Life in the Ring of Fire Part 18: When Foxes Fly

Greetings readers,
Sorry for the long delay in getting this entry together. I’m afraid I must admit I’ve been guilty of that cardinal sin of the adventurer: seeing the world as mundane and uninteresting. I’ve sort of fallen into a routine over the past few weeks, and was starting to look at the everyday goings on in Vanuatu as commonplace, boring, and unworthy of writing about. I think I’ve managed to regain at least some of my sense of wonder, and I’ll try not to let it happen again. This does mean I’m a few weeks behind, however, but I shall do my best to catch up as quickly as possible. Keep posted.

I woke up early Monday morning to catch a truck from Lavasal. A few minutes into the ride, it started to rain heavily and those of us in the back pulled a tarp over ourselves to keep dry. The ride up had been an uncomfortable, hour-long affair that had left my butt too sore to sit down, and doing the reverse huddled under a tarp was no better. I did, however, discover that I was becoming quite familiar with the island, a fact that I realized when I was able to tell where we were by picking out landmarks as they flashed by a one square inch opening in the tarp. Eventually, the truck deposited me in Tautu and I said goodbye to Ryan, who was continuing on to the airport to fly back to his island. I made my way into Lakatoro and found McKenzie and the two of us spent a sweltering half and hour outside one of the stores using their phone line to check our email, at the end of which we wondered aloud why we always elected to use the internet in the most horrendously balls-hot part of the afternoon, as opposed to waiting until the evening when things cool off considerably. We then headed back to Tautu for kava with my host-family and an evening more or less exactly the same as every other we’d spent on the island.

On Tuesday I decided I was feeling culinary and so I headed into the market to see what I could scrounge up. I’d recently been inspired to try to put in some more hours at cooking when I ran into a teacher at my school, who I hadn’t seen since I’d visited Malekula in November, who said (translated from Bislama) “Jesus Christ, Daniel, what the hell happened to you? You’re a twig.” Now, this may sounds odd from a guy who most of you know as someone who will flatten an unattended plate of cookies in minutes and will spend hours making his own mozzarella sticks as opposed to putting down the six bucks for the box of them at the store, but food is honestly such a pain in the ass here that it’s easy to let that part of the day sort of slide. Also, it’s an odd feeling for me, having gotten so used to being able to procure any food item at any time I wanted back home in the States, to have my diet entirely dictated by whatever people happen to decide to bring into market to sell on a given day. “Are there any limes today?” I asked. “No,” I was told. “How about peppers?” “No got.” “Tomatoes?” “Sorry.” As it turned out all that had come in that day were the basics, island cabbage, coconuts, cucumbers, and assorted mutant-looking roots, which, together, constitute the four pillars of Vanuatu’s cuisine. I did happen to need coconuts, and so I bought some, telling myself that one out of four isn’t all that bad. When it comes to coconuts in Vanuatu, a little bit of cash goes a long way, and the smallest unit I was able to purchase came with about fifteen coconuts and cost just a little more than a dollar, which was cool. The downside, of course, was that fifteen coconuts weigh a whole hell of a lot and so I was left to stagger my way back to the LTC to catch a truck, contemplating the fact that most of my trips to the market tended to finish this way.

Now, in America I was most familiar with coconut as a syrup flavoring, useful in the making of things such as snow-cones or pina-coladas, or maybe as a small white flake which sometimes adorns pastries. In the Pacific, however, the coconut is the king of all foods. Coconuts fall from the tree armored in hard shells and tough, stringy husks that deter all but the most determined animals from enjoying them as sustenance. Thusly adorned, they can be swept away by the tides and carried vast distances across the ocean to land on distant shores and promptly take them over in a feat of island hopping many times more far-reaching and persistent than any of its photosynthesizing counterparts. Now, as far as food goes, coconuts can be found and eaten in three forms: green, dry, and navara. Of these, you're probably only familiar with the dry variety. Green coconuts are coconuts that have not yet fallen from the tree. However, a well thrown stick or rock will shake them loose. They contain a large amount of coconut water, which is excellent for a hot and thirsty day as it is both sterile and loaded with salts and minerals (think Gatorade, except not colored neon blue and labeled with a name that, while sounding impressive, gives you absolutely no clue as to it’s flavor, like “Mountain Chill”), plus it tastes kind of like Sprite. I, personally, am totally and completely sick of coconut water and am still doggedly trying to find that coconut that breaks open to reveal a frozen strawberry daiquiri with a little pink umbrella. Once de-husked (quite the ordeal and, in my opinion, usually not worth it), the coconut shell can be cracked open with a machete, a feat that, when it was first unveiled at the airport upon my arrival to Vanuatu, I found very impressive, but has now become quite mundane. Inside, the flesh of the green coconut is very thin and soft and can be easily scraped out with a spoon and eaten sort of like jello. Dry coconuts have already fall from the tree and been allowed to sit in the sun for a bit. This causes some of the coconut water to congeal, forming thick, hard flesh on the inside. They still contain water, but it’s mostly just water at that point, no nutrients. The meat can be scraped out to form coconut shavings, like those that you can find in the grocery store. The coconut shavings can then be milked to extract coconut milk by squeezing them. Finally, if you allow dry coconuts of sit for a week or so, they begin to sprout and become navara. In the navara coconut, all of the coconut water had congealed onto the sides, meaning that the coconut is no longer hallow, but filled with a ball of very sweet and tender meat that feels and tastes kind of like balled up cotton candy. In my opinion, navara is the best coconut form of coconut for eating, but for cooking coconut milk is usually what you’re after.

