Ratua

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.

“Late in the afternoon, Martin and I walked a little way from the village talking over the best method of taking leave of our strange host. We strayed farther than we realized, and came upon a much traveled path leading to the tiny doorway of an unusually large hut. Always curious, Martin got down on his hands and knees, peered in and entered. I followed. As my eyes gradually became adjusted to the dim light I saw what looked like baskets of black grapefruit. I picked one up to examine it more closely and dropped it in horror.

“It was a dried human head!

“There were dozens piled in baskets. More grinned at us from the eaves in a macabre frieze. Pendants of skulls dangled from the rafters. Untidy heaps of human bones lay in the corners. I loosed a shuddery groan. Martin clapped his hand over my mouth and dragged me as quickly as possible through the doorway into the open, and here, after one quick look about, he took my arm and hurried me back to the path leading to the village. Martin always regretted not being able to get a picture of the head-house.”

—From I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson, 1940

A Martin Johnson photo captioned "Campfire of the headhunters"

The most important building in any village in Vanuatu is the nakamal, a sort of men’s clubhouse. Sometimes it’s just the place where the men meet at the end of the day to talk and drink kava (sort of a South Seas sports bar), but for ni-Vanuatu who truly follow their cultural heritage, as they do in Vil-Vil, it’s also part school and part church.

After the men of the village had done a few songs and dances for us, I sat down with Chief Bule Kone and we traded off asking each other questions. I asked him how often he visited Luganville, the largest town on Espiritu Santo and a good three hour drive away.

“Maybe two time…maybe three, “ he said.

“A month?”

“A year.”

Then he asked me what church I belonged to. I told him that, sadly, I didn’t go to church.

“Never?”

I smiled. “Maybe two time…maybe three.”

“A year?” he asked me.

“In my life.”

He laughed at that.

What I was really curious about was how they educated the children in the village. Obviously there was no bus coming by bright and early in the morning to pick the kids up who lived in the jungle.

“I will explain it to you,” he said, leading me to a long, low-slung building with a low, narrow door and thatched roof—the nakamal. Inside, I had to stand motionless for a moment to let my eyes adjust to the darkness. There were a couple of rudimentary louvered windows on one end of the house but they were closed to keep out the tropical sun. Other than that, the only light came from what spilled in through the doorway.

Against the walls were a series of low bunks, made from bamboo poles, topped with thin bedding. The top bunks were covered in green mosquito netting which could be lowered to cover the bottom bunk as well. In a corner some bricks had been stacked in a square and in the middle, a small fire was smoking and smoldering. Scattered about the dirt floor were some tin pots and pans, sandals, and a plastic tub for washing.

This is how we teach our children, Bule Kone said, spreading his arms about. When the boys—and only the boys—are 14 or 15, they must come here to live and take care of themselves, cook their own food. And in the afternoon, the elders come in and make up a batch of kava and everyone sits around talking about god and learning all the rituals that are still practiced and that keep the village together. While Bule Kone was explaining this to me, one of the young men was shredding a kava root the size of a stock of corn into a hollowed-out log.

Villager shreds kava from a root like the one Chief Bule Kone, right, holds. Photo by David Lansing.

“This,” Bule Kone said, holding a root in his hand, “is our pen. And this,” he said, picking up a handful of shredded kava, “is our paper.”

The shredded root was mixed with water and filtered through coconut fibres, then poured into a coconut shell bowl which was handed to the chief. He drank it silently in a single gulp. Then a second bowl was prepared and handed to me. I did likewise, the muddy liquid tasting pungent and peppery. Everyone else followed. And then I had a second round, my feeling being you can never get too much education.

“Early the next morning we were once more on our way into the Big Numbers territory. Martin pressed my hand. We were both thinking of that other time. Today there were thirty-one of us. Four white men, twenty-six trustworthy natives and myself, all armed with repeating rifles and automatic pistols. We anticipated no trouble, but our boys were skeptical of the worth of our optimism and plainly frightened by these notorious cannibals. Our carriers held back when we reached the beach. They feared ambush in the jungle.

“We finally persuaded them to continue, and, equipped with photographic apparatus, trade-stuff, and food, we plunged up the trail.”

—From I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson, 1940

The girls of Vil-Vil. Photo by David Lansing.

I’ve done enough of these touristy “let’s-go-visit-a-native-village” trips to be leery. What you usually get is some Disneyfied group of locals dressed up in costumes they normally wouldn’t be caught dead in who then perform a few dances and sing a few songs before bringing out the trinkets they hope you’ll buy.

But the village of Vil-Vil was different. First of all, this was no tarted up tourist attraction. It was a few rudimentary shacks made from bamboo poles and rough-cut coco wood with thatched huts spread out around a cleared space in the jungle that was half mud and half grass. On the parameters of the village were little garden plots for cultivating a few banana trees, pawpaws, and patches of piper methysticum—better known as kava.

When we finally arrived, in a light drizzle, there were no guitar players strumming Isa Lei, as you’d get in Fiji, or winsome lasses in coconut bras stringing plumeria leis over our heads, ala Hawaii. In fact, about the only activity I noted when I crawled out of the van, seasick from our tortuous ride, was that of the jungle chickens picking at the grass for insects. And then suddenly a handsome, smiling man, barefoot and bare-chested, wearing a dyed-grass loincloth and ankle rattles, called vivangs, came out of one of the huts to greet us. This was the chief of the village, Bule Kone.

Chief Bule Kone's ankle rattles, called vivangs. Photo by David Lansing.

I liked Bule Kone immediately. He was both inquisitive about where we were from (“Ah…America. We like America very much. We still remember from the War when you came to protect our islands.”) and straightforward and open about explaining his culture (when I told him I’d read that young ni-Vanuatu girls have no say in who they marry, he smiled and said, “Yes, in our village, this is the custom”).

Then several young men came out of the village long house, known as the nakamal, the men’s-only lodge where village adolescents spend their teen years learning culture and religion (and how to be enlightened through kava), and there was some dancing in the mud and beating of the boo-boos, as Osa Johnson called them, and singing, all of it a bit insipid. Half way through the butterfly dance, I wandered off and started taking photos of three little girls who were radiantly beautiful and so shy it almost broke my heart. The rain started to come down a little harder but the men went on stomping their feet in the mud, their vivangs rattling around their ankles, the drummers rhythmically pounding hollow logs with sticks. The whole thing was both fascinating and dispiriting to me and, even still, I’m not sure I could tell you why. Only that it made me uncomfortable.