Yu No Kick Part 18: Ples Blong Mi Issue 3 (Lakatoro)

Lakatoro is our very own slice of the western life here in on Malekula. It promises such amenities as ice, cold drinks, cheese, alcohol, ice cream, and internet (although, thanks to the arrival of Digicel, Lakatoro no longer has the monopoly on this). When I first began my service, I probably spent about as much time in Lakatoro as I did in Tautu. These days going to Lakatoro is a once or twice a week event (in some part thanks to the fact that there is no longer a Peace Corps volunteer living in Lakatoro) and is more of a chore than a treat. Lakatoro is south of Tautu and is most commonly reached by hailing a passing a truck and paying them 100 vatu to take you there. I'm one of the few who tend to forgo the truck and either walk or ride my bike. The walk (or ride) is pleasant as long as it's not too hot a day, as shade is often scarce. Tautu sprawls southwards almost as much as it does northwards (towards Norsup) and about a third of the walk is just spent clearing the village. Although most of this stretch seems uninhabited, there are actually large family compounds set back from the road all along it. So, while it looks like a bunch of unmanaged bush, chances are it's someone's garden or something. Early on in the walk you come to a mysterious sign that has intrigued me for most of my service. It's pretty large and (relatively) well made and proudly declares, in bright blue letters, “e-Shop” and advertises movies, computers, and other electronics. The arrow on the sign directs you to a follow a narrow, overgrown road off into the bush that seems rather unlikely to lead to much of anything, much less an electronics store. More baffling still is that there's an identical sign along the road between Tautu and Norsup which also points off into the bush, seemingly in a totally different direction. As it turns out, however, the signs do actually point towards the same thing, a fact I discovered one day when I decided to investigate the anomaly and set out along the tiny bush road indicated by one of the signs and emerged, some five minutes later, at the other sign. While the area that I walked through was not exactly bush, it was not exactly developed either. I passed by several bamboo and thatch houses, some complete with old ladies out front grinding yams to make lap-lap, but nothing that seemed like an establishment that might sell computers.

The end of Tautu is indicated by the Norsup Airport (like I said, nowhere near Norsup). Although having a paved runway is become increasingly common in Vanuatu, when I first arrived I considered myself very fortunate to be near an airport with a paved runway as flights would be considerably less likely to be canceled due to heavy rain. As it is, the runway is the only paved surface on the island. A small tin shack houses the airport office (with an all-in-one ticketing counter, check-in counter, arrival counter, gate counter, and baggage counter). Another small tin house is home to the airport tax collector, to whom you must give 200 vatu every time you board a flight. Attached to these two structures is a large cement outline of a building. The upper portions of the frame are in a gently sloping triangle, indicating that it may have once supported (or been intended to support) a roof. Rectangular holes in the walls at about eye level suggest the idea of windows. On the ground a cement floor is engaged in a slow, losing battle with the weeds and papaya trees which force their way through cracks in the stone. There's not much wood present in the frame, but what little there is is black and charred. The airport is the subject of a heated land dispute between a few families in the area because, as I understand, everyone really wants a piece of those 200 vatu departure tax payments (approximately 100% of Vanuatu's legal activity revolves around land disputes because of a clause in the constitution that states that all land must return to ownership of whoever owned it before the colonial government showed up. This seems like a good idea on paper until you realize that there wasn't any paper before the colonial government and so the only way historical land ownership can be established is via oral legends and hearsay. Thus, mayhem ensues), which a few years ago resulted in the airport being firebombed. Still, Norsup airport has its advantages. I can easily walk there, I can wait at the beach for my plane to come, I only need to show fifteen minutes before my flight, and no one asks me to take off my shoes before going through security.

The airport is located right on the water on the edge of a crescent bay that's home to what is, in my opinion, the nicest oceanfront in the area. A thin, pristine white sand beach encircles a bay of clear turquoise water. On especially calm days the glassy blue surface of the water surrounded by the stark white of the beach looks like a giant gemstone that somehow spontaneously formed on the coastline. Large trees grown on the fringes of the beach and provide pleasant shade on a hot day. At high tide, some of the trees even reach out over the water, allowing one to climb out over the ocean and watch the waves break below you. The opposite side of the road from the beach is covered by the ubiquitous coconut plantation, which offers little shelter from the sun and the constant dust kicked up by passing trucks clings eagerly to sweaty skin and quickly coats you in a fine sheen of dirt. Thus, it's usually more pleasant to walk along the beach when heading to Lakatoro on foot and join up with the road later. At the far end of the beach from the airport is Aop river which, according to Duncan is haunted and should be avoided, especially at night. I've never seen any evidence to support this, although Aop river does have the potential to swell considerably in heavy rain and last year knocked out the earthen bridge that connects Tautu with Lakatoro. A coconut log bridge was hastily erected in response to this to accommodate foot traffic over the river while the truck bridge was being rebuilt. At the time I predicted that, given the haphazard nature of the truck bridge that I watched public works build, the coconut bridge would outlast the new earthen one. A year and then some later, however, the coconut bridge is rotten and drooping while the earth one has yet to be washed out again.

