Around the Island in 10 days

Ive been at sight, on Aneityum, for nearly a year now, but until September, I had yet to walk around the whole island. So, for the 2 week break between term 2 and 3 I decided the time had come; I was going to “round” the island.

It goes without saying that our island is beautiful. Ask any of us and we’d say it’s probably the most, or at least one of the most, beautiful islands in the South Pacific. We’ve got white sand beaches and black sand beaches, hills and mountains, dry red ground and clay red ground, palm trees and pine trees, waterfalls and brooks, deep dark blue water and shallow “forget-me-not” aqua blue water. Rounding the island, you get to experience the natural wonder of each.

Because you must climb somewhere around 5-10 mountains in your journey around the island, what you bring requires some forethought. My backpack contents for personal use were: one shirt, one skirt and a mini firstaid ziplock. Everything else was to share out with those whom I met along the way-- rice, sugar, soap, tea, matches, balloons (white people tend to make certain kids in the “bush” away from “town” cry…balloons are helpful in such an event), maccarroni and cheese, fishing line and hooks. My pack was heavy, but as my journey progressed, it got lighter and lighter. By the time I made it back to Analcauhat, my bag was empty except for the shirt and skirt.

ANALCAUHAT TO ANIPLITHEI- 1 hour (Friday)
I set out on a Friday with one of my Mamas and her 10month old baby, Elsa. Our first destination was Aniplithei to see a small waterfall and check out some vanilla plants. The hike was an easy 1 hour and there were plenty of stories along the way:
CUSTOM STORIES
~There are certain trees that if you cut them, fruit will not grow in that entire area.
~At one of the rivers, when the banks of it come close together and stand maybe 5-15 feet apart, it means someone is about to die. When the banks are far apart (30-70 feet) you’re safe.
~There is a tree trunk with a naturally occurring dugout kind of thing; if someone is bullying you, you snatch a piece of their clothing, put it in the tree hole and a snake will go and bite that person.
~There is the stone along the reef where if you put smaller stones on top of it and splash some saltwater in its grooves, the ocean will become rough and impassable.
~The waterfall at Aniplithei used to be where they took prisoners of battle and pushed them off the top. They would fall down the waterfall cliff and be impaled on a sharp stick planted firmly in the pool below.

The vanilla plants were beautiful and natural; we are thinking about doing small scale vanilla harvests to sell to Port Vila, but well see. The waterfall was small, quiet, and peaceful. Hard to imagine how many people had died there having been taken prisoner not too many decades ago.

ANIPLITHEI TO UMEJ- 2 hours (Friday-Monday)
Umej is the next “village” up the eastern coast of the island. This hike was more varied as we crossed slippery stones, 3 rivers, mangrove covered banks, and seemingly infinite stretches of white sand beaches. When i arrived, i hung around and met some of the village elders. We storied under the Banyon tree and ate dry maniok. Bland but filling. Saturday, i went to the garden with some family We set fire to piles and piles of branches from root crops pulled over the past 5 or so months. These fires were huge and people said you could see the smoke from Analcauhat. My clothes were stained black as was my skin; the locals joked that working in the garden was making my skin turn black like theirs. We planted water taro, maniok, corn and kava. We brought a pot with us and hung it on a branch stuck in the ground over a fire to boil our lunch—water taro. We also found a ripe papaya which was a nice addition to yet more starchy root crop. After the garden we went to the river where i went cliff jumping with some kids. Saturday night, i drank kava with my 70+year old grandmother. Sunday—Catholic church. Monday morning i delivered matches and soap to some of the elders as a small thank you for their hospitality and moved on leaving the village of Umej behind.

CUSTOM BELIEF
~Those in Umej believe that you cannot go to the water taro garden if you eat certain foods that week: coconut and anything from the ocean. If you eat those, you have to stay out of the water taro gardens, though you can go to the gardens where other crops are grown.

UMEJ TO EJASES- 5hrs (Monday-Tuesday)
After Umej, there isn’t another real village with a significant amount of people until you reach Anawamet which is directly opposite Analcauhat on the northern coast. However, along the way, you will find small family compounds hidden behind the tree line just inland from the shore. Ejases is one such place.

