I missed the Kentucky Derby this year which is just as well since I’m not a huge fan of Mint Juleps which, to me, taste like a child’s version of bourbon, if such a thing is possible. Like marzipan and fudge, the julep is just way too sweet for me. What it lacks is some sort of tart component to balance out all that sugar and mint. Which is why I much prefer a cocktail invented by the King of Cocktails, Dale DeGroff, called the Whiskey Smash, which is very much like a Mint Julep except better. Much better.

Now I say that DeGroff created this drink and maybe he did, but the Whisky Smash has a long history although, like a lot of cocktails, the exact ingredients have changed over time. Jerry Thomas, who is generally considered the patron saint of bartenders, briefly mentions a Whiskey Smash in his landmark cocktail guide, How to Mix Drinks, or the Bon-Vivant’s Companion, first published in 1862.

“This beverage is simply a julep on a small plan,” he writes, and then lists the ingredients as 1/2 tablespoon sugar, 1 tablespoon water, and 1 wine-glass of whiskey.

Well, okay, we get the idea: bourbon, mint, and sugar. A bit anemic, that.

Flash forward to 2005 when Bobby Flay opened Bar Americain in Midtown Manhattan. One of the most popular drinks on the cocktail menu was a Whiskey Smash, which was quite different than the Thomas concoction. To whit, while muddling the mint with simple syrup, Flay added a couple of lemon wedges and smushed those up to get some of the juice as well as a little of the lemon oil (think bitters). Then ice, add the bourbon, and—this is a bit unusual—top the whole thing with a splash of soda.

Did DeGroff come up with his version of the Whiskey Smash before or after Bobby Flay? Who can say. What we know is that his version calls for Makers Mark Bourbon, three lemon pieces, five mint leaves (five: not four, not three—five) and no soda. The version they serve at Bemelmans Bar in New York City’s Carlyle hotel, which credits DeGroff as the creator, insists on Bulleít Bourbon, which I quite like, and lemon juice instead of muddled lemons. I don’t know. I could go either way on the lemon issue. On the one hand, muddled lemons do give you that slightly bitter lemon oil which I find quite nice, but just using fresh lemon juice makes the drink a little smoother I think. Maybe try it both ways and see what you think.

Cheers!

The War Horse Saloon in Port Vila, Efate. Photo by David Lansing.

We had to be packed and ready to go this morning by eight. I said good-by to Martha and Terrine, who have been so lovely to us each morning, and then loaded my luggage into the small motorboat for the thirty-minute trip over to Luganville for the short flight to Port Vila.

Once here, I had several hours before my flight to Auckland so I decided to drop in on the War Horse Saloon which every one on the island just calls The Saloon.

The Saloon is owned by Don and Donna MacQuid, a couple of ex-pats from Denver who thought they’d take a break from life and go sailing for a couple of years. That was in 1984.

“We ended up sailing around the world—twice,” said Don who was wearing a floppy cowboy hat and drinking a Nambawan, a draft beer he brews on the premises (say the name of the beer slowly and you’ll understand what it means).

Don, in cowboy hat, shares a Nambawan with patrons. Photo by David Lansing.

I asked them how they ended up owning a brewery and saloon in Vanuatu, particularly one that looked remarkably like the Traildust Steakhouse in Arlington, Texas with its stuffed buffalo heads and big-screen TVs playing sports, and Donna chuckled and said, “Well that’s a long story. You got all day?”

Here’s a brief version: They were on their boat, Solitaire, headed for the Solomon Islands when they heard there was a cyclone in the area so they changed course and headed for Vanuatu instead. “Once we got here, we never left,” she said.

Don had always wanted to make beer so he thought he’d open a brew pub in Port Vila but the government wouldn’t have any of that. “They are half owners in Tusker (the local beer in Vanuatu) and they wouldn’t allow me to build a brew pub. So I sued them. Which was kind of a crazy thing to do but it got their attention. Eventually they said I still couldn’t open a brew pub but I could open a brewery which is what I did. And then in 2006, we just happened to open the War Horse Saloon right in front of the Seven Seas Brewery and a couple of years ago, we started selling our Nambawan beer in Vanuatu to compete with Tusker.”

