That's right, you read the title correctly, I went wild boar hunting. How sweet is that? Actually, it wasn't quite as sweet as it sounds, but that's kind of the point: it sounds ridiculously awesome, so it doesn't really matter because it's an impressive story regardless. You know, like if you're chatting with some friends at a party, “So what'd you do this weekend?” “Oh not too much, hung around the house and watched TV mostly, how about you?” “Oh, about the same, except, oh yeah, I went WILD BOAR HUNTING.”
Anyway, that doesn't actually happen until the end of this blog entry, so you're going to have to wait. Just building a little suspense is all.
Monday morning I was making my way back from Lakatoro, still recovering from the weekend's St. Patrick's Day celebrations. Since I needed to get back in order to teach class, I was forced to take a truck instead of walking, as I usually do. There's a fairly large fleet of trucks that spend the day driving up and down the one road on the island connecting Norsup (north of Tautu) and Litz-Litz (south of Lakatoro). By pointing to the ground next to you, you can hail a passing truck, jump in the back, and be taken to anywhere along the route for the cost of 100 vatu (about a dollar). Now, Vatu comes in 100 vatu coins, 200 vatu notes, and a variety of other denominations. The hundred vatu piece is by far the most useful piece of currency (kind of like the quarter, it'll get you places bills and smaller coins just won't), as it's the agreed upon price for a shell of kava, a ride in a truck, and a number of items in the market (needless to say, nakamals, truck drivers, and people in the market usually don't have change). Now, I only had a 200 vatu note on me, but I reasonably assumed I'd be able to get change as the driver would only need to give me one hundred vatu coin, and there were a number of other people entering and leaving the truck who, presumably, were paying with hundred vatu coins. Thus, I was a little dismayed when the driver informed me that he had no change. I went back and forth with him about this for a few minutes, insisting that he had to be able to change a 200. He finally told me that he'd give me my change later and drove off. Naturally, I assumed I had just been scammed and went about my day feeling a bit put out. By evening however, I had forgotten the incident and was on my way to my host family's house for kava when a truck zoomed past me, screeched to a halt about 50 yards up the road, and went into a hard reverse, the wheels throwing rocks and dirt everywhere. The truck reversed to me, stopped, the driver leaned out the window and handed me one hundred vatu, and drove off without explanation. It wasn't until about an hour later that night that I remembered about that morning and I figured out what the heck had just happened.
Monday night the rain started. Up until this point I'd sort of concluded that Vanuatu's so called “rainy season” was something of a joke and that the people that had dubbed it as such were, in fact, wimps. Sure, it probably had been raining a little more than I was used to, but it tended to come in quick bursts, heavy and explosive, but short lived. If it started raining all you had to do was duck under a tree or a roof for about fifteen minutes and it would be over; basically it wasn't really something that would interrupt your daily activities. This rain was different. It was calm, patient, cunning and determined. It started as a drizzle that was little more than a delicate pitter-patter on my iron roof as I fell asleep that night. The next morning it had escalated to a light rain that continued throughout the day. It got a little heavier by Tuesday night, but I still didn't give it much so much as a second thought. Wednesday morning it was raining in earnest, but still nothing to catch my attention. It wasn't until one of the teachers came and told me that the road to Lakatoro had been washed out did the realization strike that it had been raining more or less nonstop for two and a half days. Now, the bridge between Tautu and Lakatoro isn't exactly the sort of thing you picture when you hear the word “bridge,” being a man-made contraption allowing one to cross over some sort of drop-off (river, ravine, etc). Actually, it's not really the sort of thing that you even notice, as evidenced by the fact that up until that point I was completely unaware of the fact that there WAS a bridge between Lakatoro and Tautu. Really, it's just a section of the road that has a small trickle of a stream running through a metal drain underneath it. I found it hard to picture what, exactly, could have possibly been washed out and so, as soon as my class was over, I went to visit my host papa, Duncan, and the two of us headed up the road to have a look (I mean, who doesn't like going to look at broken stuff?).