The walk from Umej to Ejases was a little more strenuous. You must climb 5 or so mountains, one that will take the wind out of you. It’s is well worth it though because these views are truly amazing. Reaching the top of the last mountain, I sat down and took a break to look out across the Pacific. You can’t see a single thing, just blue, blue, blue. The waves below crash slowly against the black stones that break up stretches of beach. Sitting so high up and looking down at the waves, you would swear they are going in slow motion, heavy and lazy. As the waves crash into the protruding rocky edge, they seem so gentle. They crash in unison at times, at others in a series. It all seems so calm, so peaceful…but you know those same waves could easily kill you. The ocean is so calm, yet so powerful. Your perception of it can be very different depending on where you stand. I sat up there looking out, seeing nothing but the edge of the world; the dark blue ocean, the light blue sky, then a white stripe diving the two; a flash of white light that really does feel like the edge of the world.

Half way through our walk we came across a family that had made a shelter out of coconut leaves and a couple of branches; a very temporary structure. They roasted green bananas while some kids and i went fishing on the reef. Standing on those stones as the tide came in, I got a taste of just how powerful those waves truly are. They had looked to calm and peaceful when observed from above, but now, standing face to face, they were powerful enough to swipe my feet out from under me and send me tumbling. I managed to stay standing long enough to catch 3 fish.

After roasting lunch, we walked on straight to Ejases. When we got there, the sun was ready to go down and the men had just come back from fishing. They had well over 20 fish which was enough for the 10-15 people that had gathered at Ejases. We came at straight kava time, so I sat down with a couple women and chewed 2 kava stumps. We drank 3 shells each and nibbled on fish that had been baked in leaves on hot stones. That night, I slept on the ground, people on either side of me and dogs at our feet. With 3 shells of kava, I wouldn’t have noticed if I had slept on a temprapedic mattress.

(Tuesday)
That morning, I got one of the young girls that lives at Ejases to take me to the waterfalls. Sandrine is 15 and has never been to school, having lived there her whole life. She can’t read or write or tell you who Einstein, Hitler, Obama, or Gandhi are, but she has dozens of prosperous gardens, can weave a 15ftx15ft double mat in a single day, can climb the highest of high coconut trees, and knows every stone, flower, and waterfall that surrounds her family’s land.

The waterfalls were incredible, getting there, treacherous. To get up to the waterfalls (no there are no trails), you have to walk, or actually jump, from stone to stone and the stones are fatally slippery. Seriously, it’s as if you took a marble floor, poured dishwashing soap on it with a bucket of water, got it good and slippery, then took a jackhammer and broke up the marble and spread out the chunks just far enough apart that you strain to reach the next step. No joke, it was the scariest thing ive ever done in my life; Scarier than The Shining, than roller coasters, eating oysters, choking, heights, falling in love. You name it, it was scarier. The waterfalls were worth it though. Some were 15 feet high, others 50. Some had pools to swim in, some splashed down into shallow rivers. Orchids were scattered along mossy stones, growing off of tree trunks, spying out of caves. That afternoon when we got back, I laid in the large fishing net hung between the trees and wrote in my journal. All the kids crowded around to watch me write. These are kids that, living in the "bush" away from Analcauhat, do not attend school and are illiterate in their own language, Bislama and English. But they were mesmerized watching me write. When i left, i have them some hooks, matches, a bag of sugar. I gave Sandrine an anklet i had been wearing for the year. She ran off skipping with a smile from ear to ear.

