Noipe Village, Nendö Island, Santa Cruz Islands, Solomon Islands, Day 8

Tags

dancing, kastom, melanesia, Nendö Island, Santa Cruz Islands, Solomon Islands, South Pacifc, welcome ceremony

Ship Position: 10°51’19.1″S 165°49’29.3″E

Today they had a treat for us. We were being taken ashore and loaded into the finest transportation on the island and taken up into the hilly interior of Nendö Island, the largest of the Santa Cruz island group, in the Temotu province. Up until now we’d been visiting coastal villages.

We took the zodiacs into a broken bottle, rusted tin can littered beach with 100 people hanging around to stare at us. This sizable town had a freighter sized dock where a large boat was taking on passengers and leaving as well as the obligatory rusted out shipwreck pushed up again it and blocking half the dock space. The town was big enough that it had a hospital, a local jail with razor wire on the fence. But the finest transportation on the island turned out to be trucks and we were all loaded into the back.

They pulled out 2×4 boards to sit on to squeeze us in tighter. And since the main road was rutted, it was not the most comfortable ride.

An hour later when we unloaded from the trucks and wandered toward the village, we were greeted again with the traditional small village greeting — young men in traditional garb, painted with mud, and running at us yelling and brandishing weapons. From behind me, I could hear the expedition leader say, wait, they’re shooting real arrows.

They attempted to organize us into two lines so that we could be marched into the village. (I say attempted because this group seemed to resist any form of organization. It wasn’t a herding cats sort of thing, it was more like the movie, Up, where the dogs keep saying “Squirrel!” and completely losing focus.) But the villagers had woven leaf leis for us and wanted to present one to each of us and shake our hands and welcome us. They’d built a big tent with woven mats and wanted us to sit down and drink a coconut and relax for the welcome speeches. They had demonstrations set up for us of the women preparing local food and men weaving the local bride price which was long bands of small woven red feathers the women wore coiled on their heads.

Then they danced. The men danced, then the women danced, then the men and women danced together (with the women following the men).

There’s a word that comes up in this region, kastom. And it does have some of the meaning of the word, custom, as in this refers to the traditional, customary way of doing things. But the word, kastom, has more subtle meaning than that. It’s nostalgia for what they’ve lost, it’s a rejection of modern ways, it’s their secret, personal myths and rituals. So, the welcome rituals, the dances, the demonstrations, are all aspects of their kastoms. And they’re very proud of them, they want to show them to us and it’s interesting to watch the locals pull out their cellphones and take video.

After this, they took us around the village, showed us the church with no roof with ferns growing it in (because they needed a bigger church and stopped using this one so they could focus on getting the new church built, at least that’s what they told us) and the school where there was a delightful little book on what to do with our foreign visitors and they had done every step in this book.

A couple of us then walked down the road for a while back the way we came with the idea that eventually the trucks would come along and pick us up on the way back. The forest will filled with ferns and butterfly flowers.

The air was filled with birds and flying foxes.

And right about here, the air opens up with that jungle in the rain smell of earth and ferns. And you start to hear a soft patter. Just enough time to put the camera in the dry bag before it starts to pour. I mean, caught in a car wash agitation.

We got loaded back up in the trucks and taken down the hill, but everyone was soaked. But it wasn’t cold and, if I had a super power, I would be the Human Torch, because I put off heat. If only I could control it… Flame on

Up until now the trip had been rainy, but the voyage hadn’t been rough. That changed today.

A nasty irregular 8-10 swell was coming up from the south from a storm in the seas between Australia and New Zealand, but there’s no land masses to impede it. So, the seas just keep rolling. And it wasn’t that the boat went up and down — because I can handle that. Pitch and roll are fine. It’s when you start to get irregular yaw and a sporadic elevator drop feeling. The cooks had made a great meal that they’d been working on for days because we were half way through the journey and most of us just bolted from the dining room without eating much.

It was a long rough night of clinging to the box around the bed.

But the good news is that we’re halfway through the trip and no tales of mortal danger, no death-defying… Oh, wait, that’s tomorrow’s story.