The Happy Isles of Oceania Read online

  PAUL THEROUX

  The Happy Isles of Oceania, Paddling the Pacific

  Paddling the Pacific

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  PART ONE: MEGANESIA

  1 New Zealand: The Land of the Long White Cloud

  2 New Zealand: Sloshing through the South Island

  3 Waffling in White Australia

  4 Walkabout in Woop Woop

  5 North of the Never-Never

  PART TWO: MELANESIA

  6 Buoyant in the Peaceful Trobriands

  7 Aground in the Troubled Trobriands

  8 The Solomons: Down and Dirty in Guadalcanal

  9 The Solomons: In the Egg Fields of Savo Island

  10 Vanuatu: Cannibals and Missionaries

  11 The Oddest Island in Vanuatu

  12 Fiji: The Divided Island of Viti Levu

  13 Fiji: Vanua Levu and the Islets of Bligh Water

  PART THREE: POLYNESIA

  14 Tonga: The Royal Island of Tongatapu

  15 Tonga: Alone on the Desert Islands of Vava’u

  16 In the Backwaters of Western Samoa

  17 American Samoa: The Littered Lagoon

  18 Tahiti: The Windward Shore of the Island of Love

  19 A Voyage to the Marquesas

  20 The Cook Islands: In the Lagoon of Aitutaki

  21 Easter Island: Beyond the Surf Zone of Rapa Nui

  22 Easter Island: The Old Canoe Ramp at Tongariki

  PART FOUR: PARADISE

  23 Oahu: Open Espionage in Honolulu

  24 Kauai: Following the Dolphins on the Na Pali Coast

  25 Niihau and Lanai: Some Men are Islands

  26 The Big Island: Paddling in the State of Grace

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE HAPPY ISLES OF OCEANIA

  Paul Theroux was born and educated in the United States. After graduating from university in 1963, he travelled to Italy and then Africa, where he worked as a teacher in Malawi and as a lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda. In 1968 he joined the University of Singapore and taught in the Department of English for three years. Throughout this time he was publishing short stories and journalism, and wrote a number of novels, including Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play and Jungle Lovers. In the early 1970s he moved with his wife and two children to Dorset, where he wrote Saint Jack, and went on to live in London. During his seventeen years’ residence in Britain he wrote a dozen volumes of highly praised fiction and a number of successful travel books. He has since returned to the United States, but continues to travel widely.

  Paul Theroux’s many books include Waldo; Saint Jack; The Family Arsenal; Picture Palace, winner of the 1978 Whitbread Literary Award; The Mosquito Coast, which was the 1981 Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year, joint winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was also made into a feature film; My Secret History: Millroy tile Magician; Kowloon Tong; The Great Railway Bazaar; The Old Patagonian Express; Riding the Iron Rooster, which won the 1988 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; The Happy Isles of Qceania; Sir Vidia’s Shadow, a memoir of his friendship with Sir Vidia Naipaul; Fresh-Air Fiend: Travel Writings 1985–2000; and his most recent novel, Hotel Honolulu. Most of his books are published in Penguin.

  BOOKS BY PAUL THEROUX

  FICTION

  Waldo

  Fong and the Indians

  Girls at Play

  Murder in Mount Holly

  Jungle Lovers

  Sinning with Annie

  Saint Jack

  The Black House

  The Family Arsenal

  The Consul’s File

  A Christmas Card

  Picture Palace

  London Snow

  World’s End

  The Mosquito Coast

  The London Embassy

  Half Moon

  Street O-Zone

  My Secret History

  Chicago Loop

  Millroy the Magician

  My Other Life

  Kowloon Tong

  Hotel Honolulu

  The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro

  Blinding Light

  The Elephanta Suite

  A Dead Hand

  CRITICISM

  V. S. Naipaul

  NON-FICTION

  The Great Railway Bazaar

  The Old Patagonian Express

  The Kingdom by the Sea

  Sailing Through China

  Sunrise with Seamonsters

  The Imperial Way

  Riding the Iron Rooster

  To the Ends of the Earth

  The Happy Isles of Oceania

  The Pillars of Hercules

  Sir Vidia’s Shadow

  Fresh Air Fiend

  Dark Star Safari

  Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

  The Tao of Travel

  To Mee Ling Loo and Sheila Donnelly

  God bless the thoughtful islands

  Where never warrants come;

  God bless the just Republics

  That give a man a home …

  –RUDYARD KIPLING, The Broken Men

  Come, my friends,

  ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

  Push off, and sitting well in order smite

  The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

  Of all the western stars, until I die.

