Clams and kava
Kokamo's Pacifc Meanderings
Tom and Rachel
Mon 30 Aug 2010 23:39
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Three days ago Kokamo was at 16:32.5S
167:50.2E
Our Malekula explorations continued
by sailing back along the south coast of the island (more upwind, but a gentle
day for it), and anchoring in the beautiful Maskeleyne Islands. This was
our first visit to a coral lagoon in Vanuatu - and it seems that the lagoons
here have the edge over their Fiji and Tonga counterparts by having far more
mangrove, and many more mosquitoes.
The community on Uliveo Island set up
a clam conservation area back in 1991, and now there are about 3000 of the
impressive bivalves with their strangely psychedelic painted
inards. We were taken in a canoe across the shallows to their protected
little lagoons, where we found plenty of brightly coloured giant clams, up
to almost a metre long, greedily pumping seawater through themselves. There
were also hundreds of smaller ones whose fleshy bits displayed
intricate map-like contours, and feigned surprise by snapping half closed if you
swam too close.
In the evening, some of the men
wanted to put on a kastom dance to earn some cash for school fees. It was
a bit of a lame display to be honest, with only three men, as others had been
called away to the main island. But settling down to chat over some kava
in the village felt much more relaxed. It was the first time Rachel had
drunk the ground up pepper tree root outside the kava bars of Vila, as
woman are not allowed to drink it on Tanna. I had warned her it was
stronger in the outer islands, but I'm not sure she was expecting to feel
quite so unsteady and spaced out after knocking back her three
'shells!' Maybe we should have gone back to check out those psychedlic
clams again...
Over the next couple of the days we
decided to make some distance northwards - so sailed in two hops up the 80 mile
east coast of Malekula, to Santo.
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