Yu No Kick Part 10: Land Diving

I'd been getting rather claustrophobic during my second year of Peace Corps service. I felt like I'd exhausted most of the exciting things (and probably also most of the unexciting things as well) to do in my village and increasingly was finding myself spending way too much time watching movies on my laptop. Also, take my advice and never, ever agree to live at a school. Especially a grade school. Dealing with a large group of children is difficult enough when it's in a classroom for a few hours a day, but when large groups of children are running and shouting about four feet outside your living room window pretty much 24-7, it's all you can do every day to keep from snapping. I'm sure living at a high school would be no picnic either, but I feel like older kids tend to get into quieter kinds of mischief than young kids. I mean, they may sneak off during recess to smoke cigarettes or whatever, but at least they do it without making a lot of noise. Really, it's the screaming that gets me. It's incessant. And it's actually not even screaming, it's too high pitched to be screaming. They're more like squeals. It's like they're perfectly planned to enter the ear at just the right octave to make you cringe and wish that you could listen to someone drag their nails across a chalkboard instead. It makes one long for the soothing sounds of police sirens and passing trains and car alarms and the relative quiet of the city (people imagine villages as being quiet. This is wrong. Villages have about a thousand times – I'm serious. I've measured. The precise number is 1003.74 ± 0.02 -- more noise than cities. The animals alone make quite a racket. There's roosters and bats and pigs and dogs and rats and bugs and then you add to that all the kids screaming, all the people screaming at the kids, and then the people screaming at each other. These days, when I spend time in a town such as Port Vila or a city like Austin I marvel at how quiet everything is), hell I'll even take roosters at 3am and the guy next door who puts on loud music at insane hours of the morning. Just... no squealing. Please.

At any rate, when school let out for an end-of-term break in early May, I was ready to be away from my little island. I'd used up all of my Peace Corps leave (the time that I'm allowed to be out of Vanuatu) with my trip back to Austin during Christmas and my week in Australia, so I couldn't get too far away but still, better than nothing. When I first read about Vanuatu on Wikipedia after discovering I was to be sent here, I devised two main goals for my Peace Corps service: throwing a penny into the volcano on Tanna (I mean, if fountains are supposed to bring good luck, volcanoes should be the mother load, right?), and watching the land diving on Pentecost. And so, when I got word of a group of volunteers heading to Pentecost during the school break, I decided to jump on board. Land diving is one of the more popular Vanuatu customs for tourists to witness and it's often photographed and put in tourism pamphlets and promotional videos. It's basically like bungee jumping, except elastics hadn't been invented back when it first started, so people had to improvise. Instead of synthetic bungee cords that are deemed low-risk enough to be featured at most amusement parks even in the super safety conscious US, the land divers on Pentecost use tough, wooden vines with something of a poor safety record. Although generally fairly strong, the vines don't really have a lot of elasticity to effectively adsorb the energy of a fall. In fact, land diving is traditionally only practiced in the months of May and June because during thus time of year the vines are slightly more elastic and thus marginally safer. The reason for the timing of this custom was apparently forgotten and rudely re-discovered some years ago when a village decided to put on a jump out of season to honor the visit of the queen of England and a diver was killed when the overly brittle vine broke securing him broke. A second safety issue arises from the towers which they jump off of, tall structures made from tree branches lashed together with bush rope (a plant whose bark is ductile enough to allow it to be used as a makeshift rope). Unfortunately the towers suffer from a lack of effective building code, as well as a lack of nails, and during a jump last year the tower collapsed and killed one of the people climbing it. Needless to say, I received a warning from my parents back in the US that I should not try and jump myself (which some tourists do sometimes), but I was a little surprised when I was waiting at the airport for my flight and I got a call from Duncan. “Dan,” he said in a frantic voice which suggested that he'd nearly forgotten something important, “I forgot to tell you before you left. Sometimes white people like to jump in the land diving, but you don't do it!”

The nice thing about living in a small country with a lot of other Peace Corps volunteers is that there's always someone you can look up wherever you go, meaning that you rarely have to pay for accommodation and you can get into most tourist attractions for free, or at least at a discount. Sure enough, one of our Pentecost volunteers, Erika (who sounds a lot like Ellen Degeneres, which I think is pretty hilarious), let us all crash in her house and arranged for us to see a jump that was being put on in her village for the benefit of a cruise ship. Cruise ships are apparently becoming a growing phenomena in the Pacific, judging from the large increase in frequency of their visits to Vanuatu in the year and a half I've been here. There's even a cruise ship stop at a village on Malekula, just a little bit north of Tautu, although god knows what there is to see there. Most Ni-Vans I've talked to get a real kick out of watching all the white people (usually Australians) disembark from their ship and putter around their island for a few hours, so I was actually looking forward to seeing the cruise ship almost as much as I was looking forward to seeing the land diving.

