Better Than Fiction

by Lonely Planet

  ‘Navy crackers, tinned corned beef, tinned tuna, tinned mackerel and Two-Minute Noodles,’ they replied.

  But we were worried about finding toilets on the islands, because we were told there weren’t any.

  Chris threw a party, and we got drunk with some of the Solomon Islander women who had relationships with expatriates. One in particular, named Sheila, was beautiful, all dressed up like African hi-life, supposedly a princess in her home province. She gave Jo a pair of shell earrings, and told how she’d been beaten up and raped in Brisbane while she was pregnant. I remember she asked why white people hated blacks. I don’t know why, but I didn’t write that down.

  The MV Compass Rose took about fifteen hours to reach New Georgia. Jo and I travelled ‘deluxe class’, which meant our seats were upholstered. Chris chose to go ‘second class’ and ended up sleeping on a web strung across the deck. It looked like a big hammock, but the other passengers used it as a garbage net, and at night somebody threw fish bones over him.

  A teacher called Charles introduced me to a young Islander named Ben, who had a rest house near the ferry stop at Seghe. We agreed to stay there for a couple of days, even though we’d never heard of the place or its owner.

  We reached the jetty at 3.30am, and had to wait hours for a motor canoe to come and collect Ben. In darkness lit by shooting stars, the canoe’s engine failed on the lagoon. Jo sat closest to the paddle so she was designated as auxiliary boatman. I took the role of motivator. Every time she seemed to be flagging, I offered a hearty ‘Come on, Jo’ to encourage her. I was very successful and we soon reached Ben’s parents’ general store, where we fell asleep on the outside decking.

  By daylight, the Marovo Lagoon, the largest saltwater lagoon in the word, was one of the loveliest places on earth, with water like sheets of beaten silver surrounded by brilliant green rainforest and teeming with riotously vivid fish.

  Ben’s rest house was one of only two buildings on Matikuri Island. We had been warned what to expect – a leaf hut with no bedding, furniture or plumbing, and only an ocean to shit in. In fact, Ben had installed a mattress, running water, an enclosed shower and, incredibly, a classic vitreous ceramic-bowl flush-style toilet. It didn’t actually flush, because it wasn’t connected to anything, but the sight of the seat made my heart hula.

  We tried to fish for our food. I caught a few stones, a leaf and the boat.

  Ben took us around the lagoon to meet Estelle’s wantoks, who were friendly but stunned at our arrival. They really did sleep in leaf huts and shit in the sea. They showed us their gardens, their waterfalls and the village crocodiles, which they kept in bamboo cages and fattened up for skinning. Most people owned nothing apart from their clothes, their hut and a canoe. We did not hand out our tinned food until we were ready to leave, to ensure they didn’t cook it for us. We stayed two nights in their villages, and Chris eventually waded out waist-deep in the water and, I assume, emptied his bowels.

  I say ‘assume’ because, when I asked him what it was like, he said, ‘I am never, ever going to tell you,’ and he never, ever has.

  I didn’t record his pledge in my diary, although I remember it more clearly than any other part of the trip.

  More than ten per cent of the population of the Solomon Islands had been converted to Seventh-day Adventism, and did not eat pork or shellfish, drink tea, coffee or alcohol, smoke tobacco or take drugs. They abstained from most non-religious activities on a Saturday, but this was no great strain since the majority of Solomon Islanders didn’t do a great deal anyway. The two most popular pastimes in the villages were sleeping and going to market.

  The majority of people were Anglicans, Catholics, and South Seas Evangelicals. Uninvited, we turned up at a Christian wedding, where a Gilbertese man from Kiribati was to marry a local woman. We stood outside the church during the service, but the pastor was quick to point out that this happy occasion had brought two families together ‘and also the whitefella has come to watch’.

  We sat down on palm leaves and joined the wedding party for a feast of dried fish, yam bread, tapioca and cassava. Jo made a speech on behalf of the whitefella, and the crowd applauded both before and after she spoke.

  We caught the Compass Rose on to Gizo (population about 6000), the capital of the Western Province. On board, I met a New Zealander called Sean. We all found places to stay in Gizo, and Chris and I drank beer in the ‘world-famous Gizo Club’, where the barman claimed his name was Barman.

