Budi's shoes at the start of the day, on their way to obscurity |
There is a certain tourism venture just out
of Luganville which gets rave reviews on Trip Advisor and three members of
Pandion signed up for the whole shebang, a day long journey over bamboo bridges,
down streams, through a massive cave and several villages.
Ex-raft guide Miles felt that paying for such pasty white nonsense was beneath him and Sylvie was too young (THANK GOD) so Rems, Budi, me and the crew of Dogstar* fronted up at the gates of the Beachside Resort at 8am sharp waiting for the bus.
“Rubber time,” shrugged the NiVan woman
from reception when we were still waiting 45 minutes later. Island time, Vanuatu time, rubber time; they
all mean the same thing: you’ll see us when you’re lookin’ at us.
A banged up minivan arrived and two
uncharacteristically reserved NiVans ushered us in. At this point the sky was partly cloudy and
the forecast was for no more than 1-5 mm of rain, if any. The trip had been cancelled in the preceding week
because of heavy rain, which should have been a heads up, but wasn’t…
Arriving at the office of the tour, we
received a briefing from one of the staff about what was in store for us: a
longish drive into the bush, a longish walk through a couple of villages, a
trip through a “wet” cave, a languid swim down a river and a shortish walk to
complete the circuit. Pictures on the wall
showed ecstatic customers signed with accolades like best trip ever!!!!!!! and woohoo,
so much fun!!!!! and other encouraging stuff like that.
We ate up some more Rubber Time waiting
outside for the rest of the punters to arrive and then piled into various
vehicles to take us to the start of the trip. Our vehicle was a twin cab ute
with a plank across the back, which was where the kids sat. Santo roads are so bad that the ute moved
very slowly and my fears of projectile children flung into oncoming traffic
grumbled beneath the surface.
“Is it true you’re not allowed to do this
in Australia?” one of the guides asked Rems, who was sitting in the back.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “You have to sit
inside with a seatbelt on and if you drive too fast the police will get you.”
The ute pulled into a servo to fillap.
“There’s the police,” said the guide to Rems, waving to a cop exiting
the servo with a jumbo box of breakfast crackers under one arm.
The cop grinned at the guide, sent him a gangsta
brutha wave and didn’t bat an eyelid at the trayfull of tender young bodies
crammed into the back.
Unscathed we arrived at the drop off with
the other vehicles. A number of NiVans
in blue t-shirts were milling around but didn’t introduce themselves or give
any instructions and like grazing animals we all started moving when the herd
seemed to be heading off.
It was muddy, and punters picked their way
around large puddles and skated around a bit on wet grass but most of us
arrived at the first village 20 minutes later looking much the same as when
we’d left the vehicles. It started to
rain as we filed into the large nakamal where we would finish up at the end of
the trip. Somebody started handing out
life jackets, and having nowhere else to carry them, people put them on and
buckled them snugly up, in spite of the fact that we were just about to embark
on the 1.5 hour trek to the cave in 100 percent humidity. Wait a minute, hold that thought. While she was trying on her life jacket, Rems
noticed one of the village women peer out into the rain, walk back inside to
the blackboard where the trip was mapped out and discreetly wipe out 1.5 and replace
it with 2.5. Awesome.
We headed off, about 20 punters with blue
shirted guides interspersed amongst us.
It was raining more heavily now and people began to fall over.
“Prize for the first person to fall on
their bum! Extra points if you land on
your face!” called Claire from Dogstar.
Our shoes rapidly disappeared into a cookie
dough of mud and the few people still trying to skirt puddles usually just
found themselves marooned on a dwindling patch of solid ground more than a
standing leap from the next patch. Some
of the falls were spectacular. Eleven
year old Iris was the first to go, landing on her butt in a particularly deep
patch of mud. Some people lost shoes with
a sucking schklup sound. Robin from Dogstar surfed magnificently down
a muddy slope for several metres and managed to stay upright the whole
time. Claire fell down a short slope and
landed so heavily she winded herself and banged her head on the ground. Without actually falling down, Malachy (aka
Pigpen) gradually began to look muddier than anyone else because dirt is sort
of attracted to him.