And then Don had to excuse himself. He said he needed to help a local country band set up for tonight. I asked him where he found a country and western band in Vanuatu.

“Oh, they’re natives,” he said, adding, “I think ni-Vans are the most naturally talented people I’ve ever met. People wonder where I find a band in Vanuatu that can play Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash and I tell them, Well, you just find some local musicians, give them a couple of western CDs and a week to rehearse and you’ll swear they grew up in Memphis.”

With that he headed off and I finished up my Nambawan before catching a taxi for the airport.

Ratua's chef, Kandy Tamagushiku. Photo by David Lansing.

I’ve been trying for days to meet the chef here at Ratua. She seems a bit mysterious to me but Frederick says she’s just shy. A couple of times he’s brought me back past the pond where the ducks, who provide us with eggs, live to the kitchen. Each time she’s been elsewhere—out in the organic garden or off to the markets at Port Vila. But tomorrow is my last day here and I really wanted to talk to this chef who has made us such fabulous meals so this morning at breakfast, Frederick went into the back and came back dragging the chef by her arm sleeve.

Her name is Kandy Tamagushiku and, over coffee, she told me a little bit about herself. She was born in Port Vila but her father, a park ranger, moved them to New Zealand when she was five. After that, she’d make it back to Vanuatu maybe once a year to visit relatives.

“Vanuatu was always in my heart,” she said. “I never forgot it.”

A year or so ago, she was working in a café near Auckland when a cousin of hers who was doing some electrical work on Ratua told her that the resort was looking for a chef. She knew immediately, she told me, she’d apply. “It was an experience I simply couldn’t turn down. And it was a chance to return to Vanuatu.”

I asked her if there was a difference between living in New Zealand and living here. She said life was much simpler here and, because of that, she thought the people were happier. “They don’t know troubles the way we know troubles.”

We talked a bit more about her life here on the island and then she looked at her watch and told me she needed to get back to the kitchen. “I’m roasting a whole pig for dinner tonight,” she said standing up and shaking my hand. “And a pig waits for no man. Or woman either.” And then she walked past the ducks back to the kitchen.

Storm clouds gather as we canoe to Malo's blue hole. Photo by David Lansing.

Where was I? Oh yes, upside down in a drifting canoe searching for my submerged camera bag. Well, I found it. Weighing twenty pounds, it hadn’t drifted far along the muddy bottom.

“This is not good,” I said to G who’d lost her hat and her new sunglasses. The straw hat she was able to scoop up before the current had taken it too far. The glasses were lost. I held my pack up high in the air as water gushed out of it like a broken pipe as I plunged towards the shore like a plow horse through viscous mud that swallowed me mid-calf. At this point the other canoes had caught up to us and were idling in the stream, watching us as we scrambled to secure paddles, canoe, clothes, towels, and my camera bag. Nobody said anything except, “What happened?”

What happened? I’ll tell you what happened. The New York mouse capsized our canoe. All right, it probably wasn’t strictly her fault since I was the one who’d instructed her to watch out for the mangrove branch, which she’d successfully accomplished by rolling our little unstable vessel into the drink. Still.

Well, it took awhile but we were able to get everything to shore, roll the canoe to get the water out of it, and recover everything but G’s polarized sunglasses which really had looked quite stylish on her.

“Are you going to look at your camera?” G asked me.

“Nope.”

“Why not? Don’t you want to know if it’s okay?”

“G, my camera bag was on the bottom of the river. When I picked it up, water ran out of it for five minutes. Of course it’s not okay.”

“So you’re not going to look?”

“We’re not going to talk about the camera bag anymore. The next person who even says the words camera bag is going to be thrown out of the boat by me.”

“So you’re not…”

“What did I just say? We are not talking about it anymore.”

We got back in the canoe. The tropical rain, which had seemed so charming only a few hours earlier, now seemed to be biblically punishing me. What, overturning the boat hadn’t done enough damage? Now god was going to hit us with an afternoon monsoon? I didn’t care. What more damage could be done? I draped a wet towel over the backpack and paddled as hard as I could. G did the same. Neither of us spoke. For the full thirty minute trip.