The subtle power of the rainstorm was further driven home for me when what looked like shallow puddles in the middle of the road were in fact miniature lakes with water almost up to my waist. By the time we got to the scene of the broken bridge we were soaked through and through, both from the puddles of unusually large size and the steady beating of raindrops from overhead. To my astonishment, what was once a small stream had swollen into a raging river, brown and churning with the mud of what used to be its banks. What had seemed like a large, sturdy, and formidable chunk of earth had been nonchalantly washed into the ocean, leaving a gaping ravine in its place. Never fear, however, as Malekula's finest Public Works engineers were on the job of making repairs. They were attempting to build a small foot bridge out of coconut tree trunks, but were having some problems as all the construction equipment (ie. the one front-end loader on the island) was stuck on the Lakatoro side of the ravine. Fortunately, the entire population of both Tautu and Lakatoro were lining their respective banks, helpfully shouting advice and suggestions at the top of their lungs. I imagined what a similar scene might look like in the US, with an entire neighborhood gathered at a construction site of, say, a highway overpass, trying to get their two-cents in with the construction workers. “No! Put the I-beam over THERE! And you need more steel-reinforced concrete! That's it, now where's the cement mixer?” Duncan, not to be left out, immediately joined in on the back-seat-construction-working and was soon shouting and gesticulating as wildly as everyone else. Myself, I decided to sit it out and just enjoy the unfolding mayhem. The folks on the Lakatoro side had felled a coconut tree, lined it up with the road, and were slowly pushing it forward out over the ravine with the front-end-loader, hoping, I guess, that they could push it over the 30-something foot gap without it pitching into the river and being swept into the ocean. This hope was in vain however, as before they'd managed to bridge even half the length, the trunk tumbled in and was carried off by the rushing water, taking with it a little earthen island of what was once the road that had somehow avoided being swept off up until that point. Fortunately (things always seem to work out in the most haphazard ways in this country), someone noticed that a truck with small crane mounted on it had just turned off the main road a few hundred meters back and was making its way up to the PRV plantation, presumably to do some road maintenance up there. “Hey!” everyone started shouting “come over here, we need to use your crane!” The driver reversed the truck to us and we soon had two pieces of construction equipment at our disposal: the front-end-loader on the Lakatoro side and the crane on the Tautu side. Things followed much more smoothly after that and soon three coconut trees were lying side-by-side across the ravine and people were scrambling out to nail down various boards, pieces of plywood, and whatever other random scraps of wood that happened to be around. About an hour after we'd arrived, a passable wooden bridge had been constructed and the mob thinned out as people went about their business. I suggested that we head back to Tautu for a couple beers, Duncan agreed, and we trudged back home, soaking wet, but exhilarated.
Friday was Good Friday, so I decided to put on a fish fry for my host family (actually, this was decided for me on Thursday when Duncan pulled me aside and said “So, we're going to come over to your house for lunch tomorrow”). Up until this point I'd been finding it incredibly difficult to find fish for sale, aside from the tiny, bony, mostly-inedible mini-fish that all the Ni-Vans go crazy over, especially given that I was living in a country which consisted of about 20 times more ocean than land. And so when I asked Duncan on Thursday where I could get a nice, big fish for lunch on Friday, I wasn't really expecting any sort of useful answer. Thus, I was a little surprised when he informed me that a Tautu family living just about a two minute walk up the road owns a fishing boat and sells fresh 3-4 kilo fish every day. Huge. And so when I've been asking exactly the same question basically every other day for the past four months you didn't tell me this because...? Anyway, let me tell you, having to gut, scale, de-bone, and fillet a fish yourself really makes you appreciate the fact that you can pick up a chunk of ready-to-cook fish at any grocery store in the States, even if it's not quite as fresh. In the end, however, I had a piping hot tray full of fried beer-batter fish. It went over quite well with the family and man was it nice to dig into some nice, greasy, salty, and monstrously unhealthy fried food for a change (now if only I could get some good fried chicken. I'd kill for a Church's right now. Heck, even a KFC would be awesome).