The ship showed up on Sunday morning and all of us volunteers headed down to the beach to check it out. I'm sure most people reading this have seen one (or maybe been on one) but cruise ships are MASSIVE. Like, it was probably the biggest man made object I'd ever seen in Vanuatu, and it looked very out of place, parked just offshore of this village carrying with it more wealth, technology, and power (power in the scientific sense, being work per unit time) than is even fathomable on the island it visits. During my time in Vanuatu, I'd grown somewhat annoyed by the tendency of Ni-Vans to jack up the price of goods and services for white people, but looking at that ship I understood their thinking perfectly: anyone capable of producing THAT can easily spare a few hundred vatu extra. The small landing boats the ship put out to ferry Australians the half kilometer to shore were larger than the majority of the copra ships that carry cargo as well as Ni-Vans between Malekula, Santo, and Vila. It kind of felt like we were being visited by a UFO, that a species of vastly superior beings were coming down from their mother ship in order to observe and document the eccentricities of a primitive society.

The change the village undertook for the benefit of the cruise ship was very strange. Land diving is one of the many Vanuatu customs that live on today solely because the Ni-Vans have realized that they can get tourists to pay to see them. It's a bizarre dynamic, hanging onto old practices and traditions for financial or historical reasons rather than because they're actually still applicable ways to living. There's a lot of pressure on Ni-Vans to maintain their authentic lifestyles rather than adopt western practices, but I feel like that calls a lot of the authenticity into doubt. I mean, what's more authentic, old traditions being acted out by people who don't really use them in their daily lives anymore or an adopted lifestyle that the majority of people actually do practice all the time? In a lot of ways I feel like my quasi-westernized village, although it has lost most of its custom, is a much more accurate portrayal of what Vanuatu is actually like. It's not quite as exotic or exciting as the tour guides indicate. People go to church instead of dressing up in costumes and dancing to make the yams grow, people wear pants and shirts or dresses, not penis sheathes and grass skirts, and people like to eat rice and noodles, not each other. So, while these cruise ship passengers were witnessing more Vanuatu custom in a few hours than I had in my entire service, I felt like they were leaving with a totally false picture of what living in a village in Vanuatu is like. I think it's kind of like learning about American culture by visiting Disneyland. Yeah, it's more glamorous and entertaining than, say, Cleveland, but it's all staged. And that's kind of what this village felt like when the cruise ship rolled in, Disneyland. People dressed up in traditional dress to get their pictures taken with the tourists, they put on dances and shows, put up signs directing people to various attractions (including one which labeled their dock as “Queen Elizabert II's Landing,” after an English monarch very few people have heard of) and sold souvenirs (such as the very traditional Pentecost beer cozys). There were even overpriced concessions. Grapefruits, which are usually handed out for free, were going for a hundred vatu a piece. On the plus side, however, the cruise ship staff had set up beverage stalls around the village selling cold drinks (so the passengers wouldn't have to go a whole afternoon without a frosty brew), which you could get if you could find an Australian willing to charge you one to their account in exchange for some vatu. The best part, however, was that, when they departed later that day, the staff left us with two giant bags of ice.

The land diving itself was very strange, and definitely not quite fit for prime time. Let's just say that once you've seen one guy jump from a wooden tower with vines tied to his feet, you've pretty much seen them all. However, the land diving ceremony consisted of something like fifteen jumps and lasted almost three hours. Towards the end, it was basically just us Peace Corps volunteers with the patience to still be watching. The jumping was accompanied by a troupe of men doing a stomp dance next to the tower, which they doggedly kept up for the entirety of the ceremony, although they did look a little worn out near the end. The tower was adorned with about fifteen wooden platforms (one for each jump), each one slightly higher than the last. A pair of vine ropes were fastened to the end of each platform. People started jumping from the lowest platform, maybe ten to fifteen feet off the ground and worked their way up, finally climaxing with the platform at the very top of the tower, maybe a hundred feet up. A guy would climb onto a platform and stand still while a team of kids tied a vine to each foot. When they were finished, he'd step to the edge of the platform and do a sort of ceremonial dance, which seemed to me to be a thinly veiled excuse to buy time to psyche himself up before taking the plunge. Finally, he'd cover his head with his hands and dive headfirst to the ground. The platforms were rigged such that they would partially break as the diver neared the ground and the vines became taught, thus absorbing some of the force of the fall. The ground below the tower was kept kicked up and soft to offer some padding and was inclined to allow the diver to roll, all of which were planned to reduce the force of the impact. Even still, some of the divers took quite a beating and looked none too happy as they were pulled out of the dirt to their feet. As the jumpers moved to the higher platforms, the lengths of their pre-jump dances became longer and the last jumper (from the highest point) actually stopped the whole ceremony so that an extra branch could be fastened to the side of his platform for him to hold onto while he was mentally preparing himself. We'd all been sitting in the sun for a long while by the time the whole thing was over and we were all glad to be able to adjourn to the beach and sit in the shade. I struck up a conversation with a Ni-Van who sat down near me and asked him what the significance of the land diving ceremony used to be. “There was never a reason for it,” he replied “it was just for fun.”