Vanuatu – happy times country

The fun with our next destination within Vanuatu archipelago - Pentecost Island started even before we took off. Once, the proprietress of our small hotel in Port Vila heard that we are heading to Pentecost, she asked if it would be a problem for us to take a package for the owner of a lodge where, by the way, she booked us a room.

The package turned out to be a plastic bag of beef meat (around three kilos) and a typical cardboard case of 12 eggs. Why, on Earth, would anyone bother to get someone else to carry a 3kg of beef meat and a dozen of eggs? Honestly it is hard to imagine the products that are easier to come by. So we asked the gentleman who brought it this question. Without losing his composure, he cheerfully replied that on Pentecost these products are actually not so easy to came by - the deliveries by cargo boats are very unreliable, the electricity on cargo boats is even less reliable, so the food gets frozen and unfrozen many times. And Silos does not want his guests to be left starving or get poisoned.

It's important to add that it was still the same day when we had the emergency landing, the torrential rain kept on falling almost ceaselessly and the heavens over Port Villa were more grey than the sky over Brussels (and as you may know Brussels is really hard to beat when it comes to gloominess of a rainy day). Moreover, Ieva just started reading 'Happy Isles of the Oceania' by Paul Theroux, where the author travelling across Melanesia, keeps on grumbling that the food is awful and mainly consists of canned beef and Spam. Our morale went seriously down, we were supposed to have a relaxing holiday in the Pacific paradise; a happy end to our seven months wandering across the globe. Instead, it looked like the most adventurous, painful and culinarily austere part of our trip was about to start. In normal circumstances, we would say great, but, as just mentioned, it was seriously out of sync with our expectations.

The next day, the sun in the sky was back, and once we approached Air Vanuatu check-in counter and ostensibly placed the beef and the eggs on it we even found the whole situation quite enjoyable. Indeed, they carefully weighted our check-in luggage as well as ourselves, but did not ask a word about the carry on items. After a couple of more flights we clearly understood what the 'delivery man' meant by: Air Vanuatu is frighteningly relaxed about any security rules'. During these two weeks no one even made a suggestion of checking what was in our luggage and often no one even checked our passports (to verify if our names match the ones printed on the boarding pass, let alone often we were not even issued with a boarding pass). However, they continually put us on the scales or at least asked what our weight was. 

The passengers' body mass matters a great deal if you fly on 20 seater twin Otters that seem to rule in the Pacific skies.

The flight was rather bumpy and the landing in Pentecost was extremely bumpy with a very strong side-wind so the safest place for our eggs was in ... the cockpit :).

While we were jolted up and down, the young pilot gave us reassuring looks and thumbs-up from the cockpit. Once safely on the ground he asked: 'So, how many bags today'? He meant air-sickness bags; the answer was three bags, but all for only one (tourist) girl – poor thing she really suffered, the tears dripping down her cheeks. As far as we were concerned, after our previous day landing on the grass, we were prepared for trouble, so eventually in quite a good shape. Once off the plane, we were handed hibiscus blossoms, we picked our luggage straight from the aircraft...

... an got entertained by the the 'welcome committee' - friendly villagers and a local music band (of course our landing in good, old Zambia came to our minds :)).

We soon found out that we were the only plane that managed to land out of the scheduled five due to strong winds (that made our landing so bone-shaking). The remaining planes as well as a huge cruise-ship (we could, actually see it rocking on the waves in the distance as the airport was virtually at the beach) were diverted to other islands. We don't wish anyone bad, but it turned out to be a blessing for us, as the ambience at the 'land-diving' ceremony was so much better without the few hundred cruise-ship passengers.

We would hate to sound repetitive, boring or pretentious, but the sentence: 'something... exceeded our expectations' runs the risk to be a bit overused while we account on what happened in Vanuatu. Nonetheless, this is exactly what we can say about the 'land-diving' ceremony. The whole thing looks totally surreal at best or completely irrational and outright dangerous at worst. In any case, the whole event is great fun. The seventeen or so meter-high diving tower looked like a monstrous medieval war machine. 

When we arrived at the site (a pleasant five minutes walk from the 'airport' or more precisely the 'airstrip'). The 'divers' were already preparing the ground for the jumps; they were preparing the ground literally - they were turning the soil over with shovels and rods to make the landing softer. Usually, there is nothing exceptional about men digging in the ground in the Tropics, but not in Vanuatu … as the whole garment of these hard working gentlemen consisted only of a small leaf wrapped around their penis...