  Chris had to fly back to Honiara because one of his cheap running shoes had disintegrated, and his feet were rotten with infected coral cuts, open sores and mosquito bites. I took a walk around the island with Sean. At the top of a hill, the road split into three. Sean asked a woman sitting outside her house if she knew the way to Titiana, the first village on our route. The woman replied in the Marovo language, but pointed out a direction.

  ‘That woman’s an idiot,’ said Sean. ‘I can’t understand a word she said.’

  Sean knew that Titiana couldn’t possibly be where the woman, who lived less than two kilometres away from it, thought it was. We found two young men, who were strangers to the area but could translate the woman’s Marovo into English, and they gave us the same advice. Sean would have none of it, so all three Islanders went into conference and decided it was possible to take another road but it would be a long way around. They refused to choose the route Sean was keen on, though, so he ignored them. He was adamant that he had memorised the map in his guidebook, and we spent an hour trailing dead ends before he agreed to follow the road to Titiana.

  ‘Well, that’s one up to you, Mark,’ said Sean, cheerfully.

  I resolved not to speak to him again.

  Jo and I flew out of Western Province on a five-seater plane operated by Western Pacific Air Services, the airline of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. From 4000 feet, the islands were heartbreakingly gorgeous, like a lover who shows you a perfect body but lies too distant to touch.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  The old religion had no name and it certainly didn’t have an airline, but in the province of Malaita, there were still communities who worshipped the dead. In 1990, almost a decade before the civil war that set the Malaitan Eagle Force militia against Guales in Guadalcanal, Malaitans were feared as the fiercest fighters in the islands. Their homeland was hardly visited by travellers, but when we met a Malaitan briefly in a bar, and he gave us his address on an artificial island in the Lau Lagoon, we accepted his invitation to visit with an enthusiasm I now find baffling.

  Once again, we boarded an inter-island ferry carrying nothing much but a scrap of paper, a few tins of fish and a Lonely Planet guidebook. On board, I quickly met Jack Kii, who spoke good English and lived in Funafou where, he said, custom was strong and the people still believed in the old religion.

  In his village, he said, they had a devil priest who could conjure up ‘small Satans’. The guidebook mentioned the possibility of visiting the area, but only to note ‘this would be a heavy experience. Not for the average sightseer.’

  We fell asleep but Jack woke me at 6am, drinking gin from a Coke can, possessed by the idea that we should come to stay at Funafou where, he insisted, no white man had visited in his lifetime.

  ‘Sparkmaster,’ hissed a passing Malatian. (‘Sparko’ was pidgin for ‘drunk’.)

  There was nowhere for our boat to dock at Funafou, so we were met by a flotilla of small canoes that unloaded the passengers and their bags of tobacco, tinned food and rice. One of the canoes was paddled by a tall, thin white man wearing glasses.

  At Funafou, an island built of stones brought from the mainland and piled up on the reef, we were taken to see the chief, a handsome man in a lava-lava, and his bent-backed, white-haired father, who was the devil priest, his face a moko of blue tattoos.

  Funafou was divided by invisible taboo lines, most of them marking areas forbidden to women. Chris and I paid the devil priest ten dollars to take us to the tabu stones and beu (me
n’s house) while Jo was shown the bisi, where women were sent during menstruation and after childbirth.

  The space around the beu was taboo to everybody but the devil priest, although the village children who followed us hopped in and out of it whenever the old man turned his back. The beu itself was a hut which had partially collapsed. Inside, the devil priest showed us some old spears, which he needed to keep himself propped upright. The skulls of their former owners were kept in a mound behind the building.

  The tabu stones marked the place pigs were sacrificed, to find out the will of the ancestors. The names of the dead were chanted over the body of the dead animal, along with a question with a yes/no answer. If the pig bled through the snout, the ancestors’ response was negative. If it didn’t, their spirits were pleased.

