Forgotten Vanuatu

I returned a few months ago to my birthplace, a 44-acre island in the South Seas, to find it had become a luxury resort. “Iririki, Island of Elegance,” as the brochures describe it, is a five-minute boat ride from Efate island and Port-Vila, capital of the Vanuatu island group, regarded when I was a kid as the most deadbeat possession in Britain’s colonial portfolio.

I remembered Iririki as a shadowy, hat-shaped place containing a small hospital and just two houses, each situated high on the crown. We lived in one; the other, a palatial residence with park-like grounds and a flagpole flying a bedspread-sized Union Jack, belonged to the British resident commissioner. Now, 72 neat bungalows were strung across the tiny island’s northern end. I booked into one overlooking the palm-fringed, handkerchief-sized beach where I had learned to swim.

The spot where our yams once grew had sprouted Michener’s, a top-rated restaurant anointed by the prodigious novelist himself. He set “Tales of the South Pacific” in wartime Vanuatu, and the book inspired Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1949 musical and the inevitable movie. Everyone can hum the songs yet few know a damn thing about their muse. Even as other island groups prospered, the locus of all that late 20th century South Seas mythology (the idyllic world of Bali Ha’i hosted nuclear testing ranges) remained in a time warp, isolated and forgotten.

Vanuatu resembles Oahu, Bora-Bora and Fiji in the days before developers awoke to their possibilities. Waiting in Iririki’s poolside coffee shop for an old family friend, I wondered how many guests here realized this obscure little republic once occupied the comic hinterland between high farce and satire.

A collection of 80 earthquake-rattled islands, Vanuatu lies in the southwest Pacific, 1,200 miles east of Australia and 500 miles west of Fiji. Named the New Hebrides by Captain Cook, they became in the early 1900s an Anglo-French condominium, a territorial compromise in which two great powers split by a millennium of enmity attempted to share. It never worked. The Brits complained about the duplicity of the French, who bemoaned the sneaky maneuverings of the Brits.

Their mutual determination to yield on nothing led to the duplication of everything: two flags, two anthems, two languages, two currencies, two courts, two jails (the French served better food), two hospitals and two political ideologies. It was a diplomatic joke, an investor’s nightmare. Then, in 1980, under growing United Nations pressure, both countries agreed to get out. The new republic of Vanuatu eagerly hoisted its jungle-hued flag.

The new nation suffered a calamitous infancy. Following the scent of independence, a gang of Americans bent on creating a tax-free nirvana persuaded the largest island, Santo (officially called Esp 3/8ritu Santo), to secede. Vanuatu’s legitimate government won the ensuing little Coconut War, and the nation, scarred but united, is making slow progress.

My connection to Vanuatu spans four generations, starting with my Scottish grandfather. A charismatic Presbyterian missionary with the voice and air of a Victorian actor/manager, he settled in 1900 on Paama, a mountainous, thickly wooded island measuring 6 miles by 3. He built 21 churches there, and then, for the ash-gray people who dwelt among the blast clouds and lava flows of a nearby volcanic island, he put up three more. For 39 years he tirelessly preached in all of them.

My father, born in Glasgow and raised on Paama, administered the old British hospital on Iririki. My son John, who also studied medicine, worked at the hospital at Vila Air Base, which handled U.S. soldiers wounded during World War II in the Solomons before becoming the chronically underfunded successor to his grandfather’s famously well-run establishment.

And I, a London-based journalist, had indulged in a late love affair with some of the most sublime islands in the South Seas. Hoping to get reacquainted with the home I had left at age 7, I invited my oldest family friend, Dr. Makau Kalsakau, to show me around. “Let us climb the hill,” he said.

Thick undergrowth walled off all the old paths. We waded in, and after a dozen paces had come up to a half acre so familiar I felt I was breaking into my childhood. Through knee-high grass, past a massive banyan that had gained half a century’s girth and height, Makau guided me through the phantom rooms of our house. The great hurricane of 1948 may have leveled the bamboo and thatch several years after our departure, but the garden had spurted into a tangled boisterousness that would have delighted my mother.

Makau paused. “Here mummy built her school,” he said, regressing into nursery talk. (To him, I am perennially juvenescent, a toddler with a worrisome weakness for cigars.) When the British and French refused to provide secular education, my mother erected the smol skul (small school). It proved so popular that later, a few yards away in another one-room shack, she established a teachers college.

Our garden academies produced, to the unease of both governments, two tiny streams of bright kids. One entered teacher training, and the other trickled down a steep slide of steps to the hospital, where my father taught Makau and others to be doctas. These scrub-covered humps and hillocks once surrounded his alma mater and, as we walked its imaginary halls, even finding the site of my extraction with forceps, the evening sun made the wooded landscape a work in silks. An outrigger canoe slid past, propelled by a woman in a crimson dress. “Gud naet!” she called.