When we got back to Ratua, Frederick was standing on the dock, in the rain, waiting to greet us. G took him aside and told him what had happened. Frederick ran off and came back with dry towels and two hairdryers.

“Can I help you with your equipment?” he asked. Frederick is such the gentleman.

“No, thank you,” I told him. “I think what I’ll do is go back to my villa and sit on my veranda and open up my camera bag. If you hear a long scream in the jungle, it means I might be late for dinner.”

Before heading back to Crocodile Villa, I went to the bar and asked Claudia to make me an Espiritu Diablo. “Don’t be stingy with the tequila,” I told her. She made me a very large drink with very little ginger ale. Then I walked back in the rain, which had diminished, to my room, took a warm shower, changed into some dry clothes, and then pulled up a wicker chair in front of a small table on the veranda and opened up my camera bag.

The view from my villa after the storm. Photo by David Lansing.

Not too surprisingly, everything was wet. Very wet. So I took all of the equipment out, piece by piece, removed batteries and lenses and memory cards, carefully dried them with the towels Frederick had given me, and then used a hairdryer to dry everything with hot air. The whole process took me about two hours. Then I spread all the gear out, unassembled, on the rustic desk in my room. I made myself a gin and tonic and sat on my bed. The rain stopped. The sun went down. After awhile, there was a knock on my door. I opened it just a crack. It was Frederick. “Is everything all right?” he asked quietly.

“Oh, sure. It’s fine,” I said, not having the heart to tell him the truth.

“The others are worried about you. Will you come join us for dinner?”

“Soon,” I said, and then I closed the door and sat back on the bed with my drink.

Tomorrow I will put everything back together. I will twist on a lens and slip in the lithium ion battery and install the memory card. And then I will move the switch to ON and see what happens. But not tonight. I’m just not ready to do that tonight.

Instead, I walked in the darkness towards the Yacht Club where I could hear voices and music in the sticky hot air, stopping at the bar to ask Claudia to make me another Diablo, and then I stepped into the candle-lit light of the dining pavilion and sat down next to G who, when she saw me, looked as if she were holding her breath under water.

“And?” she whispered.

I patted her hand. “We’re not going to talk about it.”

“But Frederick said everything was okay.”

I smiled at her. “We’re not going to talk about it,” I repeated. And for the rest of the night, we didn’t.

G paddling upriver to the blue hole on Malo Island. Photo by David Lansing.

I usually hate the rain, but it’s different here on Vanuatu. It’s warm and it’s comforting and there’s something about it that just connects me to the earth in a primitive way. It’s like the way my sense of smell is aroused by a smoky campfire or my taste buds ignited by bacon sizzling up on a cast-iron skillet outdoors. There is some DNA is our bodies that connects with the smell of fire, the taste of food cooked outdoors, and the feel of tropical rain.

Yesterday we were supposed to go on a day-long bush walk along a narrow jungle path across creeks and cascades and over a bamboo bridge to the Millennium Cave on Espiritu Santo, but in the morning, Frederick looked up at the rather gloomy sky and announced that the hike was off. “It is going to rain—hard,” he said, “and you’ll be up to your hips in mud.”

Instead, he suggested that if we timed it properly, we might be able to get in a canoe trip up an estuary on nearby Malo Island to a blue hole that, he said, was quite beautiful. Now, usually when I think of blue holes I think of the great vertical submarine caves off the coast of Belize or Dean’s Blue Hole in the Bahamas which were formed back in the Ice Ages when the ocean was 300 to 400 feet lower than it is now and these limestone depressions were formed from rain and chemical reactions and then, eventually, filled by the ocean.

That’s not what the Malo Blue Hole is. It’s simply a swimming hole far back in the jungle where a freshwater underground spring meets the ocean. The result is that the water is a brilliant cerulean. Thus the blue hole moniker.

So late in the afternoon, after we’d gotten one of those long, warm tropical showers that lasted for no more than twenty minutes before the skies cleared, we hoped into one of the resort’s motorboats and Amos took us over to Malo where several canoes were pulled up on the sand where the estuary empties out into the ocean.