“I fucking hate this mud,” muttered one of
the other kids on the tour. He looked to
be about nine years old, even though the trip is technically for 12 year olds
and up.
“You know, I never liked the colour of
these shoes,” I commented to Claire as we lurched from one handhold tree trunk to
the next.
“Er, what colour are they?” she asked.
“Pale green.”
We looked down at my shoes, completely
obscured by thick clots of mud.
“I don’t think they’re going to be that
colour anymore.”
We came to a creek and I stopped to wash
the worst of the mud off my tevas (no longer pale green) and at that point the
group, already straggling out in a long muddy line, unintentionally split in
two. The guides with the knowhow up the
front directed most of the punters around the corner and back into the creek to
walk downstream a ways. Budi and Rems
were in that group. A select group of
punters including me, two Americans, Robin, Claire and their daughter Iris from
Dogstar and another (increasingly irate) woman blithely followed our blue
shirted guide straight up a very muddy steep track in a completely different
direction. What can I say? By the time I finished washing my shoes my
kids had disappeared and a group of people and a guide were walking up a
hill. Naively I thought we were
following everyone else.
An hour later, when I had summited what had
to be the slickest bit of terrain on earth and still hadn’t caught up to my
kids, I rounded a corner and found the Americans and the guide standing disconsolately
on the track. The American woman sounded
dazed. “He says he doesn’t know where we are,” she called.
“He’s the guide,” I said, disbelieving.
“Yeah, but he says he doesn’t know where we
are.”
I broke the news to Dogstar as they
scrambled up the last few metres of the Impossible Slope.
“What do you mean he doesn’t know where we
are?” said Robin, also disbelieving.
“He’s the guide!”
“Exactly when did he stop knowing where he
was, and was it before, after or during that muddy cliff?” panted Claire.
Sensing growing animosity, the guide sidled
past us and raced off back down the Impossible Slope and disappeared before you
could say Hey man please don’t leave us in the jungle all by ourselves.
We turned back and were confronted with the
Herculean task of getting back down the Impossible Slope which was gouged all
over by the finger-marks we’d left getting up it. “Fuck this,” said Claire eloquently and
plumped onto her backside to bumslide down.
There’s a point at which you don’t notice a bit more mud.
At the bottom of the Impossible Slope one
of the other guides appeared. He
grinned. “You went the wrong way!”
“No,” said Iris, “he did,” pointing after the offending guide who had sheepishly
disappeared.
“You must hurry,” said this new guide. “We are very late.”
“I’m worried about my kids,” I said,
jogging along beside him. “I have all
the food and water, and I’m worried that they’ll be worried about me.”
As it turned out, my kids were worried that
I’d be worried about them.
Back at the other group the group had
started to realise that they’d shrunk by half a dozen people.
“I think they’re lost,” Rems said to Budi.
“Where are those Kiwis? And those Yanks?”
asked one of the Australians.
“And our mum,” put in Rems.
The guides put their heads together. “We wait,” they said. One of them ran off to find us.
People who had food ate it. My kids watched them eat it and tried to
catch raindrops on their tongues. Half
an hour of sitting in the muddy drizzle and the guides conferred again. “We go.”
“What, without them?”
“We meet them at the cave. They are lost.”
None of this was very comforting.
“Is it far to my kids?” I asked, hurrying
after the guide. Now the group was split
into three: a few guides with the majority of the group, me and the sheepish guide
who now knew where he was, and the rest of the lost sheep with the other guide.
“Yes, a very long way.”