As we headed back to the resort, guests abandoning the beach for happy hour looked curiously at Makau, surprised to see a native islander outside the role of employee. A handsome old man with amused eyes and a wispy Assyrian beard, he strolled through the airy, vaulted lobby as if he owned the place, which in a sense he did.

Makau came from Ifira island, a quarter mile away. Its 800 people, long regarded as Vanuatu’s elite, today play a major role in national affairs. They own Iririki and, in a typically shrewd move, leased it to an Australian development company. “In 75 years we get the island back, plus a top-quality international resort,” my friend explained. “They build it. We keep it.”

As we sipped drinks at the poolside bar, chatting over live Polynesian music, my thoughts drifted to my parents, living quietly on the hill, making do on a missionary’s stipend. There had been compensations, though, and we were witnessing one now--a sunset so stunning that all conversation ceased. An unearthly lavender light spilled across the sky into the harbor at our feet, empurpling air and water. Makau finished his orange juice and stood. “Lookim yu,” he said.

See you later.

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Vanuatu’s 160,000 inhabitants, known hereabouts as ni-Vanuatu, are dark-skinned, fuzzy-haired Melanesians who speak either English or French, plus a distinct local pidgin language. With possibly the world’s highest linguistic density--one per 1,200 residents--Vanuatu needed to devise an official tongue. The resulting Bislama is vivid and discursive. A piano, for example, is a bokis (box). Anyone inquiring about flight arrivals should know that foldaon (fall-down) taem means landing time, and aplen, of course, is a plane.

The nation’s traditional copra-based economy a few decades back received a boost when someone realized the plantations that for so long had yielded coconut meat for European soaps and margarine also offered excellent grazing land. Imported Charolais cattle have since fed an unceasing demand in Japan for high-quality, top-dollar beef. Meanwhile, though Port-Vila aggressively markets itself as an offshore tax haven, tourism is Vanuatu’s Holy Grail.

Getting there requires serious traveling--a 12 1/2-hour flight from Los Angeles to Auckland, and three hours more to Port-Vila on Air Vanuatu’s lone 737. Since this busy plane also serves Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, the islands would make an offbeat and exotic add-on for travelers to New Zealand or Australia. Except for a few French and Brits, it’s Kiwis and Aussies who holiday here. (I met Americans too, but they were part of a second U.S. invasion--motivated Peace Corps volunteers, all speaking immaculate Bislama and up to speed on the local scene.)

Though the big development bang has yet to reverberate throughout the group, Port-Vila boasts three, perhaps four, international-caliber resorts charging international prices. Iririki ($170 per person per night) nuzzles a quiet, harbor-facing beach with all the expected water toys and activities, and the other hotels snake around the tranquil Erakor Lagoon. The latter deliver genuine peace and quiet, if not a Waikiki-style view of the surf. Cheaper alternatives dot the capital, but, beyond it, only the islands Santo and Tanna offer hotels.

On other islands, the options cross the divide into adventure traveling. You stay in village huts lacking hot water, sanitation, plumbing or privacy. You bathe from buckets, eat village food, drink water warily (boiling mandatory) and sometimes bunk with rats. Pack a portable fan and a mosquito net. Supplies are spotty, and malaria is endemic.

Over several weeks in such places, I made many friends and startling discoveries. I began to sense the measured pulse of island pastoral life and felt a curious, deepening sense of privilege. I also lost more than 10 pounds.

Strangers still excite interest here. Once trust dissolves the locals’ initial reserve, you’ll relish the company of raconteurs whose microcosm has barely changed for generations--or not since (they like to point out) their great-grandparents ate the visitors who sit where you do now.

During my childhood, Port-Vila amounted to a termite-ridden clapboard settlement, unable to even hypothesize a different future. It stoically awaited the tropical saeklon (cyclone), the etkwek (earthquake), the market forces, the human perversity that would blow it all away. But with the departure of the European powers, Port-Vila bustled. Up sprang good restaurants and coffee houses, a cinema, several ovasi bangs (overseas banks), well-stocked supermarkets, a library, even bookshops with the latest paperbacks.

One morning, aboard the clattering outboard Iririki-to-Vila ferry, I overheard an Australian tax-avoider with a ruff of spare chins talking to a companion. “I’m going to move a million down here,” he said. “And if that works I send in the serious money.” His shorts, as he waddled ashore, looked as if they contained grappling wombats. The ni-Vanuatu boatman gave me a faint smile. “Bigmaot,” he said. “Big baksaed.” Big man. Big backside.

Efate island is easily driven around in a day on an eroded road. The views are stupendous. On the landward side, shadow-puddled coconut plantations meet soaring, bush-clad peaks. On the seaward, every escapist cliche in the book applies: bright seas, misty offshore islands, miles of sparkling sand.