Now, here’s the thing: We had three canoes and seven people plus Amos, our guide, so two of the canoes had three paddlers and one had two. Because I was bringing my camera gear and wanted to shoot photos as we rowed, I wanted to go with Amos and someone who could actually paddle a canoe while I shot pictures. The only problem with that is that it left the other two boats with mostly inexperienced paddlers. Which was a problem almost immediately. One boat, with three women, would either paddle into one of the other boats or, worse yet, straight into the shore.

“Don’t try and power it with your arms,” I thoughtfully yelled out to the women. “Use your core and your lower body. Paddle with your hips and your legs.”

“What the fuck do you think we’re doing!” replied Marguarite. Evidently she didn’t appreciate being stuck in a boat with two New Yorkers, neither of who had a clue as to what they were doing.

Meanwhile, my boat, guided by G and Amos, was doing fabulous, allowing me to sit comfortably in the front of the boat and take pictures, despite the fact that about every 15 seconds G would say something like, “Those guys in the other canoe are going to drown. We have to let Amos go with them and take one in our boat.”

Absolutely not, I told her. I’m shooting here. They’ll be fine. Just give them a few minutes to get the hang of it. Which is when the three women rowed straight into the concrete piling of a low bridge. Not good.

So G got her way. We all pulled up on to shore and a little mouse of a woman who looked absolutely terrified by her five or ten minutes on the water, got into the canoe with me and G while Amos gracefully slid into the other boat. And off we went.

There were howler monkeys screaming madly at us from the trees and legions of crocodiles sunning on the banks and when we came around one bend in the river, there was a rather frightening looking headhunter swinging two shrunken skulls at us and calling out that he had a special going today—two of his heads for one of ours.

I kid you, dear reader. I’m a kidder. There was none of that. In fact, the jungle was eerily silent. Like the calm before the storm. Also, it was getting rather dark. Very dark.

This estuary we were paddling up was shallow. In fact, every few minutes one or the other of us would ground their canoe and the occupants would have to carefully climb out, so as not to tip the boat over, and push or pull the craft over a sandbar. The two paddlers in one of the boats decided, after they’d both grounded their boat several times as well as flipped it, that it might just be easier to walk with the boat up the estuary, which is what they did.

Ah, but G and I and the nervous New York mouse navigated cleanly up the waterway, searching out the deep channels that often ran close to shore and avoiding any mishaps and after about an hour, we’d arrived at the blue hole. Which was a sort of milky azure color instead of the crystal clear cerulean I’d been expecting. But that was due, no doubt, to all the sediment-carrying rainfall feeding into the estuary. We tied the boats to mangroves and went for a swim. The water was much colder than the sea but not nearly as saline though, for some reason, it seemed heavy to me; like swimming with weights around your ankles.

The blue hole on Malo. Photo by David Lansing.

After about half an hour, the rain that had been threatening for some time started to come down. Not heavy, not intense; just small rain. But you could tell it was going to get worse. Which was a problem for me since I had stupidly not brought any protection for the backpack holding my camera gear other than the towel that I now wrapped around it like a turban.

We got into the canoes and, ignoring the others, G and I paddled quickly and silently. We had, on the trip up river, gotten into sync and now could sense when to switch sides paddling or let the other paddle left or right to maneuver us without the need to say anything. It felt splendid. Still, I was worried about the rain and my camera.

At one point the river narrowed to no more than ten feet with mangroves reaching out from both banks like zombie arms. Which is when I made a tragic mistake. I spoke to the New York mouse, sitting trembling with her hands in her lap as G and I did all the work, to watch out for the branch coming up on the right. Which is when she rolled hard to the left. And the canoe and G and I rolled with her.

What did I think as my backpack with a Canon 7D, four lenses, six filters, card reader, and numerous (spent) memory cards went underwater?

Just one word and it begins with an F. In fact, I thought that word three or four times. As in, F—, F—, F—, F—.

And then I was swimming to the surface and watching as my camera bag floated in the current away from me. Not good, I mumbled, or maybe it was more F—, F—, F—. It’s hard to remember. Suffice it to say that I was not a happy camper. But forget about that. I needed to quickly swim after my bag before the current claimed it.