  It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

  It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles …

  –TENNYSON, Ulysses

  PART ONE

  MEGANESIA

  1

  New Zealand: The Land of the Long White Cloud

  There was no good word in English for this hopeless farewell. My wife and I separated on a winter day in London and we were both miserable, because it seemed as though our marriage was over. We both thought: What now? It was the most sorrowful of goodbyes. I could not imagine life without her. I tried to console myself by saying, This is like going on a journey, because a journey can be either your death or your transformation, though on this one I imagined that I would just keep living a half-life.

  From habit, when I was alone, I slept only on the left side of the bed, and so I felt lonelier when I woke up with a big space beside me. At last I felt so woeful that I went to my doctor.

  “Your blood pressure is fine,” she said, “but I don’t like the look of that.”

  She touched a discoloration on my arm. She used the misleadingly sonorous name “melanoma” to describe it. I heard melanoma and I thought of Melanesia, The Black Islands. Eventually she gouged out the black spot and put in four stitches and said she would let me know if this piece of my arm, this biopsy the size of an hors-d’œuvre, was serious. “I mean, if it’s a carcinoma.”

  Why did all these horrors have pretty names?

  Needing to be reassured by the familiar sights and sounds of the place where I was born, I went to Boston, but I felt too defeated to stay. And home is sometimes so sad. One day a message came from Melbourne: Are you free for a book promotional tour in New Zealand and Australia? I thought, Any excuse. So I continued on my journey, carrying a tent, a sleeping-bag and collapsible kayak. I headed west, by plane, to Chicago, San Francisco and Honolulu where, to cheer myself up, I took the big bandage off my stitched arm and put on yellow Garfield the Cat bandaids.

  I went farther away, deeper into the Pacific, thinking: Planes are like seven-league boots. I could be in New Zealand or Easter Island tomorrow. And yet the Pacific was vast. It had half the world’s free water; it was one third of the earth’s surface.

  More than an ocean, the Pacific was like a universe, and a chart of it looked like a portrait of the night sky. This enormous ocean was like the whole of h
eaven, an inversion of earth and air, so that the Pacific seemed like outer space, an immensity of emptiness, dotted with misshapen islands that twinkled like stars, archipelagos like star clusters, and wasn’t Polynesia a sort of galaxy?

  “I’ve been all over the Pacific,” the man next to me said. He was from California. His name was Hap. “Bora-Bora. Moora-Moora. Tora-Tora. Fuji.”

  “Fiji,” his wife said.

  “And Haiti,” he told me.

  “Tahiti,” his wife said, correcting him again.

  “Oh God,” he said. “Johnston Island.”

  “What was that like?”

  This sinister little island, with the Stars and Stripes flying over it, is 800 miles west of Honolulu, and was formerly a launching site for H-bombs. More recently, nuclear waste was stored there, along with nerve gas and stacks of hydrogen bombs. A recent accident had left one end of Johnston Island radioactive. Few Americans have heard of it. The anti-nuclear New Zealanders can tell you where it is and why it terrifies them.

  “Who said I got off the plane?” Hap said.

  “We’re members of the Century Club,” his wife said. “You can only join if you’ve been to a hundred countries.”

  “What does ‘been to’ mean? Pass through the airport? Spend a night? Get diarrhea there?”

  “Guess he’s not a member!” Hap said, joyously.

  Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, I thought. Travellers don’t know where they’re going.

  Then it was dawn, but it was the day after tomorrow, a narrow band of ochreous light like sunrise in the stratosphere. In this part of the Pacific, at the 180th meridian of longitude, the world’s day begins. When the plane arrived in Auckland, New Zealand, it was like touching down on a distant star.

