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Machinist in Paradise - Part XXII
by Mike Fitzpatrick

The things that fascinate me about the exotic places we visit, are the comparisons to our American way of life. Not just the big facts, such as; there's 105 distinctly different languages in these Islands but rather the small everyday things. If I ever compile these letters into a booklet of our voyage, I'll entitle it "Different Times and Paces". For example, yesterday, we went to the Market. Anytime you ask a villager, on any Pacific island, about "the market," they know you mean the open air, farmers market. They've been on every Island we've visited where there are trails or roads between villages. Opening at predawn on the appointed day, folks bring what they have to sell the night before. They sleep on mats, right there and market becomes both business and a social activity. Maybe it's because my Dad had a small grocery when I was growing up, but I just love walking up and down and seeing the mothers and babies and the old folks selling things we sort of recognize like 10 inch diameter avocados or three foot long beans. There's also piles of peeled, green drinking coconuts - just ready to pop off the top and drink the refreshing liquid. I can't pass those up at twenty Vatu each (about 18 cents). There are piles of a wide variety of bananas on the stalk, taro, basketball sized grapefruits, and all sorts of exotic treats including snails, live pigs and chickens. But even more, we see things we have no idea of what they are, like the bumpy green things that look like cactus heads but aren't. All home grown whatever the heck they are. This week, the big item was raw peanuts still clinging to their vine-runners. There are things that are, well, a little hard to describe - visualize this if you can! I went up to one attractive lady to buy some of the big shiny green avocados. I asked for "two big ones please" and held out 40 Vatu; the posted price on the pile. She set her nursing baby down, which disconnected it from its meal - her breast plopped down amongst the fruit between us. Wow, was I glad when she reached around to choose mine from the pile, leaving me to think through my opening statement. To communicate here in Vanuatu and throughout the Melanesian basin, the Islanders have invented their own version of English called Bishlama - you might call it Pigeon. Originally, it was a clipped version of the ships language that took Islanders for deck crew or as indentured labor for Australia. Today, Bishlama has evolved into a serious language that connects millions of people from New Guinea, the Solomon to Kiribati, and many other Island Nations. I've tuned it in on the radio and found that Bishlama has it's own grammatical rules and dictionary as well as differing regional dialects. In the village, I can buy instructional guides to speaking it. It's not as easy as you might guess. Some words and phrases can be worked out while others require study and practice. Copra is very much the King crop here. There are two modest freighters loading as I write this, storing thousands of sacks to be shipped to Singapore. Small copra boats shuttle back and forth between the out island plantations and the village docks. At the isolated outer villages, they buy the dried coconut meat from the simple folks, with cash. Then the villagers go right out to the boat to buy the staples they need, handing the cash right back to the boat. An ensnaring ritual we've seen and written about before. The Asian freighter is directly upwind so we smell the not-unpleasant smoky-sweet, dried coconut meat as they sling it into the cargo holds, day and night. Copra also gets made into soap and oils here in the Islands. All the shoreline of this and the visible Islands nearby is lined with plantations. This is the only place we've been where copra is a viable and un-subsidized crop. Here's a favorite story: Two days ago, Linda and I were out in our high speed skiff, exploring some of the smaller Islands just across the one mile channel from where we were anchored. Skirting the reef, looking for a place to go ashore for shells, we spotted a couple of young men waving from an outrigger parked up over the reef, so we veered in to say hello. That turned out to be a good turn for us all. Brothers, Simon, 15 and Sylvas, 11 were real ambassadors for their country. Sylvas spoke broken English while Simon spoke French. That's typical here and depends upon the school one chooses to attend, English or French. We told them that we were interested in trading for shells, especially, some big tritons. We've had pretty bad luck finding them other than alive and I don't take them unless they are dead. Bingo - Jackpot, did we get shells! They said they had some and would like to trade. Would we tow their canoe back to Bon-Bon village across the channel? If so, they would get their shells. We did, with Sylvas riding in our boat chatting as best he could. He's a cutie, the kind of kid you want to take home with you. Big bright eyes, easy smile and smart as any kid you ever met. That day and the next, we hosted them for lunch, went snorkeling with them and I went to their village to take family pictures with our Polaroid camera. (A trick we learned from Bob and Laurie when we sailed in the Caribbean aboard Shearwater - many articles ago.) We now have four beautiful tritons and a great big helmet shell too. Tritons are the shells often depicted as a ceremonial message horn in Polynesia. That's only a fraction of the shells we ended up with, but it wasn't a one way trade either. I had a brand new pair of squash shoes (a sport like racquet ball) left over from New Zealand and some bright sun glasses, several tee-shirts plus two of Linda's custom baseball hats. They were very happy to trade for these items especially since the shells came from the sea without cost and the shoes were far beyond their wildest dream of owning at the equivalent of one hundred dollars or more in Lugganville. One item we "threw in" was a frozen ten pound tuna. We knew it would be appreciated by their parents and feed their whole family. In all these Islands, where the people live off the reef, we've seen evidence of overfishing. We rarely see fish any bigger than four or five inches long. That's been true in Samoa, Tonga and most of Polynesia except the Tuamotoes. So, a good-sized fish is real treat. On the reef, there's literally thousands of fish but they're so tiny! They were spear fishing when we came upon them but they had nothing in their outrigger, I noticed. It came time to go, the boat was ready and it was dried out from the crossing to Vanuatu, we had our provisions and fuel aboard and the weather opened up. Bound for our next stop, the Solomon Islands, we obtained permission to visit some of the out-Islands of Vanuatu on our way North. That's not always possible because once I declare "zarpie" (official clearance to leave), I must then leave the country. But the government gave us permission to visit the remote Northern out-islands as we saw fit. Other than the French Tuamotu tolls where we shared life with Pai, Henri and the wonderful Kuihi villagers, this was the most memorable experience of the trip.