Ranthe Vua!

Yachting

OUR Vanuatu courtesy flag waved red, green, black and yellow from the starboard spreader as we flew along at five knots under jib alone. With flat seas and tradewind skies, we headed for Pentecost Island in the northern Vanuatu group.

Across the Selwyn Strait, we ghosted slowly along Pentecost’s western coast sailing past waterfalls, caves, cliffs and valleys. A tall dark island, Pentecost is long and narrow with a mountainous spine running up its centre. We followed the range markers into the anchorage at Loltong where several village children paddled out to greet us. On board one of the outriggers was Phillip, a ni-Vanuatu with two children. Phillip became our friend and guide.

Travellers encounter the challenge of language and communication in all the islands of the South Pacific but in Vanuatu the problem is different. Vanuatu has the most languages per capita of any country in the world and there are still more than 100 distinct traditional languages spoken in Vanuatu. The national language, Bislama, is an English-based pidgin which has evolved and is used throughout the archi pelago as the lingua franca. Until 1980, Vanuatu was jointly ruled by a “condo minium” government operated by Britain and France. Bislama allows those who have been educated in French language schools to communicate with those who have studied at English speaking institutions.

Most ni-Vanuatu are multi-lingual.

We carried our dinghy ashore and placed it in the shade of a nabanga, or banyon tree. Villagers came out of their homes and handshaking was non-stop as men, women and children welcomed us to northern Pentecost. “ Ranthe vua! ”

We went wokbaot our top priority when we are travelling. We took a long walk along a high ridge overlooking the bay for a spectacular view. 6ently tugging at her anchor rope, Fellowship was pro-

Sally Andrew continues her adventures in Vanuatu, ‘one of the most interesting places in the South Pacific, on board

tected on three sides by the light lumi nescent blues of coral reefs. To the west was a misty silhouette of the island of Ambae, and to the south were the well-kept grounds of the local Catholic mission and French

language school.

On Friday we ambled along the coastal path and visited two nearby villages. We walked along the shore, Phillip showed us inside the nakamals, pointing out the utensils used for making kava long wood, coconut shell cups and coral pestles used for crushing kava. We discovered that ni- Vanuatu often use the palm of their hand as the mortar.

In the evening, Phillip invited us to his home to drink kava or aelan bia. Kava roots were dug up, washed and peeled. We sat on a bench in a small two-room house and watched. Phillip sat on a mat on the coral floor surrounded by an assortment of kava

brewing paraphenalia. The scraped kava

roots were washed again, arranged in the palm of his left hand, then hand ground onto a wooden platter with a pestle made of shaped and fluted coral. The grated kava was kneaded with a little water, formed into a ball, wrapped in coconut gauze and squeezed first into two primary thick shelled bilo then melitta filtered into a thin drinking coconut shell cup. After a short blessing, the first cup was offered to us.

Bottoms up. I closed my eyes as the thick earthy drink went down. It tasted good. I passed the cup back to Phillip and thanked him. Later we learned to go to the door, yell Paaaaa , cough, spit, and shout an epithet to stop the rain. In between trips to the door, the conversation flowed quietly. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when we got back aboard Fellowship

All too soon it was daybreak. In the village, a cock began crowing. The cry sounded more like Ranthe Vua (the indigen

ous “good morning”) than the five-syllable

“cock-a-doodle-doo” of my childhood. A barking dog joined in the serenade and the village began to stir. The sky slowly lightened, and the smoke of cooking fires rose in the bush, along the shore, in the

hills, along the ridge.

Saturday is sports day in the outer islands of Vanuatu and entire villages turn out to play or cheer-on the local athletes.

At Loltong, the soccer game was exception ally well-played, with a high level of enthusiasm and competitive spirit. On the edge of the playing field, women sold fried cakes (gateaux), drinking coconuts and Vanuatu’s national dish, laplap. Laplap are packages of grated manioc, taro roots or yams tightly wrapped in taro leaves, often seasoned with bits of meat or fish, and cooked in an underground oven. After the games we toured the local mission with

Father Jean.

In northern Pentecost we had been welcomed with open arms and leaving was sad. As a parting gift, Phillip and his family gave us a gift of fresh fruit and vegetables, and a hand-woven five-colour pandanus basket and traditional purple-dyed kastom dance mat.

Vanuatu is linguistically and culturally one of the most interesting places in the South Pacific. Traditions vary from island to island, and we found that Pentecost is still a very kastom oriented island. People believe in doing things the ni-Vanuatu way, and that made our visit to Pentecost

especially rewarding.