  “What’s that?” It was the inspector: Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, poking my big canvas bags.

  “A boat,” I said. “Collapsible.”

  “What’s wrong with your arm? Hope it’s not contagious.”

  It might be cancer, I wanted to say, to wipe the smile off his face.

  “Welcome to Na Zillun,” he said quietly.

  It was nine in the morning. I had an interview at ten (“Is your novel based on real people?”), and another at eleven (“What does your wife think of your so-called novel?”), and at noon I was asked, “What do you think of Na Zillun?”

  “I have been in New Zealand three hours,” I said.

  “Go on.”

  Provoked, I said, “This is a wonderful country – or would you call it an archipelago? Most New Zealanders seem to wear old shapeless hats. You see a lot of beards and kneesocks. And sweaters. You also see an awful lot of war memorials.”

  I was led into a ballroom where I gave a luncheon speech. It was the first meal I had eaten in thirteen hours, but I had to sing for my supper. They wanted autobiography; I gave them Chinese politics.

  A person in the audience said, “Are you working on a book at the moment?”

  “No, but I’d like to write something about the Pacific,” I said. “Maybe the migrations. The way the people went from island to island taking their whole culture with them, until they found a happy island, and spread it all out, like a picnic that would last until the end of the world.”

  Saying it aloud made it seem like a promise, something I ought to do. I needed a friend. There was always the possibility of friendship in travel. It was an odd place for such an observation, yet in The Secret Agent Joseph Conrad wrote, “But does not Alfred Wallace relate in his famous book on the Malay Archipelago how, amongst the Aru Islanders, he discovered in an old and naked savage with a sooty skin a peculiar resemblance to a dear friend at home?”

  The great naturalist Wallace had been looking for specimens of the bird of paradise on the Aru islands, which are off the southwestern coast of New Guinea. He had written about “one funny old man, who bore a ludicrous resemblance to a friend of mine at home …”

  That was not very surprising. The oddest part was that it had only happened once in the entire book. It happened repeatedly to me. In Africa, in India, in South America, in China and Tibet, I had constantly run into indigenous people who rang bells like mad and reminded me of old schoolfriends at the Roberts Junior High, and Medford High, of Peace Corps buddies. People who bore a resemblance to members of my own family popped up from time to time.

  Suddenly I wanted to see the extreme green isles of Oceania, unmodern, sunny, and slow, with trees to sit under and bluey-green lagoons to paddle in. My soul hurt, my heart was damaged, I was lonely. I did not want to see another big city. I wanted to be purified by water and wilderness. The Maori people, who had come to New Zealand via the Cook Islands from Tahiti about a thousand years ago, called the Pacific Moana-Nui-o-Kiva, “The Great Ocean of the Blue Sky.” And the image of the night before came to me again, of the Pacific as a universe, and the islands like stars in all that space.

  Auckland has the largest Polynesian population of any city in the world – fully half the people are dusky islanders, and looking at them you might think: They all come from Fatland. Many of them were organized into street gangs with names like the Mongrel Mob and the Black Power Gang, the Tongan Crypt Gang, the United Island Gang, and the Sons of Samoa. Where were the women? The ones I saw were pot-bellied men, some of them so fat they had an odd twisting walk, like penguins waddling down a plank. Their skin had gone gray in the chilly New Zealand climate. Their swollen cheeks gave them squinty gimlet eyes. It was hard to imagine any of them paddling a canoe. Roughly ten percent of them, the Maoris, had arrived from Tahiti via the Cook Islands about a thousand years ago, and named these islands Aotearoa, “The Land of the Long White Cloud.”

