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Monday, 13 August 2007

The sea seen through pawpaw...

Friday 5.12.03: Waiting in Ghizo

The town of Ghizo with Kolombangara island on the horizon

How long we will be here is anyone's guess. Flights are irregular and, because of the fuel shortage, they sometimes return to Honiara with as few as five passengers. We wander along the waterfront to the market where we buy sweet potato, reef fish and cassava pudding - a delicious, yellow, plastic-like material wrapped around a sweet, cooked banana. This we plan to eat later.

We are again staying at the Rekona Moa Moa Lodge where, during our absence on Choiseul, two young Englishmen have moved in. One of them, a fit-looking man in his late twenties who wears his blond hair short, is a diving instructor from the UK. For a couple of months he and his friend are backpacking through the islands. While we talk, his friend is readying his surfboard for a trip to the weather coast, but the diver confides that he would be just as happy reading his book here at the guesthouse. He goes, anyway, leaving me to sit back, close my eyes and enjoy the cooling wind from the sea. These are the South East Trade Winds... the Solomons at their best.

Steve is talking to the day manager, a young woman from the Vella Levalla islands to the north. Talking to young women is something Steve has a reputation for. When his new friend goes off to do some work he comes to where I sit.

"We are lucky we made the crossing yesterday", he says. "It would be rough today."

Steve and I eat reef fish from the market for dinner, then retire to our shared room. A ceiling fan keeps down the heat. As usual, we wake early.

"I'm going down to check at the airline office", says Steve. He seems ready to leave although I suspect he would be quite happy to spend a few more days in Gizo, as would I. That is a desire balanced by the knowledge that time to collect information for the handbooks is limited and we have planned to spend the following week on Malaita. I consider going with him but the sea breeze feels so good that I stay to enjoy it. I watch Steve walk down the path, across the dusty road and turn towards the market. I know that his walk to the airline office will not be straightforward - he is certain to encounter people he knows and stop and talk with others he has never met before. I expect it will be hours before he returns.

The breeze takes the stickiness from the day. On the balcony, I put my notebook aside, lift my feet onto the railing and turn my face to the wind. Now, if this wind blew all the times in the Solomons....

What idyllic life?

Sitting in my room in Sasamuqa I thought about life in the rural villages of the Solomons. In the West, even in Australia where it is still possible to find solitude, the Pacific exerts an allure attarctive as a counter to the harassed lives so many urban people live.

Those that do not enjoy their harried urban lives move to coastal town to escape the city, but a few imagine life further afield... offshore, in the Pacific. I wonder, though, how many city people would successfully make the transition to village life here? Some have, and I know that others would, but I suspect that for many the experience might soon start to pale. Most overstimulated city folk would find the sameness of the days in the village too routine, even boring, and eventually they would miss their city conveniences.

Then there are interpersonal relations. The workplace may be inhabited by self-seeking, disputative people, but you find people with similar characteristics in the villages. As I learned on Sasamuqa, villagers too have their own agendas and seek power and influence as readily as those in the cities. Personal relations can sour just as quickly in the village as in the city.

I had stumbled into development assistance work and, so, did not come with expectations preformed by media images of life in the Pacific islands. It was only later that I developed a curiousity about why people come to places like this. That was when, scouring Sydney's second-hand bookshops, I came upon titles, most of which had been written decades ago, that shed a little light on the question.

One of these books was DC Horton's The Happy Isles (1965; William Heinemann Ltd, London) that describes the Solomons from late-1937 to early-1942, during which time Horton was a District Officer on Guadalcanal. Another was Sverre Holmsen's Polynesian Trade Wind (1949; James Barrie Publishers Ltd, London), the story of the somewhat idyllic wanderings around Tahiti and Bora Bora of a young Swede. Louis Beck's By Reef and Palm (first published in1894; reprinted 1955 by Angus & Robertson, Sydney) is a collection of short accounts of wanderings in Polynesia. Colin Simpson's Adam in Plumes (1954; Angus & Robertson, Sydney) describes New Guinea in 1933 and 1955 from the point of view of an Australian with a keen interest in the history of the country.

There appears to be little of this combined biographical/ anthropological/ travel writing done today that is of the depth of some of the earlier writers. Pehaps this is because fewer writers immerse themselves in a foreign culture for a lengthy period. Most contemporary writing falls firmly into the travel genre, though some of it is revealing when the writer has the capacity to reflect constructively on what they encounter and observe. On traveling rough in New Guinea are Isabelle Tree's Islands in the Clouds (1996; Lonely Planet Publications, Melbourne; ISBN 0 86442 369 1), the tale of a daring young woman who moved around the highlands at the start of the 1990s and Kira Salak's Four Corners, the story of an adventurous lone traveler who had some trying times in the highlands (2001: Bantam Books, UK; ISBN 0 553 81550 4). The Sex Lives of Cannibals is j Maarten Troost's account of his time as an 'accessory' to his aid worker wife in Kiribati (Micronesia) (2004; Transworld Publishers, London; ISBN 0385 606435). Perhaps the most entertaining is the story of a sometimes-bumbling Englishman who helped a village set up a poultry business at the same time he struggled with the Solomon Islander's different sense of time (Will Randall, 2002; Solomon Time; Abacus, London; ISBN 0349 11502 8). Tree's book is revealing because she visited PNG twice for lengthy periods separated by a number of years. It is also sad, as much had changed for the worse.

