Vanuatu
By the time we reach Vanuatu I am waking every morning with a hint of dread in my heart. Before succumbing to the day, I lie ruminating in our bunk, Ted’s deep regular breathing a calming influence beside me. Five years. Five years. It’s coming to an end, life as we have known it for five years. The images jumble in my head, the people, the colours, the smells. For five years we have roamed from country to country, culture to culture, mostly Third World – that pejorative term which implies inferiority. But now we know that in lots of ways, they are really the more fortunate ones.
Here in the Pacific, we see these ‘poor’ people, in their simple huts with million-dollar views, surrounded by frangipani, hibiscus, tropical crotons and coconut palms, kids rambling freely through grassy clearings, old men sitting watching the sunset over the water. I think of the chaperoned children of Sydney and wonder. I think of the grandfathers in retirement villages and old people’s homes, and I wonder.
As I drift in that hazy state between waking and sleeping, I hear again the strange languages and different accents, see the smiles, feel the warmth, see again the small gifts, shyly offered. So many cultures. So much to regret losing – roosters crowing across the hills in the morning, sandy streets, small coloured fish around the boat, the sunrises and sunsets, ours alone across the whole bowl of the sky.
And I see myself again, sailing across forever waters, sometimes boisterous, rough or kindly, swaying with the boat, my friend, who nurses me along like a mother. Commonplace are the flying fish, the phosphorescence, the shooting stars, the rainbows. And then the squalls, creeping up at night, bursting at us as we scurry along with shortened sails. From every anchorage, there’s always the romance of the enticing gap out to the ocean – always another sea calling to be sailed. I am accustomed to watching it beckoning through the heads, with promises of a new dawning, a different sea, a new culture.
From Vanuatu we are to commence the last leg of our circumnavigation. The desire to see family and friends is a strong lure, making us impatient to be gone. Like us, most of the cruisers have joined the Port2Port Rally to Bundaberg on the Queensland coast, a casual event organised by the Bundaberg Cruising Yacht Club, specially created to run the rally.
As we prepare Blackwattle for the last leg of her circumnavigation and socialise with cruising buddies Bauvier, Mary Constance, Chatti and many others, a miracle happens. An email alerts us to the fact that Fantasy1, which was forced to sail back to Ecuador from the Galapagos so many months ago, is now fully repaired and has sailed in a direct route across the Pacific, covering the world’s largest ocean in forty-two days of continuous sailing. We gladly prepare to meet Sandy and Karl, with whom we have shared so many experiences, with hundreds of balloons. The first contact is made, as usual, by VHF radio, and we travel in a small flotilla of dinghies with all our balloons, catching them around Fantasy1’s lifelines so that she arrives into the anchorage amid a bobbing waterfall of colours. What hugs, what a reception! There is hardly a dry eye between us all. Fantasy1 will have crossed the Pacific this season after all. On a sadder note, we learn that the speed of Fantasy1’s crossing was due to Sandy’s mother falling ill back in Australia.
In Fantasy1 and Chatti and other Australian boats which are finishing their circumnavigations, the excitement builds. Before we arrive in Bundaberg, we will cross our outbound path, thereby completing our circumnavigation. We won’t be home – our journey will not be complete until we have sailed past the white lighthouse on Barrenjoey Headland into Blackwattle’s home, Pittwater in Sydney – but we will have swapped our ever-changing lifestyle for familiar shores. No more new and unusual customs, no more lazy markets full of strange and wonderful vegetables or artefacts, no new tales, no more old wisdom from young lips.
Eat few eggs. An egg feeds only one person. If you allow the egg to hatch, one day it will feed four people. I read that in Australia we throw out thirty per cent of the food we purchase, and that already ninety per cent of the world’s fish stocks are gone. We need more Taias in this world.
Late in the morning, walking the streets of Port Vila, loving the tropical warmth, the jagged footpaths, dusty edges, throngs of Melanesian inhabitants in their rich colourful clothes, I remain sad, conscious of the enormity of losing this naturalness.
I laugh to see that the ‘Mary’ dress – that bright flowing one-size-fits-all garment the missionaries forced on the scantily clad locals – is still very popular with the women in the markets. Now it’s the tourists here who are scantily clad.
My sense of loss is profound. My eyes are filling as I walk through the market on this most ordinary of mornings. But it’s not ordinary to me. I love you, I think, out of the blue. I love your naturalness, your utter lack of self-consciousness, your lack of competitiveness. I love your simple smiles, without agenda, your proud kindness when I speak to you. I will miss you and all the others from all the countries we have visited, from whom I have learned so much.
Beyond the market, out there on the water, misty in the distance of a rainy morning, are fifty boats or more, all heading out in the next few days. We’ve explored Port Vila and further, circumnavigating the island by truck, and now we’re provisioning, ready for our last great sail.
I dry my tears, blow my nose, put a smile on my face – so that it can work its way in – and go back to Blackwattle and the world of tomorrow.
We have discussed it interminably. We have both found that Less is More, so simple to say, so difficult an idea to attain. This discovery does not sit well with any consumer-driven Western society. We think of our small treasured flat in Istanbul and the caring people of Turkey; but I so wish to share my children’s lives in a small way, and they are in Sydney, that place of plate glass and shining towers, stimulating, aggressive, overcrowded. Maybe we’ll just keep on sailing . . . Our conversations haven’t been able to get past our arrival home.
‘Let’s not worry about it now,’ says Ted, equally uncertain at the end of each dreaming and wondering conversation. ‘We’ll work it out somehow.’
We have each other, and that has become our strength. Everything else is hazy, obscure.