  Many of the Funafouans’ wantoks, who didn’t follow the island’s pagan ways, lived in the larger neighbouring island of Sulufou, where they worshipped at the Seventh-day Adventist church, which had recently been blown away in a cyclone. In order to annoy their pork-averse relatives across the water, the Funafouans kept their pigs – sacrificial and otherwise – in cages raised on stilts over the water, all of them facing Sulufou.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  My diary only hints at how bad tempered and exhausted we had all become by the time we caught the copra boat back to Honiara. I hardly mention that our calves were studded with ulcers that subsequently took years to heal. On our last night at the yacht club, I noted that ‘everybody was equally pissed off with everybody else’ and we drank at separate tables. I wrote ‘I don’t remember much about the evening and I have deliberately tried not to dredge much up … Apparently, I fell asleep in the car. Apparently, Jo wanted to leave me there.’

  Now, that evening, like so many others, is lost and forgotten. What comes back to me is an overwhelming feeling of angry, hungry, constipated nausea – dampened then inflamed by Spear tobacco smoked in exercise-book paper – and a growing concern that Chris might be going mad.

  There are a lot of drunken nights in my diary and I can hardly bring any of them to mind. I’d thought I never argued with Jo, but we seem to have been fighting at least half the time. While images of the journey have faded with impressions of our relationship, the hardest part to believe is the people we used to be.

  What did I think I was doing, boarding boats to isolated islands, trusting in the kindness of strangers and the promises of drinkers (let alone the directional sense of New Zealanders)? I remember the diary but not the author. I don’t recognise him at all.

  Confessions of a Coconut-Soup Eater

  BY STEVEN AMSTERDAM

  Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming won the Age Book of the Year (Australia) and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award (UK). His most recent novel, What the Family Needed, has been published in Australia and the UK, and will be released in the US in early 2013. Born in New York, he has lived in Melbourne since 2003, where he works as a writer and palliative care nurse.

  The sign was handwritten in English: there was going to be a meditation session at a community hall in two hours, locals and tourists welcome. The hall was in the middle of Surakarta, Java, as was I. After three weeks on my own, waking up every morning to the 4.50 call to prayer, the thought of something that might settle my mind for the evening had appeal. I’ve never been prone to stillness, but it was worth a try.

  Twenty or so of us, in all shapes and shades, sat in folding chairs. The maroon-wrapped ringleader instructed us in Bahasa, while his grizzled white sidekick, who had clearly been in-country too long, followed up in English. Every thirty seconds we were led to contemplate a single word – egg, lake, soil, leaf, and so on. Rather than leaving my mind to wander off into a fog of associations, the steady prompts kept me moving forward. As the words flowed onwards, a rhythm filled the room. Without getting too spiritual about it, the distractions seemed to matter less than the beat of our shared path. It was deep.

  (Relevant: I was in my late 20s and prone to revelations. Additionally, I was on an anti-malarial drug called Mefloquine. Its list of side effects included vivid dreams, hallucinations and psychotic reactions. I wasn’t aware of this. The intensity of the side effects was cumulative. In a few days I would take my fifth tablet.)

  After the session, the crowd sorted itself out, with the locals walking home and the travellers – mostly other loners – hanging out for conversation before going back to their mosquito-netted beds and, if they paid extra, a lazy ceiling fan. A South African woman dressed all in white started chatting with me. She had a breathy kind of voice, as if all of her possessions would be white too. She opened with, ‘Are you planning to go to Toraja? You’d love it.’

  Funny that she should know me so well. Toraja already occupied a space in my imagination and a few pages in my Lonely Planet Indonesia. The people who lived there had some interesting notions of the afterlife and what to do with dead bodies. They hung them in baskets, from high branches, or left them in caves. The young ones were inserted into tree trunks and tarred in. If the family could afford it, effigies of the deceased were placed in balconies built out of cliffside caves nearby. Obviously, this had huge appeal, but I had researched it and getting there required a flight to Ujung Pandang on the southern tip of Sulawesi, and another to Rantepao, in the middle of Toraja. It seemed like a lot of trouble to perve at another culture’s burial practices.

  The woman went on, ‘I had to leave last week because of a plane ticket, but I felt like a fool. Funeral season is just starting. Don’t think about it. Just go.’

