There’s A Hippo In My Cistern: One Man’s Misadventures on the Eco-Frontline. Pete May
means things get done when people turn up. All times are moveable. It’s almost as if the Loaded editorial team is running an entire country. Another plus is that although hardly any houses have televisions, everyone knows Premiership football. Big matches can be watched at a bar in Honiara and luckily I’ve arrived with a stock of football magazines such as 90 Minutes where I’d done some freelance subbing. They’re like hard currency in the Solomons and Nicola’s local friends are very pleased to receive them.
We sit drinking beers in a shaded bar by the beach and it all seems ideal – at least until nightfall. As ever, we clash over sleeping arrangements in our beach hut. At home, she wants to sleep with the window open. Here, she feels ‘trapped’ by the mosquito net over our bed. So she removes it. I soon realise that her body is cold-blooded and possibly reptilian. Mine is hot, sweaty and deliciously salty. Mosquitoes adore it, and spend the night feasting on my flesh. In the morning I’m covered in itchy bites; Nicola is untouched. For her, I’m a one-man mosquito repellant. But for my course of anti-malarial tablets, I’d surely have died a lingering death in the fashion of some Victorian missionary.
After three days at the beach we return to Honiara, staying in a local guest house. From there we take a walk to Bloody Ridge, so named because of the thousands of soldiers who perished there in fighting between US and Japanese troops during the Second World War. We have lunch with Nicola’s friend ML, a journalist with The Australian newspaper who’s researching a book on the civil war in the nearby island of Bougainville. I’m not sure what my own field of research is, although ML does supply some useful information about a riot following an offside goal in the Guadalcanal/Malaita Island derby match. Aggro is universal, it seems.
We take a motorised canoe across the waters to the volcanic island of Savo. As we arrive a group of Solomon Islanders in traditional dress are performing tribal dances. Is this for me? Erm, no, a group of Swedish tourists are politely applauding. Nicola can speak Solomon pidgin (the English/Portuguese hybrid that developed when Europeans first visited the islands), and this helps negotiate our passage. She introduces me to several useful phrases such as ‘What kinda Mary u tu ya? You makem me karange for good now!’ which translates as ‘What kind of woman are you, you make me permanently crazy!’ – sentiments that had often occurred to me in London.
We spend the night with a local family in a traditional hut made of leaves, sleeping on plaited leaf mats. The local taboos take some getting used to; such as women not being allowed to show their thighs (thighs matters?) and the fact that at nightfall the entire village goes down to the sea to wash and, if necessary, go to the loo on the beach. Is there no lavatorial indignity Nicola won’t put me through? At first I think we’re supposed to try to defecate in waist-high waves. When I discover it’s on the beach in the dark, that’s even worse. The tide is meant to wash everything away, but even so, group pooing is a little over-familiar for this Englishman abroad. Maybe if I don’t eat too much there will be no need for a loo trip until Honiara.
The next morning George, a local guide, takes us on a guided walk to the volcano, along with his dog. He carries a huge bush knife and chops away foliage in the casual manner of the Solomon Islander. George strides effortlessly through river valleys and then up a steep sharp ridge towards the volcanic peak. Dense rainforest is all around us. George stops to show us a snake sitting on a vine, just as I’m about to put my hand on it. He yomps up ever-steeper hills in flip-flops and a vest with the air of a man on a Sunday stroll.
My outfit is an entirely appropriate pair of luminous green surfing shorts, as modelled by English lager louts abroad, a navy-blue Fred Perry T-shirt, trainers and a baseball cap. Soon poor Fred Perry is saturated with sweat later analysed as containing 90 per cent beer. Here is my personal Bloody Ridge. My thoughts turn to the Second World War battles fought here and how hellish it all must have been. The heat is relentless and Nicola and I find ourselves drinking copious amounts of water. They don’t train you how to be an explorer at comprehensive school or, indeed, during days at Loaded. It’s worth the effort though, when we finally reach the summit and find a plateau of smouldering sulphur, boiling streams and hot geysers.