CUSTOM STORIES
~There is a cave along the sea front that you can see from up top on the mountain. When the waves come rushing in, they flow into the cave and shoot out the top. The noise is like a bomb-loud and powerful. There used to be another cave like this one, only 3x the size and the noise 300x as loud. The story goes that when the waves would rush in and make the booming sound, it spoiled the kava high of the men. They were so peeved, that one of the village elders went and did a custom spell to make the ocean incredibly rough, rough enough that the waves came in and crushed the stones and destroyed the booming cave. Now it is just a huge hole in the otherwise continuous stone wall along a stretch of the eastern coast.
~One of the waterfalls has a large pool at the bottom and the cliff the water runs off of is not straight down at a 90degree angle, but slants down, like a slide. In times of war, the villagers of the surrounding areas would send the young men up there. The men had to ‘ski’ down the waterfall slide into the pool. In the middle of the pool they stuck a sharp stake pointing upwards at them. Those who slid down the slope and dodged the stake were to be a leader in battle. If you were speared, well, that was either the end of your life or if you managed to survive, you weren’t going to be leading.


EJASES to AN OLD WOMAN along the way-1hr (Tuesday night)
As I left Sandrine Tuesday night, I was in no rush. My shoes had broken and the soles of them flopped with every step. I also had 3 sores developing, so I was taking it easy. I came across an old woman sitting on the beach weaving a mat by a fire. She was shocked to see me come around the bend and was eager to hear about my journey around the island. We storied for a few hours and she insisted that I stay with her that night. She was openly embarrassed about having a house that leaked and didn’t have all 4 walls standing, no bed, no food other than manioc. She was relieved to realize it couldn have mattered less to me. We slept on the mat together, sheltered by 3 ½ standing bamboo walls. The next morning, we walked the reef and found “naswol”—reef snails—which we boiled and ate for breakfast. I left her that afternoon with a kilo of rice and a promise to return before the year’s end.

THE OLD WOMAN TO ANTASPOS-3 hours (Wednesday-Friday)
The next leg of the journey was easy with no mountains to climb. I followed the beach with the occasional detour through the bush. I passed mangroves and tree houses that seemed to have been abandoned. I came out at Antaspos which isn’t really a village in the conventional sense of the word, but a family lives there, my family; One of my mamas-Ilene- and her husband Stanley live there with their kids. We spent the evening storying, playing the guitar, and roasting bananas. Thursday I storied with some elders, went to the swamp where I was almost eaten alive by mosquitoes (literally), and hunted for crab. We found some fish that had gotten stuck in reef holes when the tide went out, but no crab. I slept that night with the kids, all of us crammed under a single mosquito net (Antaspos is known for mosquitoes). Friday we hung around, relaxed, went to the river and washed. Papa Stanley had gone diving that morning and got us a couple lobster and even a crab. I set out on Saturday leaving Ilene and Stanley with a CD (Stanley is an island-wide famous guitar player) and some fishing string and hooks.

ANTASPOS TO ANAWAMET- 1 hr (Saturday)
I set out for Anawamet early because I had some work to do over there. There is small primary school there (20 students) and I wanted to talk to the teachers and chief to see about running a couple workshops over there and helping them set up a library. I met with the chief, got the OK to come stay over there for part of term 3 and run some workshops. I made laplap with the 2 teachers and explored their coffee and vanilla gardens. I stayed until just after lunch and helped out with a small fundraising for the Presbyterian Church

ANAWAMET TO ANPEKE- 3 hours (Saturday-Monday)
Leaving Anawamet, I had to make a stop at the small village of Inap which has magic vegetable gardens. Their lettuce, tomatoes, cabbage, and bell peppers grow to be enormous, and I just had to see where these delicious vegetables were being grown. On top of the mountain, the family had cleared a large area of ground and leveled it. Rows and rows of neatly planted vegetables sprouted from the ground. This garden was unlike any ive seen in Vanuatu. Usually the gardens are totally unorganized, seemingly unplanned, crops sprout everywhere with no rhyme or reason to their location or spacing. But Inap, they had taken some serious time and planned out this garden. I gave them some seeds I had been holding onto and they gave me a basket of vegetables. Delicious.

