Wanderung 33

After a night drifting far offshore with all our bars, shops, and casino open for business, our ship slowly steamed back to the beach at Lifou after 6 o`clock the next morning. We had breakfast and checked the shore excursion we had signed up for, which was a drive to the Cliffs of Jonkin. Rather than having our tour group meet on board and then proceed as a group to the tender and then to the bus, RCI just told us to be at the meeting point above the beach at 10 o`clock and left it up to us to get out to the meeting point on time. This put all the burden of scheduling our tender trip to shore on our shoulders, of course, but clearly saved RCI the time and personnel that would otherwise have been used in shepherding us over to shore as a group. It was curious to me in how many ways RCI was cutting corners on its cruise ships, even compared to relatively low-cost cruise lines such as Costa that still escorted all their tour groups from start to finish.

Uncertain how long the queue for the tender would be, we headed down around 8:45 and did have to wait 15 minutes or so, but the tender ride was short so we were on shore by about 9:20. There we found signs pointing to the parking lot, but only a few harassed-looking guys who didn't seem to want to answer the simple question of whether we were waiting in the right place for our tour. Other cruise lines usually have either signs for where you wait for each tour, or, alternatively, have a guide available for each tour who carries some type of sign. On Lifou, RCI had neither, so perforce we finally cornered one of the harassed gentlemen and he said we were there too early! There's nothing like good old customer service, and this was nothing at all like it!

Since we now knew where to go and clearly had some spare time, we toured the goods and services offered by the local folks in stalls located between the parking lot and the dock, as well as finding a small roadside shrine at one end of the parking lot. The Services offered in stalls below the parking lot ranged from hair braiding to massages, and the goods offered ran the gamut from tourist trinkets to arts and crafts and various types of food and drink. Among the dink offerings, I spied a can that looked like a beer and pointed that out to Monika as she had not had any beer since Honolulu. Our ship was sitting out in the bay and clearly visible between the palm trees.

When 10 o`clock rolled around, we re-entered the chaotic scene in the parking lot and joined the by now hundreds of people who were wandering around, as confused as we were. But finally we were directed by a local person, who appeared to be organizing the buses for the tours, to board a rather nice, air-conditioned bus for our tour.

The first stop was a botanical garden where they were breeding and developing vanilla plants to be grown on local farms, with the avowed intent of ultimately growing enough of the vanilla beans to export them directly. Currently the farmers of Lifou produce a couple tons of vanilla beans per year and have to export them via a middle man in Noumea in New Caledonia. (I infer from this that the local farmers may be trying to cut out the middle-man when selling their vanilla beans in the future.)

The vanilla plant is actually an orchid, which is to say an epiphyte that in this case takes the form of a climbing vine roughly the size and shape of a tree-climbing Philodendron, if you can imagine that (see pictures). Our guide discussed getting the orchid to grow, which amounted to putting a small rootstock in a pile of debris located at the base of a tree or pole that the vanilla plant could climb as it grew. The plant has to be at least 4 years old before it flowers and ultimately produces vanilla beans.

But then the real work begins, because the flower must be hand-pollinated as there are no natural pollinators in Lifou as there are in South America where the vanilla orchid originated.

Once the flower is pollinated and finally produces a bean that resembles a thin, stringy green bean, the work continues in carefully drying it, which includes regularly turning and kind of massaging that bean pod while it dries. Each stage of the drying process is done on a different surface, and we totaled up the number of months spent in each stage of drying and came up with well over a total of a year`s worth of drying, so producing the final vanilla bean is a very slow and labor-intensive process. Who knew?

Reboarding our bus, we continued to the Cliffs of Jokin, where we stopped for some raw coconut and coconut water before walking over past a large, old-fashioned community hut and down to the cliffs. That large hut was interesting, because the interior actually looked quite comfortable--the floor was covered with woven mats and quilts, some decorated very nicely. The hut also featured a fire ring near the entrance and even fluorescent lighting attached to some of the slanted poles leading upward, that also supported the thatched roof. I suspect it served as a community meeting hall or something of the sort, and our guide mentioned that these traditional buildings were much more hurricane-proof than modern buildings. That is plausible because the lashed wooden framework is in the shape of a rigid circular cone, and would be both stiff and yet flexible enough to bend rather than breaking. A hurricane or typhoon would, of course, blow off the thatch of the roof, but then the bare poles of the main structure would give no purchase for the wind to rip it apart. Along the back roads we drove, we saw many examples of the traditional houses that were being re-thatched after the recent typhoon here, but none looked like they had been otherwise damaged.