To be continued…

Last Friday, in writing about the Negroni cocktail, I mentioned that its precursor, the Americano, is what James Bond first orders in Casino Royale.

Some readers took me to task for this, pointing out that it is in this very book that the most famous of Bond cocktails, the Vesper Martini (named after the novel’s lead female character, Vesper Lynd), was created.

Right on both accounts. The Negroni is the first cocktail mentioned in the book but the Vesper is the most famous. Here’s how it reads in the book:

“A dry martini,” Bond said. “One. In a deep champagne goblet.”

“Oui, monsieur.”

“Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”

“Certainly, monsieur.” The barman seemed pleased with the idea.

“Gosh, that’s certainly a drink,” said Leiter.

Bond laughed. “When I’m…er…concentrating,” he explained, “I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad. This drink’s my own invention. I’m going to patent it when I can think of a good name.”

The novel goes on with Bond telling the barman, after taking a long sip, “Excellent…but if you can get a vodka made with grain instead of potatoes, you will find it still better,” and then adds in an aside, “Mais n’enculons pas des mouches.”

Kina Lillet isn’t the same stuff that it was when Fleming made up this drink in 1953 (it’s been reformulated) so I go with Lillet Blanc (which is also lovely on its own as an aperitif served on the rocks with a lemon twist). And if you want the same kick Bond wanted, go for Tanqueray instead of Gordon’s (which has a lower alcohol content than it did back then) and 100-proof Stolichnaya vodka. I’d also suggest forgoing the champagne goblet since the martini glasses most of us have these days are much larger than the little things Bond was drinking out of back in the day.

I would, however, stick to his advice on having just one before dinner. Otherwise you might end up like Dorothy Parker who famously said, “I like to drink martinis. Two at the most. Three I’m under the table, four I’m under the host.”

G and a wrangler ride through the coconut grove on Ratua. Photos by David Lansing.

Yesterday I wrote that my favorite thing to do on Ratua is nothing. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t activities if you want them. For instance, yesterday afternoon I grabbed one of the electric buggies available for guests and went out to circumnavigate the island. That took maybe twenty minutes including a stop at Cap Normand, on the opposite of the island from our village, which has a lovely view of some unnamed little islands a stone’s throw away.

There are also 15 free-ranging horses on Ratua that you can ride and several of us have been talking for days about going out in the afternoon although we’ve yet to make it (you know, things like snoozing on a deck chair on the beach seem to take priority). Until yesterday.

“Are you going for a ride this afternoon?” Frederick asked G. G is a pretty young thing from Sydney who, from what I’ve observed, has wisely used her daily nap time to try out each of the half dozen or so daybeds spread around the resort.

“I’m thinking about it,” she said rather sleepily.

“You’ve been thinking about it for the last three days,” Frederick chided.

“I know, I know,” she moaned. “I suppose it would be nice to go for a ride. Can we go along the beach?”

“Absolutely,” said Frederick.

The thing is, because the horses roam free around the island, snacking on the grass that grows between the orderly rows of coconut palms on the eastern side of the island, one of the wranglers has to spend a good part of the morning trying to lure four or five horses back to Manade Ranch and get some tack on them in case anyone wants to go for a ride in the afternoon. And they’ve been doing this every morning for three days. All for naught. Until Frederick was able to guilt G into going for a ride and then she talked Marguerite into joining her.

I thought about joining them but, to be honest with you, I’m not a big fan of horses. I mean, I much prefer to look at them or bet on them to riding them. But I thought it would make some nice photos—the four of them chasing after wild pigs in the coconut grove and galloping down the beach.

But you know what? These horses weren’t too crazy about going for a ride themselves. Perhaps because they spend their days roaming free and doing whatever they want. G’s horse, a handsome bay, refused to go where she wanted him to go. And Marguerite’s horse just refused to go period. He’d just stop in the middle of the trail and stand there, looking bored to death as Marguerite gently kicked his flanks and implored him with clicking sounds to move forward.

Nope, he seemed to be saying. Ain’t gonna happen. Eventually Frederick was able to get the horse to move on, but then his horse wasn’t much better, drifting off into the coconut grove in search of some succulent sweet grass.