I cracked open a couple coconuts and went to borrow a coconut scratcher from my host family. A coconut scratcher is a round piece of metal with, rough, sharp edges. This is bolted to a piece of wood. When scratching, you sit on the piece of wood, take your coconut half, and scour it out with the scratcher, catching the coconut flakes in a bowl. You then wring the flakes through a cloth to collect the milk. The whole process took close to forty-five minutes (which, honestly, is no time at all in Vanuatu, but it does give you an appreciation for what goes into those cans of coconut milk at the store). And, about three hours later, I had a pretty decent curry on my hands; perhaps a small step towards putting some more meat on my bones, but a step nonetheless.

On Thursday I went to leave Alyssa (who’d come down from Lavasal the previous day) at the airport. Her departure coincided with the arrival of one of our Peace Corps trainers, who was in from Vila to inspect the sites of some of the volunteers on Malekula. Being just from Vila, she’d brought with her a variety of food items difficult to find anywhere else in the country including Snickers (being given a Snickers was probably one of the best things that had happened to me in at least a couple weeks – hint, hint) and apples, a fruit whose existence I’d almost totally forgotten about. Exercising a sheer force of will at least equaling that of a recovering heroine addict turning down free smack, I decided to refrain from eating the Snickers until later that evening when McKenzie was slated to come for kava in order to be civil and share the wealth. I managed to keep this promise for a whopping eight hours, all the while being quietly tortured by that insidious hunk of chocolate, caramel, and nuts separated from my mouth by only a flimsy, thin, covering of black, white, and red plastic. In the end, I proved myself a lesser man than I had thought and had to cave in (sorry Kenz).

That night saw an unusual amount of activity at the nakamal. Several trucks were parked in the yard and my host papa along with five or six other guys were pointing up at the coconut trees and muttering to each other. I watched as one of them pulled out a slingshot and launched a pebble up at one of the trees. This startled something out of the tree, which then flew off into the night. The retort of a rifle made me jump, as the man who was carrying the gun had been concealed behind one of the trucks. Apparently my yard had turned into a flying fox hunting ground. Flying fox is actually a kind of fruit bat which is plentiful around dusk. They taste quite good and can bring in a lot of money at the market, so fox hunting is always a popular pastime in the village. The old fashioned way to do this is to find a banana tree (a favorite of the flying fox) and clear out the plants around it during the day, thus making it easily accessible. When nightfall comes, you wait by the tree with your machete and, when a flying fox lands to eat the bananas, you run up, chop down the tree (banana trees are easy to chop down), thus trapping the flying fox under the fallen tree. Needless to say, this is a huge pain in the ass, so most people prefer to use rifles when they can. Now, in Vanuatu gun control laws are a little lax, so getting your hands on a .22 isn’t really a problem. Bullet control laws, however, are the constraint, and tend to limit people to something in the neighborhood of 50 bullets a month. This isn’t an attempt at cutting down on gun-crime (of which there isn’t any; there’s essentially no crime of any kind, especially outside of Vila), but more geared towards preventing people from shooting too many flying fox and making too much noise by shooting their rifles in the air when they get drunk. A new month had just began, however, which meant a fresh supply of bullets and so a usually quiet evening at the nakamal was occasionally punctuated by gun blasts and either loud whopping or cursing, depending on the results achieved.

The weekend passed uneventfully. I had been getting a little apprehensive about the possibility of starting class on Monday, especially since no one had yet told me what it was I would be teaching, but I was assured that there was essentially a zero percent chance that school would start on time. Just to be on the safe side, however, I set an alarm, something which I hadn’t done in months, and made sure I knew the location of my clean shirt, should formal attire be required.