There’s A Hippo In My Cistern: One Man’s Misadventures on the Eco-Frontline. Pete May
a ring, that’s all. I think.
We spend a mellow morning brewing real coffee on the camp stove. I read Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Nicola is sitting in her lava lava (the local version of a sarong) reading up on PNG forestry. I am finally relaxing in this laid-back eco-friendly sort of loafing. We have lunch and then lie in bed away from the sun. We’re making love, listening to the breakers, when ‘SNAKE!!!!! SNAKE!!!!! It’s up there! DO SOMETHING!!!!’
What, a trouser snake? No something worse. Bizarrely, a snake is dangling from the top of the cave’s arch.
‘It’s a sea snake – they’re poisonous!!!’ screams Nicola, whose worst phobia is close encounters with either snakes or worms.
‘OK. Stand back, keep calm, don’t panic,’ I mutter uselessly, hopping from foot to foot, wondering if I should throw a flip-flop at it. For God’s sake! What do you do when confronted with a snake? I try to remember how they coped with Ka the sneaky snake in The Jungle Book. Captain James T Kirk would, of course, roll over on the ground and then fire off his phaser. But I’m armed only with a plastic sandal and am totally useless. The snake falls from the roof and slides towards a fold in the rock.
At this moment, Nita and John arrive with more food, and seem unfazed by the slippery visitor.
‘It must have been dropped by a seagull, that’s the only way it could could have got out of the sea,’ says Nicola, suddenly lucid in all aspects of snake lore.
Our Solomon Island friends take a calm approach to the problem. First Nita throws rocks at the snake until it disappears into a crevice. John waits, ponders and then returns with a kettle of boiling water and a tube. He pours the boiling water down the tube into the crevice and claims to have killed the snake. It’s not exactly a World Wildlife Fund-approved way of removing a snake, but it makes Nicola feel a little better. We spend an uneasy final night, wondering whether the snake is really dead and what else might be crawling through the coral passages.
We’re up at six the next morning to walk to the airport with, seemingly, the whole island there for the plane’s arrival – only it’s four hours late, as the plane had been chartered to move a body, a common practice in the Solomons. Maybe the unfortunate cadaver was another victim of flying sea snakes.
Our hosts have been superb, it’s a beautiful place, but it’s not right for me, not as a place to live. The Greens speak lovingly of wildernesses and the untapped knowledge of indigenous peoples. Being hunted by mosquitoes, coconut crabs and sea snakes has left me desiring nothing more than the iffy cigarette sellers and gridlocked sprawl of the snake-free Holloway Road. Out there in the other world where they have TV, Kermit the frog is singing about how it’s not easy being Green. I know just what he means.
We continue to island hop. Munda has a bit more lad credibility, as it’s full of Second World War memorabilia. Rusting troop carriers still lie in the sea and the road the Japanese built to the airport is pot-holed but still intact. We visit a 73-year-old islander called Alfred who has a Second World War relic shed. He reminisces about his old English commanding officer, ‘Mister Bolton’ and Nicola takes a snap of me wearing a Loaded T-shirt, grenade in hand, US helmet on head.
We arrive at Choiseul Island only to be attacked by swarms of mosquitoes, forcing me to repel them with Rambo-esque towel attacks. It’s a further hour-long canoe ride to visit Chris and Maggie, Australian and English development workers. We stay in the old hospital next to their house, and Nicola has bad vibes about dead souls around us. In their traditional Solomon-style house Maggie and Chris have solar panels and are self-sufficient in energy. Once again, we shower standing under a bucket filled with hot water. For some reason Nicola is under the impression that I can snorkel. Chris takes us out over the coral reef. My swimming is equal to my snake-catching abilities. I flounder and discover just how sharp coral is. The next day is spent indoors, clad in a lava lava, countless plasters on my torn legs.
‘But you said you could snorkel!’ exclaims Nicola.
‘No, I said I once did an hour’s diving off the Barrier Reef in Australia. That was OK. We had oxygen tanks. I’ve never bloody snorkelled in my life and I can’t do it.’
Ernest Hemingway I am not. Helping indigenous people fight loggers clearly requires what Thomas Gradgrind would term ‘an eminently practical man’ – and I am an eminently unpractical one.
We miss our first return flight back to Honiara because Nicola refuses to board the small plane in a thunderstorm, as she is sure it’s going to be struck by lightning. But rule one of a successful relationship is to never question your partner’s emotional intelligence. Or emotional stupidity if you’re worried you’ll never leave the Pacific.
After a further day’s wait we finally return to Honiara. We stay with friends of Nicola’s, a lovely hospitable local family and their wantoks (extended family). In one final dashing of my lad credibility, they tell me I look very like Prince Andrew.
On my last day in the Solomons we visit Matanikau Falls. Nicola has told me to be careful not to fall from the rocks at the top of the waterfall – one man stumbled a few years ago and his body was found two miles downstream. Oh, and there are crocodiles in the river.
After a sweltering walk we take extra care on the rocks. We view the falls from a safe distance, climb down to a lower area and relax by a rock pool. The surface is level here and a mere handful of centimetres above the pool, so there’s obviously no danger now. That’s until my sandal somehow slips on an apparently solid rock and my body is propelled through the humid air and plunged straight into the rock pool. Cold water surrounds my pathetic form as I’m completely immersed. Then from underwater my body emerges like some Arthurian apparition, holding my sodden Canon Sure Shot camera above my head. It’s whirring uncontrollably, the film is rewinding in demented fashion, and the flash bulb is going off. The camera hasn’t appreciated its dunking. Nicola is laughing uncontrollably, clearly not appreciating how close to death I’ve come.
‘I told you not to fall!’ she chortles.
‘It was my sandal! Look, I’m hurt!’
Desperately I swim the metre to the edge of the pool and clamber out. My camera refuses to work and the film is probably now useless. My right foot has hit a rock and is missing a small square of skin. Maybe it’s an inept explorer’s equivalent to a bullet wound.
Luckily, I’m departing these humid and dangerous parts that night, returning to London. Nicola’s flying on to PNG with her team of fact-finding Solomon Island community foresters, and then staying for a further three months.
‘I love you,’ she says, at the airport.
‘Even when I’m falling in waterfalls?’
‘Even then.’
‘I love you too.’
What am I saying? Has the soaking affected the lad side of my brain? She’ll be working on an isolated project in the bush. And they’ll probably ask her to stay longer. And she won’t be able to say no because she loves the tropics. And there’s bound to be some hunky forestry-type man involved in the project who’ll impress her with his knowledge of tropical hardwoods.
‘Come on, you’d better go through.’
‘Bye, I’ll see if I can salvage the film.’
The flight to Brisbane is at the horrible time of ten past two in the morning. Then it’s a six o’clock internal flight to Sydney. I book into a youth hostel on arrival and immediately place my sodden clothes from the waterfall debacle into the YHA’s washing machine. Sleep can come later. The sweat-encrusted clothes go through their cycle and I remove them, only to find my trousers still have my camera in them. If it hasn’t been destroyed by its saturation in the Matanikau Falls it certainly has now.
Exhaustedly, I stare at my pile of laundry and my sodden camera and think that I’ve failed. Failed to be a global citizen. I’ll never be able to mention ‘PNG’ or ‘SI’ at Oxford Green parties or talk about ‘development issues’. Development issues to me