  This was a challenge. It had always been my fantasy to just go. Momentarily Zen, I knew the only way to achieve flow was to step into it. It seemed that I could follow the truer path of my life, or something. Leaving behind the detailed plans for temples and trails that I had researched for weeks, I booked my flights to Toraja. Two days later I was on my way.

  The twin-engine hopped through cloud level for the entire connecting flight, so I only caught glimpses of what was below. Here was a farming village hiding in the rainforest. There was a white expanse of sandy coastline and a couple looking up at an airplane. In-between, I imagined a freakish zoo of the animals I had briefly read about – dwarf buffalo, pig deer and birds that nested in volcanic vents.

  The choppy flight amplified the Shangri-La effect as we descended through the mist into the regency of Toraja. The greenest of valleys was composed of concentric rings of terraced rice paddies, winding dirt roads and broad pastures, all ending at the steep cliff line and spirit-filled caves that encircled the area. Below, rows of traditional houses peeked out from the canopy. Each one had an exaggerated roof that sloped dramatically upwards at the long ends, as if the canoe of a grand tribal chief had been balanced on a thatched hut. From the plane, the settlements looked like an armada pushing through the trees.

  Towards the flat centre of the valley were the concessions to modernity – the meeting of connecting roads, a central market, a dozen afterthought buildings, and a dull grid of streets surrounding it all.

  The only other passengers on the plane were a German couple. They were rugged and fresh faced, with clean, ingeniously pocketed backpacks. Everything about them was competent. We shared a lawnmower/taxi into town. They were going to camp at the edge of the jungle for a few days before stocking up for a big hike into the bush. Then they would trek south and photograph fauna for a few weeks before reaching a sacred diving spot on the coast. This was their honeymoon. I had been feeling mildly intrepid about arriving without reservations at a hotel, but their schedule sucked that right out of me: I was a coddled, underequipped softie. When we said farewell at the central market, I was certain they would plague me for the rest of my stay, continually turning up with breathless reports of deep connections with local ghosts and just-missed views of pig deer, all of which I would have experienced if I weren’t such a wimp.

  After traipsing around for an hour, I found a place to stay that had Christmas lights i
n the common areas (in May) and waterfall-like rock features plastered into the bathroom. In the front of the hotel, there was a small dining area, which smelled of pork and wine that had been cooking in bamboo all day. That dinner and my book comforted me past any feelings of lameness. Going to sleep on my single bed, I clung to a minor bravery: against my usual habit, I had no set plans for the next day. I just took my weekly dose of Mefloquine and went to sleep.

  The muezzin’s call didn’t wake me – Sulawesi is more Christian than Muslim – but the equatorial sunrise did. I ventured out, making it as far as a corner shop that had truly local coffee and wholegrain toast with coconut jam. This was my kind of journey into the unknown. And it got easier. The store’s proudly English-speaking owner told me that I was in luck, a funeral was starting that morning. It was some village big shot with lots of children, so they would have to put on a good show. At least ten water buffalo would be slaughtered by relatives of the deceased to aid his journey to the afterlife. Rather than rocking up with, say, a ham, his friends and neighbours would bring 100 pigs for the feast.

  What was the etiquette for crashing a funeral in Toraja? The guidebook had been thin on guidance. The shopkeeper wasn’t. Fortunately, a steady stream of morbid travellers had eased my way and an inoffensive solution had been worked out. I would be led to a viewing area from which I might be invited in to participate. If I hurried, I could see the funeral parade and score a good lunch.

  A square of land a little smaller than a football field had been cordoned off with a simple fence. A narrow, elaborately decorated, three-storey wooden tower was set up in the centre, with the coffin on the top level and a stream of respect-payers filing up and down wooden staircases on either side.

  Some of the animal offerings were penned into one corner of the large square; others, already slaughtered, were lying in pieces in another, or being delivered to an organised squadron of cooks busy stewing them in big vats under a thatch-covered walkway. All of these crowds, plus recent torrential rains, left the entire area muddy and bloody. As for the tourist area, there was only the honeymooners and myself, the three of us in Birkenstocks.