Just outside of Lakatoro there's a Jehovah's Witness house, which is funny not only because it indicates the presence of Jehovah's Witness in Vanuatu but also because the phrase “Jehovah's Witness House” doesn't translate very well into Bislama, so they have this really big sign so that they can spell out the entire Bislama translation, which is “Haos blong Kingdom blong ol Witnes blong Jehovah.” The first thing you see when you arrive in Lakatoro is the LTC (Lakatoro Trading Center), the largest store on the island. It's kind of like a Wal-Mart in that, not only does it stock a lot of random junk, but it's also open 6am-7pm every day, even Sundays and holidays. A low wall separates the LTC's yard from the road on which Lakatoro Trading Center is spelled out in large block letters, except the first letter of each word is missing so it actually says AKATORO RADING ENTER. The LTC has a nice big building which is pleasant to walk around in, and it is the only store on the island that sells cheese, but, for the most part, I avoid shopping there because anything they sell can almost always be had a lot cheaper at one of the other stores in Lakatoro. Next to the LTC is a sort of strip mall that contains the Post Office, Bank, Air Vanuatu Office, the main office of the power company, and, in a recent addition, a customs office, which is odd because exactly zero vessels and/or aircraft arrive from overseas each day to the island of Malekula, but I suppose if an international flight crashes somewhere nearby and some survivors get washed up here and need to get their life jackets cleared by customs we'll be covered.

Across from the strip mall is Kimberley's, the one (pseudo) restaurant on the island. They've got maybe six tables inside and, if you show up in the afternoon, you can usually get a plate of rice topped with meat or fish for 300 vatu or so. If you're looking for something in particular, or if you want to come for dinner, you can make arrangements in advance with the chef, who actually does a pretty good job as long as you're specific about what you want. Next to the restaurant is a meeting area which, according to the sign, seems like it should be the offices of Vanuatu's People's Progressive Party, but is actually a nakamal. After the PPP nakamal is an auto repair shop which always seems to be doing brisk business, probably because the roads on Malekula are rarely kind to the trucks that drive upon them. Across from the auto shop is another nakamal, this one marked by a revolving yellow light on top of a wooden pole, which we like to call Cancun. Most nakamals consist of a little tin shack where the kava is served and a collection of coconut wood benches outside for people to sit on and ponder how disgusting kava is. Cancun, however, looks like something from a spring break special. Its seating consists of several, circular, thatch-roofed, open-air huts which look like they should be peopled by bikini-wearing, sunburned, inebriated college students sipping complicated-looking frozen drinks served by Mexican waiters instead of gruff, shabbily dressed Ni-Vans pounding cupfuls of mud-water and hocking loogies.

After the Cancun nakamal there's a roundabout and a road splits off from the main road to the right and heads uphill to the provincial offices The main road continues on to the second half of Lakatoro, which is separated from the first half by a good stretch of nothing. I once ran into a tourist in between the two bits of Lakatoro who stopped me and asked me which way town was. I just nodded sadly and kept walking. The beginning of the second part of Lakatoro is marked by the school on one side and a nakamal on the other. When I first got here this nakamal, Jean Louis, was by far the most popular in town. The benches were always full, they made several buckets of kava each night, staying open late into the night until all other their customers left, and sometimes there was even a line to get served. The kava crowd, however, is fickle and recently Jean Louis lost its luster. We'd show up to find it totally deserted, its single bucket of kava going unsold night after night. These days they've stopped making kava altogether there. The coconut benches are rotten and broken and the sheets of corrugated metal that used to cover some of the seating areas have all been removed.

Next to Jean Louis is the department of agriculture and fisheries, an agency who's function I'm still uncertain of. Across from this is our Stadium, a large field overlooked by a stand of bleachers on the far side. Up next is the market, a big, open concrete structure that's home to not one, but two signs. Of course, neither of them advertise the market. The first is a giant, side-of-the-highway-style billboard advertising Digicel and the second is a hand-painted pink wooden sign which says something to the effect of “Welcome to Malekula. Please Be Aware That People Here Have AIDS,” which, aside from being more or less completely untrue, has got to be pretty detrimental for the tourism trade. The market itself is painted in a sort of Christmas theme with dancing Santas, Christmas trees, and decorative bells because, I guess, someone decided it would be a good idea to paint it one year for the holidays without thinking ahead to how this would look after the holiday season was over. There's another bank of stores next to the market, the first in the bank, and my favorite, is the PIM, which I like because it's about the size of a ticket booth and yet somehow manages to have a larger selection than any other store in town. You walk in to find the entire store full of towering stacks of stuff, most of which looks like it's about to fall over and bury you along with all of the store clerks under a mountain of retail goods. Generally I walk in, take a look around, trying to spot whatever it is I want to buy and, unable to locate it, I ask, skeptically, “do you have any lawn tractors?” To which the clerk will respond, confidently, “yes, of course,” and then wander over to a tower of powdered milk tins, push it aside and, sure enough, there they'll be, a nice, neat stack of eight lawn tractors. No matter how many times this happens, I never cease to be impressed. There's another store, the MDC (yeah, I don't know what the deal is with the initials either), in the same block which is about six times bigger and has about six times less stuff.

There's another roundabout, this one marked by a large pillar which, for some reason, is painted with a bunch of World War II images, with a road continuing south to Litz Litz and another heading to a third block of store up the hill. Between the three blocks of stores, it's usually possible to find whatever it is you happen to be looking for, although this can sometimes involve a lot of walking around in the heat and dust to check all the stores. Sometimes though, you're willing to do just about anything for a bottle of wine or a cold beer.