboring Espiritu Santo, were American supply bases for the impending invasion of Japan
A day later, in Loganville, capital of Santo, we see the Million-Dollar Peer, the memorial of American profligacy at the end of WWII. After Armistice, stuck with thousands of vehicles and heavy armament on Santo, the US offered to sell them locally at 8 percent of cost, and was refused. So we built a pier into the deep ocean and drove the material into the water. Presumably donating would have caused havoc with the local economies and mores. Therefore, dump! This is now a memorial and a major tale in the “cargo cult” legend.
Cargo cult is commonly seen as a native’s wish-fulfillment religion, an expectation to see American planes return and bring wealth and jobs to the people. There is more to that. The Jon Frum cult, of a local become wealthy abroad, started in the late 1930s, as continuation of the spread of Christianity. The nu-Vanuatans traditionally view religions as a means of acquiring wealth and social position, related to striving to be the “big man”, whereby one attains position by breeding more pigs and giving them away, sort of associated with the potlatches of the Dionysian Quakiutls (Ruth Benedict?), in the Pacific Northwest. Christianity was accepted because the missionaries and planters represented potential wealth, which could be linked with the arrival of the new people on “big birds,” the friendly US soldiers of WWII. When the latter left, Cargo Cult adherents started painting red crosses on their huts and placing wooden full-scale airplane models on the beaches, to attract other big birds The crosses are still in the villages, I’m told.
Upon return from the WWII peer we roam the main street of Loganville, a wide sandy avenue of racing pickups filled with workers, trucks with standing school children on their way to the beach for a swim, and taxi cabs. Swimming at the beach is a daily necessity, and sweaty bodies elicit snickers. Later, at a remote island village with black sand which we visited for a snorkel trip, we found a group of naked two- and three-year olds, accompanied by a couple of sixth grade girls, obviously a daycare center, out for a wash-up.. The toddlers, who viewed us curiously, tumbled into the surf without any prompting. At this age boys and girls are together, the traditional separation of sexes comes later. In Loganville teenage boys and young men often walk hand in hand, a center boy dragging his friends to some choice destination.. Each village has a secret men’s house, where they spend time on their crafts and lore. Women, who spend their days working in the gardens, have equal secretive traditional getaways.
About mosquitoes. We were warned to take malaria shots. There were advisories of deadly dengue fewer from Ambrym mosquitoes. Ho, ho, we experienced no mosquitoes in daytime, during mid-November, in any of the islands. Our guides offered DEET sprays as instant help, which we eventually skipped. Next, about Fiji, New Caledonia and Sydney.
Coming into port at sunrise in the tropics is a cool experience. First, you get a mug of coffee from the 24-hour galley, then walk into the pool deck, where early morning smokers gather. Together you watch the pilot arrive, in a tugboat, and hop on board. We glide us into our berth, and the ship’s Philippine crew put out the gangway. Some early morning market women are already on the peer, setting their tables of colorful salu-salu grass skirts, (70 percent plastic), coral beads, glass pearls and miniature models of collapsible dugout boats with outriggers
Our 112-passenger exploration cruise liner is the M/S Clipper/Odyssey, and today’s harbor is Port Vila, Vanuatu. We are destined for an early jitney trip to the Botanical Gardens, an enterprise started by a young Australian newspaperman who married a Mele-Maat village woman, which gave him an inside opportunity to acquire tribal land. Passing through Mele village, crowded with adults, kids, pigs and dogs, we see fenced in thatched cottages, bures, walls built with air spaces for ventilation. Occasionally people are taking a siesta in their dirt yards.
Plants in the tropics grow fast, and the young botanist now he has a garden of palms, giant spiky sea pandanus, and many local varieties of colorful trees, shrubs and flowers, interspersed with cages full of chattering rainbow lorikeets, a variety of the shrike - the equally noisy myna birds are roaming free - a silent Pacific boa snake, ant lions, flying foxes, and pigs, the local currency. The grass-skirted guide taps on an Ambrym tam-tam for attention. Printed notices of local history, curious events and floral peculiarities are posted throughout. Altogether, a good beginning for a tourist attraction. The owner has turned the garden over to his wife for management, and is concentrating on developing a tourist cottage colony. An incipient local fortune in the making.
We get back on the jitneys for a trip to the Cascades, a tropical slope with a downhill spring, the flow broken by interconnected pools with waterfalls. Our members stop to cool off in the clear water. The hilltop view of the harbor and islands is excellent, but the descent is hard. Vila is a beautiful town, with neat streets, but first our jit has to navigate the pothole cowpaths in Mele Village. A broad asphalted section overgrown with foliage turns out to be American WWII landing strip, when the then New Hebrides, particularly neighboring Espiritu Santo, were American supply bases for the impending invasion of Japan
A day later, in Loganville, capital of Santo, we see the Million-Dollar Peer, the memorial of American profligacy at the end of WWII. After Armistice, stuck with thousands of vehicles and heavy armament on Santo, the US offered to sell them locally at 8 percent of cost, and was refused. So we built a pier into the deep ocean and drove the material into the water. Presumably donating would have caused havoc with the local economies and mores. Therefore, dump! This is now a memorial and a major tale in the “cargo cult” legend.
Cargo cult is commonly seen as a native’s wish-fulfillment religion, an expectation to see American planes return and bring wealth and jobs to the people. There is more to that. The Jon Frum cult, of a local become wealthy abroad, started in the late 1930s, as continuation of the spread of Christianity. The nu-Vanuatans traditionally view religions as a means of acquiring wealth and social position, related to striving to be the “big man”, whereby one attains position by breeding more pigs and giving them away, sort of associated with the potlatches of the Dionysian Quakiutls (Ruth Benedict?), in the Pacific Northwest. Christianity was accepted because the missionaries and planters represented potential wealth, which could be linked with the arrival of the new people on “big birds,” the friendly US soldiers of WWII. When the latter left, Cargo Cult adherents started painting red crosses on their huts and placing wooden full-scale airplane models on the beaches, to attract other big birds The crosses are still in the villages, I’m told.
Upon return from the WWII peer we roam the main street of Loganville, a wide sandy avenue of racing pickups filled with workers, trucks with standing school children on their way to the beach for a swim, and taxi cabs. Swimming at the beach is a daily necessity, and sweaty bodies elicit snickers. Later, at a remote island village with black sand which we visited for a snorkel trip, we found a group of naked two- and three-year olds, accompanied by a couple of sixth grade girls, obviously a daycare center, out for a wash-up.. The toddlers, who viewed us curiously, tumbled into the surf without any prompting. At this age boys and girls are together, the traditional separation of sexes comes later. In Loganville teenage boys and young men often walk hand in hand, a center boy dragging his friends to some choice destination.. Each village has a secret men’s house, where they spend time on their crafts and lore. Women, who spend their days working in the gardens, have equal secretive traditional getaways.
About mosquitoes. We were warned to take malaria shots. There were advisories of deadly dengue fewer from Ambrym mosquitoes. Ho, ho, we experienced no mosquitoes in daytime, during mid-November, in any of the islands. Our guides offered DEET sprays as instant help, which we eventually skipped. Next, about Fiji, New Caledonia and Sydney.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 6:23 PM 
