SOUTH PACIFIC ADVENTURE – PART III

Our third stop in Fiji was Dravuni Island. Barely three kilometres long and five hundred meters wide, it’s a pocket paradise. Two hundred or so call the island home and benefit greatly from regular cruise ship visits. Unlike Tabuaeron however, the crafts for sale are not locally made. We enjoyed our day there, starting with a morning hike to the highest point on the island from where the view is incredible. In the afternoon, I rented snorkeling gear and spent an enjoyable two hours doing something I used to enjoy when I was a young gaffer, swimming.

There are no vehicles on the island, so people travel walk along paths to get from place to place. Some islanders fish, some tend small fruit tree orchards; all lead a simple life and seem quite happy. The contrast with Suva on Fiji’s big island could not be more pronounced. It’s nice to know there are still places like these on our crowded planet.

Known as “Sugar City”, Lautaka is Fiji’s second-largest. It boasts one of the southern hemisphere’s biggest sugar refineries. After three busy days, we’d decided to take it easy by walking into town, checking in by wifi with family and friends, and doing a bit of shopping. A narrow-gauge railway runs through the heart of town transporting sugar cane to the expansive mill.

Since we left Hawai’i, wifi has been hard to come by, and when we did find it, very slow. The slow speed is due to infrastructure deficiencies. Most annoying is that we had to pay for it, one way or another, wherever we went. While it’s a modest building, Charlottetown’s cruise terminal offers free wifi, a blessing to visitors and crew members and one I’m sure they appreciate.

After a sea day, the ship docked at the western-most point of our journey, the small city of Luganville, population 13,000, second-largest of the Republic of Vanautu. During World War II, the US built a base on the island of Espiritu Santo, second only to Hawai’i’s Pearl Harbour in terms of size and importance; 500,000 Allied troops passed through there at its height. Author James Michener wrote Tales of the South Pacific based on his stay in Luganville.

We’d decided to visit a traditional village and were welcomed by a friendly woman, Celia, our tour guide, and by fierce young men who challenged us as we entered the village of Loweton. Like the Maori of New Zealand, they tried to scare us away. Once inside the recreated village, we learned about the old ways. Celia and her family moved to Santo from the nearby Banks Islands for better health care for her diabetic husband and better education for their four children.

We watched as Celia’s son prepared kava, the traditional island beverage. Someone asked him what he wanted to become when older. Without hesitation, he replied: “I want to become the Chief!” Women and young girls performed the women’s dance; men and young boys performed the men’s version. Finally, we attended a performance of water music, a unique form of entertainment by eight women who, with only their hands, used water as a percussive instrument to make sounds that had to be heard to be believed.

Vanuatu became an independent country in 1980. It consists of eighty-three islands with a total land area slightly larger than Prince Edward Island and a population of 260,000. The economy is based on export of coconut products and tourism; flying time from Brisbane, Australia, is only 2.5 hours.

We spent a day in Port Vila, walking into town 3 kilometers or so from the ship on a Sunday. The city looks and feels like the capital of a poor country. There are nice places along the waterfront, like the Grand Hotel and Casino and the Iririki Resort, and a few Australian tourists walked with us along the seaside promenade. But, look a little closer and you see signs of questionable choices, like the empty and over-the-top convention center (constructed with the aid of Chinese money) and the very quiet Parliament Building shown in the photos below. Still, Vanuatu has a couple of claims to fame: it became the first country to outlaw the sale of single-use plastics in 2018, and its people are said to be among the happiest in the world.

Our third stop in Vanuatu was a beach day on Mystery Island. As with several other stops on this cruise, we traveled from the ship to the dock on tenders, the ship’s lifeboats doing double duty. The tiny island is bisected by a grass airstrip, built by the US in World War II to serve as a refueling station. It was another nice beach day.

Nuku’alofa is the capital of Tonga, the only place in the South Pacific islands we visited that has never been colonized. The country is made up of 176 islands, with a total land area about one-tenth the size of Prince Edward Island, and is home to just over 100,000 people. While Tonga is run by a government elected by the people, the monarchy, 1,000 years old, still plays an important role in Tongan society. Over one-quarter of the country’s population lives in the capital city. We spent most of the day walking around the city, and Elva found some nice Mabé pearl jewelry. The beautiful house in the photo is the Royal Palace.

Our next stop was Neiafu on the beautiful island of Vava’u, Tonga, a place pretty close to paradise. The ship anchored in a channel surrounded by tropical forest and we tendered into the town jetty. While not rich by any means, it’s a comfortable place with friendly people, surrounded by the most beautiful water vistas one can imagine. I could see myself spending a month here, immersing myself in the local culture, doing a little fishing, a little snorkeling, and generally just chilling out. We walked all around the town, talking to some of the locals like these two women preparing material for mats and a man working on Mabé pearl jewelry.

 

It’s interesting to hear experts talk about the history of the islands and island countries we’ve visited so far. They use terms like “discovered”, “took possession of”, “colonized”, “evangelized”, and “captured” in reference to Europeans, Japanese and Americans. In reality, all of the South Pacific islands were discovered and colonized by people who became today’s Micronesians, Melanesians and Polynesians. They certainly didn’t give up their homelands willingly. Thankfully, the traditional role of the chief has been retained in this part of the world, regardless of the form of central government. Modern forms of government alone do not work here.

Four of the five countries we discovered on this journey—Kiribati, Samoa, Fiji, and Vanuatu—chose to cut ties with colonial powers and go their own way. Tonga never was colonized and was ruled for 1,000 years by a King. American Samoa enjoys a certain degree of autonomy, though the US would not likely give up its right to such a strategic harbour for military purposes. Niue and Rarotonga are self-governing islands with ties to New Zealand. Residents of New Caledonia, a nearby French possession we didn’t visit, are voting on the question of sovereignty right now. French Polynesia remains an overseas department of France. And then there’s China, its expansionist aspirations casting a shadow over the whole region.

I’ve always been fascinated by how people are governed, to what extent they make their own societal and economic choices, and how successfully they do so. My all-too-brief experiences in the South Pacific have shown me once again that there is no “right” way.

During this phase of the journey, we crossed the International Date Line three times and sailed across the equator. We lost a day between American Samoa and Samoa but get it back between Tonga and Niue. I realized as I examined the world atlas that we’ve now traveled in each of the world’s twenty-four time zones, either by land or sea. Not bad for a snot-nosed kid from Wellington!