I then walked on to meet the rest of my family in Anpeke. I came out to the compound only to find it empty; They had to be at the river making laplap. Sure enough, I found my aunt, uncle, a couple grandparents and half a dozen kids hanging out under the mango trees making taro laplap. The kids were ‘skiing’ down the small dirt slopes on the husks of coconut trees; the women grating taro; the men scratching coconuts to make milk. I joined the women. As the sun started getting ready to go down, one of my grandmothers told me to follow her. We followed the river upstream for about an hour and came out to an enormous kava garden/swamp. We pulled a stump and made our way back down just as the sun was getting ready to set. The young boys chewed the kava for us while we roasted manioc. We drank about 7 shells of kava, finishing long after the sun had gone down. Roasted manioc is pretty good. The skin tastes just like potato skins from a classic place like Fridays. If only i had some sour cream, chives, cheese, and bacon bits...

I spent my days in Anpeke just hanging out, fishing, going to the garden, cutting wild cane to repair my grandmother’s roof. We went to the bush and tried to find a special kind of wild yam that is super sweet. We were lucky and found about 10 which we saved for our trip to Anawonse.

ANPEKE TO ANAWONSE-1 ½ hours (Monday-Tuesday)
This was my last stop before going back to Analcauhat. Some family was here as well and they were having a birthday party for one of my grandfathers--Inhat (he turned 45). Again, we made laplap and boiled the yams. People came from all of the surrounding family compounds and we had a big celebration. Inhat gave a speech, though it wasn’t a customary birthday speech; he talked about all of the things he had accomplished in his 45 years of life. That night was full of kava and dancing and bonfires. We went to bed around 2 or 3 in the morning and I slept, again as I had this entire journey, on the ground with several people, and dogs at our feet.

ANAWONSE BACK HOME—5 hours (Tuesday)
I was glad to get back home, though the journey was absolutely amazing. I met people who could count the number of white people they had seen on one hand. I had some of the most interesting conversations of my life and answered some of the most simple yet profound questions I’d ever been asked. I learned more about this Aneityum culture and custom in those 10 days than I could ever explain in a blog. I made some friends that I will never forget. It’s not the last time I’ll see them, but you can only have a first encounter once, and my first encounter with all the people who live outside of Analcauhat was fantastically beautiful, refreshing, rejuvenating, and inspiring.

It’s not in every lifetime that you get to have an experience like that. I’m grateful for it.

One of the things I love most about storying with people here is the questions i get about America. The world is inconceivably big to us, but imagine having never left a small remote island...its incomprehensible. Many think America and Canada and South America are all "USA" and that USA is the same place as England. Nobody has ever heard of Switzerland, Poland, Portugal or any African country by name. The idea of states and not "islands" is a hard one to grasp. They refer to America as an island and when I say I live hours from the ocean, they figure I live in "The Bush". They think we live off of rice and crackers because we dont have gardens like theirs. Their concept of "the store" is one that they get from the "stores" we have here on the islands which sell white crackers, rice, sugar, and tin tuna. I really need to bring some pictures back...pictures of basic things: streets, street lights, stores, cars (many have never seen a car or a truck!)

i have a funny story. As the 2 week break started, my family decided to go to port vila and take the kids, including their neice Senanie IF they had enough money. Senanie was so excited to go see what all the hype was about (she is 7 years old). When the day came, it also happened to be a cruise ship day, so we were all at Mystery Island selling things to tourists and they were there waiting for the plane to come. I saw Senanie that morning and i could tell she was upset. I figured my family didnt have enough money to bring her with them and she was upset about them leaving her behind. I walked around and came back about 30 minutes before the plan was to arrive. When i came back to the airport (a grass strip), Senanie was wailing, bawling, hyperventilating. Tourists were gathered around, confused and questioning what was going on, why was this sweet little girl freaking out? It turns out, i was 100% wrong; she wasnt upset because she was being left behind, she was freaking out because she was GOING to port vila--she was terrified when it came down to it, terrified of the plane, of leaving the island, of going to Port Vila. They ended up having to strap her down in the plane to keep her inside. She was fine once she got there, and her stories were so cute. She couldnt keep her eyes off the cars (she had never seen one before), she doesnt like ice cream because its too cold, and the highlight of her trip was eating bread every morning with tea. it was the cutest thing in the world

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