... while their backside were shining in the sun. 

This leaf cover is called namba and according to the size of the leave (allegedly nothing to do with with the size of the thing the leaf covers) there are two main groups - big nambas and small nambas. The land-divers are small nambas. 

The tower had several jumping ramps, located at different heights. A pair of lianas (a woody climbing plant that ubiquitously hangs from trees in the tropical forests) was fastened to each ramp. The legs of the divers are attached to these lianas. The lianas are meant to absorb the impact of the dive. That's why some of the people call Pentecost land-diving a precursor of bungee jumping. There is one caveat though – whereas the bungee lines have great elasticity, the Pentecost lianas have almost none (I checked myself by pulling on them).

While the divers jump head down, the local men and boys (in traditional outfits described above) and local women and girls perform traditional dances and cheer the brave guys up. 

The clothing of women consists of grass skirt wrapped around the hips and that's it, the chest is bare...

... and in Vanuatu it's the XXL size that is considered very sexy :)

There were more or less eight jumps each consecutive one from a higher ramp. Each ramp can be used only once as it breaks while the lianas get fully stretched saving the divers from hitting the ground with the tip of their heads. Actually, given that lianas are inelastic, it is a very smart system - the diver hits the ground with not so much impact because the breaking ramp absorbed most of the free fall's energy. Still, such a jump is a huge shock for the body, that's why the jumpers need to start to practice this 'sport' at an early age and they are allowed to climb higher ramps only after years of 'training'. The final 'athlete' dived more than seventeen meters to the great applause of everyone.

The legend has it that a wife running away from her husband (no one knows why she was escaping, however everybody knows that the Melanesian men were not very kind with their women, so this scenario is likely) climbed a high tree and cleverly fastened herself to lianas. While the furious husband caught up with her, she jumped down and the stupid man dived after her. The lianas cushioned her fall and she survived, whereas the unsecured husband ... not hard to guess - bit the dust. This, allegedly inspired the Pentecostians to perform the dives. Some wise, old man came up with the yam harvest connection and the tradition took off to our great contemporary enjoyment. The facts about the land-diving ceremony are hard to find out - no one really knows how old it is; reportedly, it appears already in the accounts of a Christian missionary in the first half of the nineteenth century. The ceremony traditionally used to be performed in May to ensure a plentiful yam harvest. What is yam you may ask – it is an edible tuber plant (to us it looked similar to cassava), apparently very appreciated in the whole of Melanesia (though with rather bleak prospects to become a hit in our latitudes as for us it just tastes ...well... tasteless). No one can really tell how the locals came up with the idea that this kind of activity will bring a good harvest.  

The seventeen meter-high jump concluded the ceremony, miraculously no one got hurt, so in good spirits everyone went home whereas ourselves with a couple of other tourists (exactly five including us) set off to check into the Silos' lodge. We got a lift on the rim of a pick-up truck, together with a village chief and his supplies, including an alive rooster, the rooster's paws were tied and he was so silent and still that it took us some time to realise that it was not dead. 

We also liked a lot his baskets made out of palm leaves, that are omnipresent in Vanuatu, and usually used to carry fruits. The ride on a narrow dirt road took around half an our and included two streams crossings (there are no bridges on Pentecost). At Silos' we were very warmly greeted by four congenial Melanesian ladies, wearing loose frocks (the outfit that was most likely recommended by local missionaries), they all introduced themselves by name, took good care to memorise ours, and put flower necklaces around our necks. Silos' lodge consisted of a couple of cottages or rather traditional huts made out of rattan, with a thatched roof. They were very simple, though they protected perfectly from the tropical heat, with no need of any air-conditioning. The Pacific beach was no more than 30 meters away.

We set off for a short hike along the beach and on the way we spotted a waterfall in the distance.

We passed through a village nearby whose residents were super friendly to us and showed us the path to this surprise cascade. 

The locals greeted us with very wide smiles, the kids were as cheerful as in Africa and some of them had super cool, blond frizzy hair. At first they they were shy and even a bit afraid of 'pale-skin' people like us, but after a short while as long as their mama was around, they became super excited that they could approach us.

The view of the waterfall and the feeling of its refreshing spray on our skin put the smiles on our faces at their widest. In the end, in spite of all our misgivings the day before, it looked like our Pacific, idyllic holiday was about to start :).