The trail down to the base of the cliff was 200 steps, and it was hot, so we debated on whether or not to go down but finally did (a few others did not descend). In one sense the trail down was a nice set of concrete steps that had been carefully installed in the side of the gorge leading down to the sea side. But apparently the railing alongside the steps had been ripped off by the typhoon and not yet replaced, and right around the mid point of our descent several of the treads had become loose from the concrete risers and were quite wobbly. The tread of one step had shifted around such that a big gap had opened up that could have easily sprained someone`s ankle if they stepped into it, so we were very cautious about supporting each other in that section. Frankly, I was surprised that the village had let that staircase remain in such a dangerous state of disrepair, and that nobody warned us about this and no one tried to help us. Our tour guide stayed up on top, and the giggling girls from the ship`s entertainment staff who accompanied us were completely absorbed with taking selfies with their selfie sticks and made no attempt to make sure all the guests got over that section safely. I hasten to add that by mutually supporting each other, we were fine, but there were a lot of elderly, frail folks on our tour who really might have been put in danger by those loose treads.

The view of the Cliffs of Jokin at the bottom of the trail were, however, fantastic and just as advertised. The water was this clear, aquamarine color with the coral heads clearly visible below the surface. The cliffs themselves are heavily eroded limestone from ancient coral reefs that have been uplifted by plate tectonics, and that rough texture gives them a rather brooding presence in this case. We were not, however, allowed to swim over to the cliffs although that may have been possible had we brought our gear along. But we retraced our way back up the steps, past the wobbly midpoint, and on up to the little village, which we found also was home to a rather pretty church. But we did not have time to explore that as we had to board the bus for our ride back to the pier.

When we arrived back at the parking lot, Monika took advantage of our morning discovery and had a very odd local beer which was flavored with some kind of tropical fruit. It was, in fact, beer although at first I wasn't absolutely sure of that--there was a bit of a hoppy taste underlying the bouquet of odd fruit flavors. Surely that is the oddest beer I have ever tasted, at least, because it just did not fit anywhere on the normal spectrum of "beery" flavors. Still, Monika found it to be refreshing.

The line for the tenders back to the ship was long but went rather quickly. While waiting, the lady in front of me remarked that one thing that was singularly missing from this absolutely beautiful bay on an idyllic tropical isle were any sailboats. She was right; we saw neither hide nor hare of any privately owned outriggers, catamarans, sailboats, power boats, or fishing boats of any type, which was quite curious as these people had a seafaring tradition going back thousands of years. Possibly we were just on the wrong side of the island, but I think that private sailboats simply did not exist on Lifou. We saw one or two small motor boats on trailers in the villages we had driven, but no private boats actually in the water. In contrast to the complete lack of boats in the bay, we saw quite a gathering of local folks enjoying some "water time" on the nearby beach. If we had brought our swimsuits with, I would have been really tempted to change into a suit and join them, because we could surely have found enough foot to eat at those kiosks to sustain us for the rest of the afternoon!

Given what our guide had said about all the land belonging to the hereditary Chiefs, I put pieces of the puzzle together this way: The land and all assets belong to the clan and thus effectively belong to the chief. This prevents most private ownership of things like boats, as only the Chiefs can accumulate enough wealth to own such things. Communal ownership also gives no motivation for individual initiative such as building better houses, clearing enough land to plant truck gardens, or establishing a business. That probably explains why I saw well over 90% of the land we drove by as completely undeveloped jungle, with only the occasion small, personal-use type of garden but no large ones. I also saw only 1 fenced-in field in two hours of driving (it was a simple triple-strand barbed wire fence). The net result of this de-motivating political system may also help explain why the population of the island has declined from 20,000 down to 11,000 according to our guide, because any young person ambitious enough to go the the mainland for work or college education would probably never come back. So what appeared to be an island paradise from our superficial Western point of view, may in fact be experienced by the inhabitants as something completely different and, in the long run, untenable and unpleasant enough to motivate emigration. Curious.

We were back on board shortly after 1 o`clock and had a nice lunch up in the Windjammer before retiring to our cabin for the afternoon. At dinner that evening, Denise and Shannon said that they had attempted to walk the road up to the church on the promontory, but they had been drenched by a cloudburst and then turned back to the ship. Sylvia, Norm, Don, and Linda had taken an afternoon tour that also included a vanilla plantation, but it was different from ours in that it included a pet snake and some bats, if I heard correctly, so I was slightly envious. Linda and Don said they would cancel their reservation for the Cliffs of Jokin tour as that stairway sounded too dangerous if you were the least bit unsteady on your feet, which was true. Gretchen said she had been on a shore excursion, but didn't say where so that remained a mystery. And so to bed.