Reminy going down one of the million ladders
It wasn’t a very long way as the crow
flies; in fact I could have walked it in ten minutes, but now we arrived at the
Rustic Ladder part of the tour, and what took up maybe 5% of the promotional
material revealed itself to be the main attraction: handmade ladders, almost
vertical and slick with the mud from the un-lost punters who’d already passed
this way. The guide in front of me ran down, my hand to God, but I
abandoned that idea after almost breaking both legs slipping between
rungs. Instead I adopted the crab
technique, belly up on all fours. My
concern for the kids gave wings to my limbs and I was almost as fast as the
guide, although I could barely move any part of my body without screaming the
next day.
Reminy told me later that one of the guides
in her group had gone in front of everybody wearing a tool belt filled with
nails. Whenever he came to a missing
rung he’d whip out his machete, cut a new rung from a sapling, hammer it into
place, and wave people on. All gud,
nambawan!
We arrived at a flooded creek at the mouth
of the cave and whatever relief I may have felt at seeing my kids alive
disappeared in the horror of realising that they were on the other side of the creek and that if I
wanted to join them, I would have to cross it too.
At this point a voice in my head was
hissing Thai soccer team in an
endless loop and I was also remembering that the village we’d just sailed from
on Pentacost had recently been affected by three landslides in steep (tick!),
waterlogged (tick!) terrain. My
confidence in the operation had dwindled with the Lost Guide incident and the
fact that the other guides had somehow wrangled my kids across the flooded creek
without waiting to a) locate me, and b) ask me how I felt about it. I felt reasonably rotten about it, but I
found myself being likewise wrangled across the creek. The force of the waist high water was breathtaking,
and there was no way of knowing where to put my feet, as the water was taking
on the cloudy opaqueness of water in flood.
Hmm, I said to myself, this whole diffusion of responsibility thing is
how people get killed en masse in
remote and beautiful settings.
“Chocolate!” my kids greeted me, and we
wolfed down soggy minibars of Whittakers.
“I was so scared crossing that creek,” said
Rems to me in between mouthfuls. “I had
to jump from one spot to the next and I wasn’t sure I’d make it. The guide only just caught my hand.”
I had post-incident heart tremors.
“And I knew Budi wouldn’t be able to jump
that far, because he’s shorter, so I positioned myself downstream and got ready
to jump in and save him if he got swept away.”
When she looked back at Budi, however, she saw him clinging to the back
of a guide, both of them slippery with mud.
The guide balanced himself with one hand and held a machete with
another.
More heart tremors.
“It was like trying to hold onto an enormous
slippery watermelon,” Budi said. “An
armed watermelon.”
As a cold wet but reunited group, we
rounded the corner and saw the entrance to the cave, a massive hole in the side
of the mountain, framed by jungle and echoing with the sound of hundreds of
tonnes of water pouring through its mouth.
To get into the cave we had to slide down a rocky chute and then cross
back over the flooded creek, flanked by guides and a helpful punter.
Why are we even going in here, I
wondered. Surely they’ll can the trip
now. Reminy had watched the mother of
the unimpressed 9 year old gouge holes in a treetrunk as she gripped the bark
with her fingernails watching a guide transport her son across the creek and
muttering oh please oh please oh please
under her breath.
Lunchtime.
Guides stood around while people got out wet sandwiches and chocolate
bars. I settled on a ledge furthest into the cave with my kids and slowly
realised that just behind where we were sitting, the entire creek flowed into
an unforgiving sieve before rushing down behind a rock wall and reappearing in
a hissing pool at the bottom. My lunch
was suddenly very unappetising. Anyone
who’d been washed downstream from one of the two crossings upstream would have
been sucked down into the sieve and drowned.
A sieve is a rocky or treetrunky blockage in a river that lets water
through but not bodies.
“You’re kidding me,” Miles kept saying when
I told him the story that night. “A
sieve? You crossed a flooded creek right
above a sieve?”
“Twice.”
Cave mouth |
I nibbled on a piece of quiche and watched
as the water slowly came up over the stick I’d been marking the water level
with. I didn’t want to go forwards into the cave, and I didn’t want to go
backwards, over the ever-rising creek. None
of the punters were talking to each other.