Saturday I agreed to go with Duncan to his coconut plantation up in the bush where they were putting a roof on a copra dryer. Copra is a rank-smelling concoction made by breaking open dry coconuts, removing the meat from the shell, and drying it for a couple days using a mesh bed on top of a 55-gallon drum, in which you build a fire. Basically, all of the greater Lakatoro area smells like copra pretty much all the time, and I'm getting really tired of it. It's not going anywhere anytime soon, however, as the price of copra is going through the roof (who knows why, I certainly wouldn't buy the stuff), and so everyone and their mother wants to make and sell copra. Despite my general distaste for copra, it ended up being a fun trip. We were working on a budget, so we were putting a traditional, natangora, roof on the dryer as opposed to the more popular (and much easier to make) iron roof. The natangora plant produces enormous fronds (they kind of look like coconut leaves, except a lot bigger) that can be used to make a (fairly) waterproof roofing material. To make roofing for a house, you remove the leaves from the fronds and sow them tightly together using strips of green bamboo in a process that I hear is a huge pain in the ass. Since no one was going to be living in the copra dryer, we were going the quick-and-easy route of leaving the leaves attached to the fronds and just nailing a bunch of fronds onto the roof. There were six of us, and we probably could have finished the job in a couple hours, but it turns out working in the garden really isn't about getting anything done, necessarily. Every Saturday most of the men in the village head up to the gardens for the day in order to tend their cows, get food or firewood, or shell coconuts to make copra. As I discovered, these weekly sojourns to the garden are really more of an excuse to get away from the wives and hang out with the other guys (discuss the price of copra, who just got a new truck, etc) and, of course, walk around the bush with a rifle trying to shoot things. As such, work proceeded at a slow rate, with a maximum of two people working at once, and what little work was being done was punctuated by long periods of resting. It took all morning to finish half the roof, at which point Duncan took me and my little host brother, Frank, to try and shoot narwimba (a bird common in the bush that makes for good eating. Looks kind of like your common pigeon). We struck off into the bush, descending from the hill on which the coconut plantation was located into a sort of grassy swamp. Banyan and cocoa pressed in all around and, although I never saw a single bird before Duncan shot it, we were soon carrying two narwimba. We paused for a while in front of an enormous banyan in the middle of a swampy clearing, Duncan circling the tree carefully and quietly, looking through his scope, trying to spot nests up above, me and Frank, trying to make as little as noise possible, watching him. Suddenly, the two dogs that we'd brought with us went insane, barking wildly somewhere out of sight, but close by, in the bush. Duncan turned to me, his eyes enormous with excitement. “Wild pig!” he said. He turned and faced the direction of the dog's barking. A few seconds later, the noise was right on top of us. I could hear several large animals crashing through the bush just outside of the clearing. The we heard the pig: snorting and grunting loudly, very close, but still out of sight in the bush. “Climb a tree!” Duncan shouted at me and Frank “NOW!” Terrified, I looked around for a climbable tree. The nearest to me had no limbs in arm's reach, but I ran for it, jumped, and tried to shimmy myself up the trunk. However, my mud-coated sandals provided basically no grip and I soon slid back to the ground. I booked it for nearby banyan and managed to wedge myself between it and a cocoa tree, back against the banyan, feet against the cocoa. I looked around and saw that Frank had done something similar and that Duncan was standing, gun leveled, in the clearing, turning slowly to keep faced towards the racket of the dogs and the pig. The noise skirted the clearing a little to my right and proceeded off into the distance. I spent another few minutes in the tree, breathing heavily, before Duncan told us we could come down. “When you see a pig you must climb a tree,” he explained “if you get stabbed with their tusks, you have to go to the hospital. ” I thought that this was something that might have been good to know before the start of the expedition. “We don't have enough dogs,” he continued “if we had more, they would have run the pig right to us.” I was somewhat disappointed that we wouldn't be able to walk back up to the plantation with a pig slung over our backs, as I'd hear that wild pig meat is a real treat. As it turned out, however, I did get to try some wild pig later that day. After returning from the garden, I ran into my friend, Calo, who told me that he'd killed a wild pig that afternoon and given us some of the meat. “Did you kill it with a .22?” I asked him. “No,” he said “bush knife.”
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