Meet the Men of the forest

In Malay language as well as in Bahasa Indonesia (i.e. the national language of Indonesia, that in fact is a simplified version of Malay) orang-utan means a man of the forest. 

Orang-utans naturally exist only in two places on the planet - the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra. 

The best place to admire them in their natural habitat is Tanjung Puting National Park in the South of Borneo, near the town of Pangkalan Bun. And guess what? That's exactly where we went. We expected the 'meeting' with the apes to be a memorable experience; what came as a great bonus exceeding our expectations, was the best river journey of our trip on the narrowboat that took us to the heart of the Tanjung Puting NP.

The generic name of a boat that brought us upriver is 'klotok'. When we saw it for the first time, the same thought crossed our minds: 'Isn't it a bit too big for just the three of us?' It's a double-decker barge, about 15 meters long. The whole upper deck was just for us, so we could never complain about the lack of living space :). 

To make it clear, as usual in Indonesia, any luxuries are not to be expected. The facilities consisted of a table, which we could call the 'tasty table', as we were served excellent meals on it (we don't know how they do it, but food on the boats always tastes great!), 

and three mattresses on the deck that served as our beds at night and loungers during the day. At night a huge mosquito net was slung over the beds, large enough to cover even four mattresses, all our backpacks and high enough even for Raf to stand inside. The boat is a perfect means of transport through the rainforest – far enough from it to be free from most of its insects and predators, and still close enough to admire its vegetation and animals on the way, in particular macaques and proboscis monkeys jumping in the canopy; all kinds of birds perching on the branches and lizards jumping in and out the river. The boat was also a perfect shelter at night, we felt as if we were in the middle of the forest, we could clearly hear all its sounds (and the chants of all the birds, insects and other beasts are a remarkable harmony and cacophony of sounds) and yet the narrow strip of water protected us from all big carnivores and the thin mosquito net from all small blood-suckers.

The orangutans in Tanjung Puting, similar to gorillas in Uganda, are 'habituated', i.e. they live wild in their natural habitat, but they are used to human presence. 

The key difference between the Impenetrable Forest gorillas and the Tanjung Puting orangutans is that the former are never given any food and each day move from one place to another (hence you need to track and find them, which sometimes takes several hours), whereas the latter have several feeding platforms where they come for breakfast, lunch and dinner (so you are sure to always find them in the same spot, where the walk takes no longer than half an hour). 

Raf and Marco (on the way to the feeding platform)

Of course, the feeding platforms are there not for the welfare of the tourists, but as a part of the programme to increase the population of the apes (or at least bring it back to the previous levels). It is not a zoo in any respect, the animals are in their kingdom and humans are only guests who are required to comply with strict safety and animal well-being rules...

Usually the platform is occupied by a dominant male who just sits there for a long time and slowly consumes the big stack of bananas. 

You can recognise the male by the 'padded' cheeks

Standing there near the feeding platform is fun, like watching an action and comedy show...

This one seems to be very greedy :)

The dominant males are not too happy to share their bounty, that's why others just try to grab as much as they can and run away quickly. However, the big guys have more tolerance for mothers with babies (maybe this is their offspring?). So the females come one by one with their babies gripped to their bellies, backs or arms.

Out of the blue the male very abruptly left the platform, as if he was running away, 'why was that?' we asked ourselves. A few seconds later another male ran in, but instead of jumping straight away on the bounty, he started chasing the former one up the tree. A fight ensued, there were lots of roars and shaking branches, but the fight did not last long. The winner soon came back to enjoy the well-deserved (or rather fought for) lunch and after lunch stretching.

When orangutans jump from one tree to another, the trunks bend as if they were made from rubber; it's amazing that they have such a flexibility, how come they do not break? Sometimes they do, actually, once we even witnessed a tree that cracked under the weight of this big ape – lot of noise. 

Sultans of Swing?

Sometimes other species also sneak in for the feast...

Gibbon is another ape that lives in the forests of Borneo, slender, very fast and funny :)

Also a shy little squirrel tried hard to join to party

Atmosphere was jovial and relaxed until 'Big Tom' came and (most likely) said: 'gentleman stupid jokes are over!'

Tom is the real king here, which is certified by his 'royal collar'

Sometimes Tom looks more like the new reincarnation of Darth Vader

During the day Tom is the boss of all the bosses in the jungle, whereas at night the forest becomes the kingdom of insects. A multi-species and multi-coloured kingdom. Enjoy the views...