Everybody was too tired and wet and muddy and hungry and the roar of the
creek made talking impossible anyway.
The guides spoke English, but not well, and none of us had formed any
kind of relationship with them in the way that usually happens on adventure
tours. A dozen historical events framed
in similar circumstances, caving accidents, canyoning disasters, helpfully and
persistently rose to the forefront of my mind.
Claire was keeping an eye on her own watermark and kept sending me
loaded glances over the cacophony.
The ladder into the cave
A short distance away the guides were
speaking in low Bislama. One guide,
torch in hand, scrambled into the cave down some more Death Ladders, leapt out
across the lightwater pool at the bottom, clung to a rock, pulled himself up
onto some more rocks, leapt into another pool and disappeared into pitch
darkness.
There was no way I was going in there with
my kids and I thought about how to break that unhappy news to them. After a long time the guide returned and
clambered up the Death Ladders, where he was immediately confronted by …
me.
“What’s it like in there?” I asked. I was mentally steeling myself for turning
around with my kids and Dogstar in the event that he said No problem! We go! and everybody else followed him into the cave.
He shook his head. “Very strong water.”
“Very strong water,” I repeated loudly for
the benefit of my kids.
“Maybe too strong water for picaninnis?” he
said.
I agreed with him, emphatically. “Is there a way around the cave?” I
asked. “Is there a way we can go around
the cave but still get into the river for the swim section?”
“No.”
“So, we’d have to go back the way we came?”
NiVans have a way of saying yes when they
don’t really want to say yes. They lift
their chin slightly and raise their eyebrows.
“Back up the ladders?” I clarified.
Eyebrows.
Back up the fecking ladders.
Actually my confidence in the tour guides
grew after they canned the trip, cut a new path in another vertical hill so
that we wouldn’t have to cross the two creeks again and sent us back the way
we’d come. A large NiVan finally emerged
as the trip leader and he shook my hand apologetically as I left the cave. “I am very sorry,” he said, “but we are all
about safety.”
“Oh me too,” I assured him.
So we started the long trip back to the vehicles.
“Mum, did we pay a lot of money to go on a
muddy walk?” asked Budi at one point.
Technically yes. The tour is 7000 vatu per person, slightly cheaper
for kids. We talked about asking for a
refund, but not seriously. The company
had had to pay half a dozen guides, petrol, admin, custom trades in the two
villages we walked through, etc etc.
The punters walking out of the jungle were
almost unrecognisable. We were sopping
wet and orange with mud, trudging along like a line of drunken zombies and
occasionally falling spectacularly on our arses. Just to rub salt in the wound, a group of
village kids passed us on their way home from school. They wore clean dry clothes, carried rainbow
coloured umbrellas and stepped daintily around the puddles in clean thongs,
smiling nervously at the Crazy Whitefellas.
“Wow,” said Robin. “Usually after a hard day’s tramping my legs
start hurting the next day, but every bit of me hurts like a bastard already.”
Back at the Beachfront Resort we paid $8 for hot showers, worth every penny, made short work of three huge bowls of hot chips, and toasted ourselves with cold Tuskers, the local beer.
“Because we’re worth it,” said Claire.
Thanks
Dogstar, for making a crazy day totally hilarious and fun in spite of
everything, and sharing all the stories afterwards. We love you guys.
*
It’s customary for cruisers to refer to each other by the names of their boats,
for example, someone might say, “Oh look, Pandion’s on shore already.” or
“We’re going to the village with Pandion.” Thus I refer to the New Zealand crew
of Dogstar collectively as Dogstar throughout this narrative, in spite of the
fact that their real names are Robin, Claire and Iris.
I read this - deja vu - with my heart in my mouth, even though I knew you survived to write it
ReplyDeleteAnd here's the thing:
I am cheered to think that there are activities that even Pandion consider to be too dangerous!
I am starting to believe in guardian angels...