Once we got to the beach, I asked the wrangler if maybe he couldn’t get the girl’s horses to gallop a bit for the camera. He smiled indulgently at me and said he’d give it a try. He smacked Marguerite’s mount on the ass and the horse danced sideways for a step or two before settling back into a slow walk. G’s horse would have none of it; he walked off into the surf as if he was hot and bored.

Oh well. I snapped a few shots of the group on their horses in shallow water, the islands in the background, and then we all headed back towards the ranch. Which is when, of course, the horses decided to pick up their pace. They knew they were headed home. As they galloped back, a pack of wild pigs, wallowing in a muddy pond, scattered while some cows looked on in surprise. Most excitement any of us have had on the island since I fell off the bench and onto the beach at lunch a couple of days ago.

The most popular activity on Ratua is lazing about. Photo by David Lansing.

Every morning it takes me a little longer to drag myself out of bed and make my way down to the Yacht Club for breakfast. Yesterday it rained. Not hard. Just that soft tropical rain, like a warm shower from one of those sunflower shower heads. It sounded so lyrical as it fell on my thatched roof. Like the sort of new age sounds of nature they play in some spas when you’re getting a massage. I got up, opened the doors and windows, and then got back into bed and just stayed there, watching the rain make patterns in the white sand in front of my villa.

After awhile I actually made it from my bed to the veranda where I fell into a wicker chair and, barefoot and bare-chested, just sat there taking in everything around me: a hermit crab shuttling out of the ocean; the way water beads on the leaves of the red cannas in the garden; small fish, no doubt being pursued by a predator, jumping out of the rain-spotted lagoon like popcorn.

By the time I actually found the energy to shower and dress, it was well after ten. I thought for sure the other guests would have had breakfast long ago, but no. Frederick said I was the second one up. This pleases him—the predictable behavior of guests to laze about, sleep in, do nothing.

The meals here have been elegantly simple: a beach barbecue with chicken for lunch; a dinner of curried red snapper; a pineapple tart for dessert. But I think my favorite meal of the day is breakfast. You can sit with others at one of the big round tables, if you like, though usually I find a quiet spot in the corner where I can sit quietly and enjoy the cappuccino Martha makes me and sip a glass of fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice that is so sweet you’d swear they must have added sugar to it, but no, it’s natural. Just the unadulterated juice of island fruit.

And then, after I’ve slowly sipped my first cup of coffee, Frederick will usually come by, ask me how I am, how I slept, and what would I like for breakfast. Perhaps a crepe. Or two poached eggs and some fruit—watermelon, pawpaw, pineapple, guava. And once the food arrives, Martha slips by to replenish my juice, ask if I’d like another cappuccino. Other stragglers wander in. Some with wet hair from having had a swim in the lagoon before breakfast; others with bed head have obviously just gotten up. Everyone is quiet, a bit sleepy, in awe of the beauty of our surroundings. It’s like going to church. Only better.

A deserted beach in front of Ratua, a private island in Vanuatu. Photo by David Lansing.

Ratua is a privately owned island and I’d like to tell you all about the owner but I don’t know anything about him. Well, that’s not completely true. Frederick tells me he’s French and in his ‘50s and he owns a vineyard in France. There you have it.

Actually, the mysterious owner has left us a few other clues. In my villa is a little book with “the story” of Ratua, written by the owner, in which he reveals that “In 2004, we decided to sail around the world. After one year spent in the Atlantic Ocean we crossed the Panama Canal to face the immense Pacific and visit some of its archipelagos—the Galapagos, Marquesa, Tuamotu, Cook, Samoa and Fiji.

“In June 2005 we arrived in New Caledonia, where our friend Patrick Durand Gaillard had been living for 20 years. Patrick immediately told us about the Vanuatu archipelago, and one place in particular, a jewel-like island whose location was kept secret. Our voyage across started on July 6, 2005.

“From its southernmost volcanic island, Tanna, we sailed north to Efate Island, the capital and its port, then to Epi, Ambrym, Malakula and finally Espiritu Santo. One after the other each island put us under a spell; here time stood still, intact tribal communities had kept their ancestral ways, nature was unspoiled, consumerism had yet to reach this part of the world.