  Plenty of them are nice as pie, people said, but lots of them are rapists. Everyone had an opinion about them: You should see the thighs on some of them, people said. You should see their tattoos. Your Maori just doesn’t want to work, they said. And they’re not really full-blooded. The half-castes, the quarter-castes – they’re the trouble-makers. Your Tongan is a decent chap, but your Samoan can be a terror when he’s the worse for drink. If you see a Samoan full of grog just turn around and walk the other way. Your Fijian? Let’s face it, they’re cannibals, simple as that, and your Indian is a terribly hard-working person – work like dogs, most of these Hindus. Your Mohammedan is another story. They’re randy wee buggers – I hate to say it. But while we’re on the subject, a lot of these island women are root rats. They bang like a dunny door. Your Rotoruan, your Nuiean, your Cook Islander – oh it’s a mixed bag, no question about it. Some of them are doing very nicely, thank you, drive flash cars, own tidy houses and land. But you just go to one of their bloody wee islands and try to buy a block of land and see what happens. They’ll laugh in your face.

  Islanders were religious, islanders were gamblers and drinkers, islanders were devoted to their families, islanders were dole scroungers, islanders fought among themselves, islanders were economic refugees, islanders were villains. They towed your car away at night and the next day called you up and demanded money to return it. They practiced extortion, protection rackets, mugging and racial violence in this pastoral country – seventy million sheep farting in the glorious meadows.

  But these days the gang violence of islanders had been pushed off the front page by the news that the prime minister, David Lange, had just left his wife and run off with his speech-writer, Miss Margaret Pope. Lange’s Mother Denounces Him, the headlines said. Claims She Regrets The Day He Was Born … Mr Lange’s wife Naomi was screeching on radio and television, demanding her rights and trying to get even. In what seemed the direst threat of all she said that she intended to publish a book of her own poems.

  The papers were full of separation and divorce, the whole world was splitting up. The sheep-shearers were on strike. They wanted $46 for shearing a hundred sheep.

  Carrying my collapsible kayak, I went to Wellington, where a television interviewer gloated to me that old Mrs Lange had been on his very program saying
that her son should never have been born, and why had he run off with this scarlet woman, and marriage was supposed to be sacred. Did I have any views on that?

  No, I said, I was just passing through.

  Another man I met said, “This Lange. He’s got some Maori blood in him.”

  It wasn’t true but it was supposed to explain why he had ditched his wife.

  I sat in my hotel room reading The Sexual Life of Savages, by Bronislaw Malinowski. When I ordered room service, the man in the hotel kitchen snapped at me, “Did you order this yesterday?”

  I said no, but why?

  He said, “We need one day’s advance notice on roomservice orders.”

  What a bungaloid place, I thought. It is bungalows and more bungalows and little fragile chalets in Wellington and none of them is higher than the trees around it, so that at a distance all you saw was roofs, mostly tin roofs painted browny-red. The rest was bare hills and a wind so strong it seemed to have shape and substance. The wind scoured the streets and whipped the dark waters of the harbor.

  I read Malinowski. I tried to imagine the Trobriand Islands. I noticed that most stores in Wellington sold camping equipment, and I bought some more. I sat in my hotel room with my collapsible kayak feeling morbid. I also worried about David Lange. What if I ended up with cancer and a divorce? I was now using Betty Boop bandages. One night, with nothing better to do, I did my arm – took off the Betty Boop bandage and cut and tweezed out the stitches with my Disposable Suture Removal Kit.

  Among the Trobriand Islanders, Malinowski said, The formalities of divorce are as simple as those by which marriage is contracted. The woman leaves her husband’s house with all her personal belongings, and moves to her mother’s hut, or to that of her nearest maternal kinswoman. There she remains, awaiting the course of events, and in the meantime enjoying full sexual freedom.

  The next day I went to Christchurch, on the South Island. It looked prim and moribund, like the sort of South London suburb I had mocked in England on Sunday outings with the kids, driving through on the way to Brighton thinking: This is the English death, the indescribable boredom that makes you desperate to leave. Life is elsewhere, I thought in Christchurch, but in this purgatory I began reliving my past. I saw frightful bungalows and dusty hedges and twitching curtains, and at last in front of the California Fried Chicken Family Restaurant on Papanui Road in the district of Merivale I saw a family of four, Dad, Mum, and the two boys, eating happily in the glarey light and joking With each other, and at the sight of this happy family I burst into tears.