Lively town on a small island

Gizo is a lively little town on the eastern shore of a small island. Just down the road from the Rekona Moa Moa is the market place, a bustling scene through the week and an outlet for the islander's agricultural produce and fish catch. The fish and chips you pay $2 Solomons for here (about $0.50 Australian) is not quite the same as you get in Australia - the chips are large wedges of sweet potato, the fish a chunk of tuna and the deal is finished with a shallot sticking out of the bag. But why go for fish and chips when, for just $2 in local curency, you get a whole, grilled reef fish? Delicious.

There are trade stores run by Chinese merchants a little further on. Here, canned tuna, noodles, milk powder and other foods, hardware items, clothing and imported, two-litre bottles of Australian mineral water - that sell for $8.50 in local currency - line the walls. The Chinese form a sizeable ethnic group throughout the Solomons and constitute a merchant class.

Gizo is a popular holiday town, especially among divers who come to dive the wrecks and the reefs. It boasts two medium-quality hotels side by side on the waterfront and a number of guesthouses on the hill behind. It might not be quite the Byron Bay of Western Province but it is a popular holiday location with both Solomon Islanders and foreign tourists.

Foreign visitors

The young Australian sailor who came ashore from the patrol boat with his kite board stands on the wharf, carefully folding the device. I hope someone told him about the weather coast. In town, European faces and those from other Melanesian countries peer from the cabins of four wheel drive police vehicles.

This must be a good posting for members of the Regional Assistance Mission Solomon Islands (RAMSI), the military-police peace enforcement operation made up of personnel from the Pacific Islands sent in the quell any resurgence of the ethnic violence that paralysed the Solomons a couple years ago.

RAMSI's presence is also noticeable on Gizo's little airstrip. Every day while we waited to cross to Sasamuqa an Australian Army Caribou - an old, twin engine and noisy transport aircraft of Vietnam war vintage - would fly in. Later, on our crossing to Sasamuqa, we saw this aircraft way off in the distance towards Vella Lavella, apparently on air patrol over the straits that separate the Solomons from Bougainville.

A quick departure

The cooling breeze has stopped and I retreat to our room to the downdraft of the ceiling fan. It is there that Steve finds me.

Hand pumping fuel into the Twin Otter, Gizo airstrip

"Russ", he says in that familiar upbeat tone. "We have ten minutes to get on the plane".

Startled, I sit up. "Ten minutes?" I ask incredulously.

"They had a special flight over to Taro this morning and the plane is going back to Honiara. They are refuelling it now", explains Steve.

There has not been a flight to Taro, the airstrip on the northern tip of Choiseul island, for some time. No ships have gone that way to land the fuel dump that the aircraft need for the crossing and the journey back.

Ten minutes. I look around at my belongings strewn over the bed. "I don't think we can make it Steve. We have to pack, then get over to the airstrip".

"There are no other vacancies on the passenger list", Steve insists, his tone telling me that we really should get going while we can. Images of us spending Christmas in Gizo come to mind. So does the Solomon Island woman I met in town on our outward journey to Sasamuqa. She had been waiting three days for a flight to Honiara and was growing more impatient and pessimistic by the hour.

"Right", I say determinedly, "we had better pack quicktime".

I beat all previous records for hasty departures. Belongings thrown into pack, I look around to make sure nothing is left behind. Steve stands with his case in hand, ready to move. We look at each other. "Let's go", I say. Down the path, across the road and past the small shop that sells take away food and "hot spies", as its sign proudly proclaims, and into the waterfront market. More than ten mninutes has already passed and I expect to hear the roar of aircraft engines and see the Twin Otter climb and turn southward any minute. I remember the reef fish and food we stowed in the refrigerator yesterday and hope someone eats it.

There is a motor canoe just pulling in to shore, a fisherman coming in to sell his catch. He makes an easy $50 in local currency by taking us out to the airstrip on the island. We disembark, Steve hands the man his windfall and we hastily walk to the airstrip.

Instead of an aircraft running up its engines for takeoff, we find passengers lolling about in the shade while out on the strip three men refuel the Twin Otter from a number of 200-litre fuel drums. Others stand talking with the pilot in the shade of the wing. Ten minutes to get on the plane? Solomons time, I remind myself.

Gizo's unsurfaced airstrip occupies the entire length of a small, flat island and is just long enough for landing and takeoff. Steve, predictably, knows Elizabeth, the pilot. The Twin Otter, she says, is easy to fly. "I like flying", she explains. "I learned to fly in Tasmania. I got to like the cold".

Soon we speed along the airstrip and climb out over the aquamarine of the lagoon. Behind us in Gizo remain the passengers unlucky enough not to have learned of this special flight.