“Finally, nestled between Aore and Malo, south of Espiritu Santo, was our destination, Ratua. This stunningly beautiful isle, in its green setting, welcomed us, a preserved sanctuary, wild yet accessible. Right away we decided to adopt the island, and after a few meetings the local elders entrusted their treasure to our care.

“We pondered during the long hours sailing back to civilization on the necessity of preserving Ratua without concession, on how to live there harmoniously whilst avoiding its destruction.

“We created a living environment without compromising the integrity of the place by renovating forty houses in total respect of their ancestral architecture. Two years later, each house had been carefully blended in its vegetal surroundings so as to preserve the ‘emotions’ of the first encounter and the uniqueness of the place. All aspects of life on Ratua derived from this concept, transport on horseback, return of indigenous fauna, sea links using traditional crafts, and organic cooking.

“The life we aspired to required that we shed our usual consuming habits and learn autarkic living again without taking too much from our environment. Thus, our entire fishing and farming will be local. In our workshop, we work with coco wood, which, together with Natangora palm thatching, will be the base of our future construction. We use rainwater and plan to make our own coco-based soap, shampoo, lotion, and cleaning products. It is a start and maybe one day we will cease to buy industrial products and manage to preserve the best quality of life locally.

“We have cautiously, yet selfishly, disrupted this place, our duty eventually will be to give it back, and to this end we have to be vigilant, ethical. More than a profession of faith, our endeavour is a raison d’être.”

The mysterious owner doesn’t mention it in his letter, but 100% of the profits from the Ratua resort are donated to the surrounding island communities, supporting hospital construction and educational and cultural projects.

You’ve got to love the French.

Frederick, the gm at Ratua, holding a coconut crab. Photo by David Lansing.

This afternoon, just as we were sitting down to lunch, Frederick, the Paris-born general manager at Ratua, came walking in holding the largest coconut crab I’ve ever seen. This particular crab, called krab kokonas in Vanuatu, had a lovely violet coloring to it; the ones I’ve seen in Niue, where they are called ugas, were more bronze and pumpkin colored.

These guys are really one of the most fascinating creatures in the animal kingdom. First of all, even though they are crabs and are born in the ocean, they can’t swim. They are born with the ability to breathe under water but they lose it by the time they’re a month old and will drown if they don’t get to shore. So the little critters head for shore when only a few weeks old. Once they make land, they look for an abandoned snail shell to call home. If they can’t find one that’s a good fit, they’ll use a broken coconut shell instead.

But that’s not why they’re called coconut crabs. They get this moniker because that’s their favorite food (although they have a terrific sense of smell and will scavenge on everything from rotting bananas to dead rats; in fact, one theory on the disappearance of Amelia Earhart has it that coconut crabs consumed her remains and hoarded her bones in their crab burrows). And while they’re happy to feast on coconuts on the ground, they’ve also been observed cutting the nuts off with their pincers and letting them hit the ground and then, if the nut hasn’t opened, carrying it back up the tree and dropping it again—over and over until it cracks. Behavior that is unique in the animal kingdom.

Coconut crabs can live to be 30 years old and weigh up to nine pounds. This guy Frederick is holding is probably at least 15 years old. The thing is, it takes a coconut crab five to eight years to mature (in other words, start having babies). Which, when combined with the fact that they’re pretty damn tasty—or so I’ve been told—explains why they’re endangered. When I had lunch at La Tentation in Port Vila the other day, I noticed that their special was coconut crab soup. Which made me very sad. While it’s not illegal to take coconut crabs in Vanuatu, they do have strict conservation laws (one of which only allows harvesting coconut crabs that are at least 15 years old so they’ve had a chance to reproduce). But imagine making a soup out of some grand creature who, as an egg floating around in the pelagic zone of the ocean for a month, survived every little fish and bird and turtle that came along to eat them, then managed to crawl to dry land and again avoid a thousand predators as he oh-so-slowly grew to be an adult, and now—after 15 or so years of hanging tough—some guy comes along and throws him in a soup.

Sad.

Which is why I was happy when Frederick, after letting me take a few shots of the Ratua coconut crab, released him unharmed back into the jungle. To live another day.