The U.S. fleet mustered in May 1942 for the Battle of the Coral Sea in Havannah Bay, an enormous natural harbor so deep the battleship Washington had to declare an emergency when its anchor failed to hit bottom. Now, kids sell green-glass Coke bottles with “San Francisco, Calif.” inscribed on the base. Thousands of empties litter the brush, they told me. Driving home, I wondered what had become of the man who, half a century ago, had guzzled from the one I’d just purchased for a few pennies.

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A few 40-ton intra-island cargo vessels carry passengers in spectacularly crowded conditions but, unless you’re cash poor and time rich, the best way to island-hop is via the domestic airline, VanAir. It operates a safe, reliable service, and one morning I boarded a Twin Otter that once belonged to Panamanian Gen. Manuel A. Noriega and set off for Paama. After a carrier-style landing on a short, sharply acclivous paddock set between the sea and primary rain forest, I hitched a ride on Paama’s only vehicle, a truck, which went pitching down boulder-strewn jungle tracks and ancient avalanche chutes to Liro, where my grandparents had lived. The largest of Paama’s 21 villages, Liro is spacious and shady, set in a green amphitheater flanked by tall hills and a bay. Grassy playing fields adjoin the beach. There I was startled to come across a young white couple, Anton and Erin Zuiker, Peace Corps volunteers. Anton, with a lean build and a gold earring, left a job as editor of a Cleveland magazine to work here as a teacher. Engaging, soft-spoken Erin helped run Liro’s tiny clinic.

They directed me to a handsome white building with a red roof and a sign reading “Rev. Maurice Frater Memorial Church 1900-1939.” My grandfather’s original Liro mission had been flattened by a hurricane and its replacement had opened just three months earlier. Inside, a solemn delegation of elders waited with a request. Could I send them a bell? The old one--cast for grandfather by the Glasgow Foundry Boys Bible Class in 1903--had cracked in the storm, forcing them to strike an oxygen cylinder, with a wrench, slung from a tree. Trying to envision winds ferocious enough to split a sturdy bell, I promised to look into it. (Back in London, I contacted a manufacturer whose 18-inch Standard Swinging Bell includes clapper and rope, plus installation hardware.)

Liro’s guest house stood by the mission, also atomized by a cyclone. The sun fell into the sea opposite the spot where my grandparents welcomed the evenings. A couple of miles away, Lopevi, the graceful, grumbling volcanic islands where they placed a trio of churches, reared from the water. The residents had been evacuated after a devastating eruption in 1970. Still, when Anton and I took a boat over, we met a cheerful family harvesting their copra.

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They led us into a tiny rain forest so prodigiously fertile that it seemed to generate its own emerald light. Showing off gardens bursting with produce, a youth cupped a hand to his ear and pantomimed the sound of melons creaking as they swelled in the soil. Later, eating deliciously fresh grilled fish, we asked about Vanuatu’s most dangerous active volcano. The men said, “The women are afraid,” but the women laughed and said, “Only when it goes BANG!”

The church folk threw a party for me. By the flickering of hurricane lanterns we feasted on lap-lap (pork, prawns or flying fox added to a yam or manioc paste, wrapped in leaves, then cooked in coconut milk) prepared by women required to linger in the shadows until the men had loaded their plates. Afterward, Liro’s generator--a massive, bellowing old engine normally switched on only to power the village photocopier, exploded to life. We filed out to watch the headmaster’s personal collection of rock videos beneath a huge orange moon.

Arriving by plane at Santo, the onetime rebel island, I shared a taxi from the airfield with a young Kiwi scuba diver eager to check out the 22,000-ton luxury liner turned into the troopship President Coolidge. “She sank close inshore in 1942 with the loss of two lives, after striking friendly mines. Supposed to be a great dive!” he said.

In Luganville, the crumbling little capital, I found a room at the comfortable Hotel Santo, then called on Peter Morris, a personable old Santo planter. “The Coolidge is our main attraction,” he said as I sipped strong Santo coffee. “It brings divers from all over the world. Last month, an 80-year-old American survivor of the sinking appeared and went down twice.

“The other draw is Million Dollar Point. We had a major American base here and, after Japan’s surrender, the Yanks offered thousands of tons of equipment to the government at 8 cents to the dollar. When London and Paris tried to screw the price down even further, they lost patience and dumped the whole lot in the sea. It’s still there--furniture, vehicles, road-building machinery, tires, aero engines, you name it. All turned to coral.”