Our next trip is a flight to the island of Bellona in a tiny twelve-person light aircraft. We fly over idyllic islands covered in coconut palms and surrounded by sand and coral reefs. The islands are only a metre or so above sea level and the huts are built on stilts. ‘They’ll be the first to go when the sea level rises,’ says Nicola. If it’s true, if the sea level really is rising because of human-created global warming, then this is the consequence of Westerners sitting in centrally-heated flats wearing just a T-shirt in winter. Other people’s homes became obliterated.
We fly on, over taller, conical islands. They’re still covered in rainforest, but from the air, you can see the ugly red scars of logging roads. Nicola tells me of islands where clear-felling has occurred. Without the protection of the rainforest, the fertile soils leech into the sea, swamping the coral reefs and ruining the villagers’ fishing grounds.
Bellona’s airport is a stretch of grass. It’s all rather pleasing after Heathrow – and the whole island has turned out to greet the plane, a vital source of supplies. The terminal building is one open-air stall selling instant coffee. It’s windier than on Guadalcanal, and the welcome breeze keeps the mosquitoes away.
Nicola has booked us into a cave with a double bed. The cave doubles as a hotel room. We’re met by John and Nita, the owners of the cave hotel, and several of their children. They’re hugely hospitable throughout our stay. First we walk for an hour through the trees. John points out various giant spiders sitting in huge webs spanning coconut trunks. His son Edmond shins up a gigantic coconut palm in roughly two seconds and presents us with a fresh coconut.
Reaching some cliffs, we descend steep coral paths and find our cave, standing some ten metres above an angry sea. John and his family own the cave and use it to shelter in whenever cyclones hit the island. Eventually he had the idea of turning it into a hotel. It’s certainly more salubrious than some of my short-life addresses have been. A double bed rests under a coral overhang, with a tarpaulin above it to keep off any drips from the rocks. A rock plateau in front of the bed area forms a natural balcony overlooking the sea. It has several chairs and a shelf of books. Our view is of white breakers. We can glimpse a bay below where thousands of green coconut crabs – capable of crushing a coconut with a squeeze from one immense pincer – congregate during their breeding cycle. At night the room is lit by candles resting in natural rock shelves.
The cave has a ‘drop loo’, a Tardis-like cabinet in the corner of the plateau area. It’s basically a bog seat set over a twenty-foot drop. Again I can’t look down it, for fear of testicle-crushing pincers grabbing my privates. What if the coconut crabs climb the rocks? Unfortunately I’m old enough to remember The Macra Terror, a Doctor Who adventure from the Patrick Troughton era, where giant crab-like creatures menace a human colony, probably having infiltrated through the sewage system.
Toilet terrors aside, our nights are comfortable and indeed, romantic. Candlelight flickering on coral, stars flickering over the sea. I’m a tanned cave man in a Fred Perry shirt. John takes me through a tiny hole into the rock into an adjoining bat cave. We’re covered in slimy mud. His torch reveals hundreds of the things, upside down.
The food is wonderful. Nita, John and various children arrive as part of ‘cave service’, carrying cassava, yams, taro, sweet potatoes, fish and many other delicacies, all stored in traditional baskets made from the fronds of coconut palms. For three days we chill. John sits and talks about UK politics and religion; his son Edmond is very impressed to receive a copy of 90 Minutes. Nita and her daughters paint a tattoo of a bonito (a tuna) on my arm, the symbol of their island. It looks good with the shell necklace Nicola has bought me. My life is all getting a bit Robinson Crusoe, but without constant threats to our survival. At least until our final night.
Nicola thought it would be romantic to spend my birthday in a cave when she organised our trip. For all our differences, she thought it worth making a real effort for the world’s worst adventurer. A man whose foot odour could probably finish off an entire indigenous species. She’s bought a pair of turtle-shell rings (‘it’s endangered so we mustn’t tell anyone,’ she warns). The ring is a nice burnished brown