Muffins for Fish
Storyteller
Sun 6 Sep 2009 02:20
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Position, 15.22S 168.07E
It's a wet Sunday morning at Asanvari, a
lovely village at the southern end of the mountainous island of Maewo in
Vanuatu. A beautiful waterfall tumbles noisily down through the
jungle to the shore. As I listened to Radio Australia early this morning to
find out if Australia had lost the rugby once again (they beat South Africa!) I
watched the people from the next village paddling in their outrigger canoes to
attend church. Some of the women were holding large leaves over their heads to
protect them from the rain. I also saw a large turtle bobbing its
head from time to time. We're tied to mooring put in by visiting yachties,
and the water is so clear that every time I toss something overboard, several
large parrot fish swirl to the surface to grab it.They particularly seem to like
aging hummous.
Most of the boats have travelled further south now,
leaving only us, Harmonie and another American yacht in this beautiful bay.There
are huge bommies and an unusual underwater ravine, all perfect for snorkelling.
We are assured that this is a shark-free bay--probably the last for a while,
unfortunately. Three years ago a young NZ girl staying on her grandparents'
yacht was taken by a shark, so we are all being very careful to check with the
locals before venturing in.
We've met some great
Americans while we've been here, all of them ardent fishers, so we've been able
to repay their donations of delicious mahimahi with good old Kiwi style
muffins.One of the American boats was a smallish Nordhaven ocean trawler,so
it has been fun swapping notes with them. They assured us that they had
actually hooked into a marlin while trolling in their dinghy not far from our
mooring, so yesterday we collected Nixon, the chief's son and some of his
friends at 7 am and headed off with every rod and line out--but no
luck. the NiVans,as the indigenous people are called, seem to believe in
the NZ superstition that you never catch fish when you have bananas on
board . So perhaps that was the problem.
Thanks to an enterprising chief and plenty of
visiting yachts, Asanvari is a much more prosperous village than most that we
have visited in Vanuatu. They actually have a 'shop' where you can buy
beautifully woven baskets and carved model outrigger canoes for absurdly low
prices. They are just as happy to trade as to take cash. At 6 30 in the morning
a chap from a nearby village paddles across with the bread he has made in his
wood stove at 3am. He'd run out of flour the other day, so I was happy to donate
him bread flour and yeast.
Sometimes we become a bit blase about the villages
we are lucky enough to spend time in, but then we are reminded that this is
a world very different from the one we live in. When we arrived here a few days
ago, we learnt that one of Chief Nixon's sons had died the previous week--from
black magic. According to Lonely Planet, this island is one of the strongholds
of witchcraft. I haven't dared ask what he had done to offend the local
sorcerer.
The young man had a wife and 4 children, one of
whom we met yesterday as she was playing with her cousins. Obviously the family
are looked after by the extended family in the village, so it's not quite the
disaster it would be in our society.
This has been our first week for a while without
visitors. We spent the first three weeks after arriving from Fiji in the Santo
area, where all the wonderful World War 2 relics are everywhere--sunken planes,
shipwrecks, Nissan huts, huge aircraft runways, now overgrown with jungle. A
delightful addition to the 'wild west' town of Luganville ths year has been a
really good French restaurant, where we met many of the local French community.
We had a lovely evening there with Anna and Dominique, an Australian/French
couple who had just arrived from Melbourne to do a 2-year stint on Santo,
running an Ausaid program.
Another highlight was discovering the circus
school run by Matt, an ex-Circus OZ performer. We took Hunter, Brigid's 5
year-old, who had a wonderful time with the local picanninis and expat kids
learning some pretty impressive tricks. It ws fascinating watching Matt coach
the older Ni Van kids in the afternoon. For Brigid the highlight was probably a
horse ride without the children, while Pete was able to remember enough of his
dive certificate to dive on both the wreck of the President Coolidge and the
American equipment dumped at Million Dollar Point.
For anyone wanting a holiday with a
difference--adventure in comfort--we'd strongly recommend Santo as a
destination, especially since there is a direct flight up here from Brisbane
once a week. You'll see travel warnings about malaria, but we haven't seen a
single mosquito since we arrived in Vanuatu. There is a particularly nice resort at Aore Island, opposite Luganville,
with wonderful coral and tropical fish a stone's throw from the beach. Brigid
and her family really enjoyed staying there while Storyteller was on a
mooring just off the resort. When we arrived at Aore we saw a couple of
visitors celebrating some occasion by drinking a bottle of Moet as they were
being paddled along on a very rustic outrigger canoe. It wan't quite the
same, but Brigid, Pete, John and I consumed a bottle on the ferry to celebrate
my birthday at the French restaurant, Le Jardin des Saveurs.
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