Infotropism Kirrily Robert’s blog

Vanuatu so far

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The whole place smells of wood smoke; it was the first thing I smelt as I came off the plane.

Dan’s brother Jakob — part of an adopted family who took him under their wing when he first came here — is teaching me Bislama, the local pidgin language, and I can now say “hemi stret nomo” with the best of them. The phrase means “It’s all cool” or “just right”.

The other night I drank kava, the mashed and strained root of piper something-or-other, and a relation of pepper. The drink is intoxicating, but not like alcohol; it has a sedative sort of effect which leaves you sitting quietly in the dark, and it doesn’t produce a hangover. However, it looks and tastes vile. It’s opaque, olivey-khaki in colour, bitter, and peppery. Worst — to my personal tastes — the mouth feel is like drinking watery mud. After drinking a shell of kava, one spits and rinses and spits again. I’m told that it’s also like pot, in that it doesn’t really affect you the first few times; this leaves me wondering why anyone ever tried it more than once in the first place.

Internet access here is about as I expected; Dan doesn’t have access at his home, but down in the town I can hook up at his office (where I am now) or at a couple of wireless hotspots his people have set up. Two of these hotspots are in cafes, one overlooking the water. It’d be kind of hipster-cool-meets-tropical-paradise if only the latency weren’t so high; web browsing’s acceptable, but ssh’ing to my server via the satellite link is giving me flashbacks to Australia in the mid 90s.

Finally, the pineapple I ate yesterday was spectacular, and I’m told it’s not quite at the peak of its sweetness yet. I am never eating pineapple in Melbourne again.

Piper methysticum. And yeah, raw kava is really an acquired taste. Well, enjoying the buzz is an acquired taste. I normally need about three or four cups to feel it. The nice thing is that if you keep on at a steady rate, you get into a nice mellow zone, and there’s no hangover. Good for people like me who start puking after four glasses of wine.

Kava goes well in hot chocolate (preferably made with real chocolate), because the chocolate hides most of the bitterness, but I imagine the climate there wouldn’t quite be the thing. You can bring in up to 2kg of kava in your personal luggage if you develop a taste for it - it’s not permitted to import into Oz for commercial gain. I brought my last stash back from NZ (only 300g).