The late James Michener was based on Santo. “He wrote ‘Tales of the South Pacific’ here,” Morris said. “His inspiration for Bali Ha’i was the island of Ambae, just across the water. When he returned a few years ago, he told me he’d never set foot there. I said, ‘Jimmy, we must do something about that,’ and he said, ‘No, no, it would spoil the dream.’ ”

I hitched a ride up to Big Bay, where an elderly village chief meticulously recounted--timed to the minute--the arrival here of three Spanish ships. This was the Melanesian ancestral memory at work and, as the hairs prickled on the back of my neck, I reveled in a seemingly eyewitness description of an event 400 years ago.

Most tourists visit the southern island of Tanna to see Yasur, allegedly the world’s only active drive-up volcano. The site is neither supervised nor protected; people have been pummeled to death by rocks lobbed into the sky. Tanna also has wild horses, shocking roads, a few simple hotels and, deep in the forest, a tribe that worships the Duke of Edinburgh. I found them treasuring their portraits of Philip, one of them autographed, and dreaming of the day he would visit. Other Tannese worship Jon Frum, a mysterious U.S. serviceman who, during the war, had allegedly promised to fly in huge quantities of modern supplies. Makeshift airfields had been readied and, though no cargo ever appeared, the Frummers are a potent force. One night I joined a revivalist congregation that gathered in a lemon grove to sing wistful hymns about America.

Each island I visited was like a planet, with its own culture, traditions and stories. The men of Pentecost island, leaping from 100-foot towers with vines around their ankles to ensure a good yam harvest, gave the world bungee-jumping. On Ambrym, I befriended a clique of morose but clever magicians whose most famous trick--a tightrope walk on threads spun by spiders--I couldn’t afford to see ($50, no discounts). On Malekula, I stayed with hospitable Presbyterians who, lounging naked on mats, invited me to a meal of lap-lap dipped in chicken fat. And on Erromango one Sunday, while visiting a lauded source of fragrant sandalwood, I found myself marched off to church and told to deliver a sermon. (I recalled grandfather’s advice and made them laugh.)

Paama’s new bell provided the ideal excuse for me to return to Vanuatu several months after this trip, but I’d have found another excuse. On my last night on Iririki, I took a last look out over the harbor and saw the Southern Cross illuminating the ocean surface like swimming pool lights. When a small copra boat slipped by, the stars dissembled, then, dipping and sliding, came together again: the full set.

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Guidebook: Away From It All in Vanuatu

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Vanuatu is 678. Hotel prices are for a double for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only.

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Getting there: Vanuatu can be reached via Auckland, New Zealand, or Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, Australia. Air Vanuatu is the only airline that connects to the Vanuatu islands; it is represented in the United States by Air Promotions Systems, 5757 W. Century Blvd., Suite 660, Los Angeles; telephone (310) 670-7302 or (800) 677-4277, fax (310) 338 0708.

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Where to stay: Iririki Island Resort, tel. 23388, fax 23880. Upscale hotel with 70 bungalows and private beach. Rate: $170. Port-Vila: Le Meridien, tel. 22040 or Meridien Reservations International (800) 543-4300. Set among 50 acres of lagoon-front property and tropical gardens, with a casino. Rates: $115 to $135. The Melanesian, tel. 22150, fax 22678. Newly renovated 86-room hotel that’s a two-minute walk from town. Rate: $105. Hideaway Island Resort, tel. 22963, fax 23867. An idyllic marine sanctuary. Rates: $52 to $69. Santo: Hotel Santo in downtown Luganville, tel. 36250, fax 36749. Good base for divers interested in the Coolidge wreckage. Rates: $55 to $95. Bougainville Resort, tel. 36257, fax 36647. Eighteen bungalows set amid lush gardens. Rate: $90. Tanna: Tanna Beach Resort; tel. 68626, fax 68610. Rates: $70 to $150. White Grass Resort; tel. 68688. Rate: $32. On several other islands, basic guest house accommodations are available; contact Island Safaris, tel. 23288, fax 26779, e-mail islands@vanuatu.com.vu.

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Where to eat: Michener’s on Iririki, tel. 23388. Fresh local beef, fish, lobster and crab; $22 to $60. The Lagoon Terrace Restaurant, tel. 22313. Good, reasonably priced Melanesian barbecue; $40 to $50. The Harbourside, tel. 26155. A converted 1925 copra warehouse serving Thai and French-Mediterranean dishes; $35 to $45. La Cabane, tel. 22763. You may buy your tablecloth, hand-painted by the owner’s wife; $20 to $30. Rossi, tel. 22528. Established in the ‘30s by a colorful Corsican family, it remains Port-Vila’s most venerable restaurant; $24 to $50.

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For more information: The National Tourism Office of Vanuatu, Pilioko House, Kumul Highway, Port-Vila, Vanuatu, South West Pacific; tel. 22685, fax 23889. Local tour operators include The Adventure Centre, tel. 22743, fax 27763; Tamaso Aliat Wi Tours, tel. 25600, fax 24275, and Island Safaris (see above).