The Melanesian Aisle: Vanuatu and New Caledonia by John Borthwick

These might be the Improbable Isles of Oceania. From the last of the Conquistadors to the last of the cannibals - whose most recent feast was only 20, or perhaps ten, years ago - Vanuatu spans a Melanesia of kastom villages and five-star resorts, of "nambas" (the world's briefest underpants) and tax-haven bankers.

The Vanuatu archipelago (previously known as the New Hebrides) and its far-from-identical Melanesian "twin", New Caledonia were both named in 1774 by Captain James Cook, who maintained the "Anglophoney" tradition of giving improbably European names to far shores that bore no resemblance to their namesakes.

Thereafter, the French and British, and their proxies - missionaries, planters and traders - poked tongues at each other for years in both the New Hebrides and New Caledonia. In a gesture of schizophrenic accord, the 83 islands of the New Hebrides were eventually lumbered with a dual Anglo-French administration, known as the Condominium (aka the Pandemonium), that lasted from 1906 until independence in 1980. With a new government came a new name, Vanuatu, which means "Land Eternal".

"Somewhere in the Pacific" was a familiar, if deliberately vague, dateline imposed by military censors on World War II correspondents. For those in the know, it often meant Espiritu Santo, the largest island in the Vanuatu archipelago. Among the 100,000 US troops staged there was a budding author named James A. Michener who was already gathering plots for his famous collection, "Tales of the South Pacific".

One of Michener's stories, "Fo' Dolla'", was set on Espiritu Santo and featured a foul-mouthed old Tonkinese blackmarketeer called Bloody Mary. (Under the title of "South Pacific", the later stage and film musical versions of Michener's book miraculously de-toxed Bloody Mary into something closer to Mother Mary.) Pivotal to the plot was a mysterious, forbidden island just offshore from Espiritu Santo. Michener called this fictive isle "Bali-h'ai".

Gaze east across the waters from Espiritu Santo towards the 1500 metre volcanic peak of Ambae Island and you soon get the picture: just add a handsome Marine officer and his off-limits lover, Bloody Mary's lissom teenage daughter. Naturally, there's plenty of Santo support for Ambae being Michener's model — and thus the real Bali-Hai (as it is inevitably misspelled). Unfortunately for Ambae, similar claims are made by half a dozen other alluring Pacific isles from Tahiti to Tonga.

Except for a popular, contemporary T-shirt announcing, "I went down on the President", Luganville, Santo's snoozy capital, probably hasn't changed much since the days of Michener and Bloody Mary. Just offshore lies the troop-carrier USS President Coolidge, sunk in 1942 by an American mine. It remains Uncle Sam's greatest foreign aid gesture to Vanuatu, having gained considerable fame as one of the most accessible wreck dives in the world.

With local dive-shop owner Mayumi Green, we drift down towards the ghostly, 200 metre hull. Its bow is only 20 metres below the surface, but far deeper are the targets for serious divers — the President's staterooms and gloomy holds still crammed with jeeps, statues, typewriters, Coke bottles and even a barber's chair. From those obscured depths, the bubbled exhalations from unseen divers stream up from portholes, heading past us for the sun. Back on shore, for those divers into bragging rights, the biggest selling line in Mayumi's shop is that T-shirt.

Espiritu Santo was discovered in 1606 by Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, a Spanish Conquistador sailing from Peru in search of the great southern continent. Mistaking the large island for his grail, he named it Terra Australis del Espiritu Santo — the Great South Land of the Holy Spirit.

Santo's jungled interior plateau is dotted with the traditional kastom villages of a very independently-minded people; indeed, they even attempted to seccede during the so-called "Coconut War" that preceeded independence in 1980. Long-term Santo resident, New Zealand-born Russell Donovan drives us through the plateau's back roads, introducing us to his ni-Vanuatu friends. At one village, in front of their nakamal meeting house, several loin-cloth garbed men explain to us their local medicinal plants, as well as their mix of apparent cultural contradictions — animism and Christianity, high school education and bride price, as paid in pigs and cash.

Russell, a bushman with something of the "Kiwi Dundee" about him, plunges his jeep deeper still in the interior, before leading us on foot along a cool river bed that then opens out to a deep blue swimming hole. With little hint of what's to come next, he aims us down a ladder to the bottom of a 20-metre limestone sinkhole, then hands out swiming masks and underwater torches. Pointing to a dark chasm, he says, "OK. Time for a bit of duck-diving", and before my keen sense of claustrophobia can lodge an objection, I find myself swimming underwater through a tunnel, emerging eventually into a pitch-black cavern — greatly affirmed in the belief that I prefer daylight. After exploring the cave system, then extricating ourselves from the underworld, we spend the night restored to oxygen and other luxuries at Aore Island Resort, just across the channel from Luganville.

The island of Malekula has been described perhaps too often as "dog-shaped". The dense pelt of jungle that clads this mountainous, 2000 sq km island makes it appear from the air more like a dragon that has settled on the sea in casual disarray.

It's a bouncing, 45-minute truck ride to the northern Malekula village of Amel Boas, through the pure geometry of plantation coconut trees and past villages where they still play pétanque bowls and converse in French. These settlements of bamboo and thatch huts are part of a plentiful garden economy that's described as "affluent subsistence".

"What's your namba?" I imagine it's not how one enquires whether a Malekula man is of the Small Nambas or Big Nambas clan, for a namba is the penis wrapper that forms a major part of a ni-Vanuatu tribal man's ceremonial wardrobe. We're at the kastom village of Amel Boas — which is indeed of the Small Nambas people — for a dance ceremony performed for us by "the Walla Kulja Club". Clearly, this village is quite pragmatic about sharing a little kastom to raise a little cash.

We sit facing a sunny clearing that's lined with totem carvings and spirit houses. Suddenly the air resonates to the rhythm of drums and chants. Ochre-smeared male dancers clad in nambas, head-dresses and ankle rattles rush out, raising blooms of dust as their feet pound the ground.

Gyrating, shuffling, mimicking birds and humans, pounding bamboo drums and stomping in rhythm, the men and boys play out a series of dances. A performer explains to us the theme of each one: yam-planting, water carrying, calling clan spirits, and other kastom rituals. There's even room for clowning, with one episode depicting a boy afflicted by, then cured of, huge testicles.

After the performance, and a handshake of thanks along the line of 15 muscular dancers, we're shown around the village by chief Talivou, the 34-year old headman. Tall and grinning, he explains how Amel Boas is revisiting its pre-contact customs. Talivou's grandfather had been a kastom chief, but his father, under the influence of missionary culture, renounced the role and his animistic beliefs. In 1993, Amel Boas decided to revive its rituals, totems and heriditary ranks, thus adopting something of an "un-missionary position".

Traditional circumcision ceremonies are being performed again for boys at around age 12. Talivou enthusiastically invites us to return for the next big event: "Come back in December 1999 when we'll have the biggest nimangi initiation ceremony in years — we'll kill 100 pigs during that month".

We check-in for the night at the little Wala Island Resort and its row of flower-decked huts (complete with mosquito nets and hurricane lanterns). So that visitors might see ni-Vanuatu village culture "at home" and also spread the benefits of low-impact tourism, a modest chain of guest houses has been established on islands such as Malekula, Tanna, Efate and Erromango.

The day goes down over the little resort's coral-strewn beach and gin-clear waters. Time for a beer and conversation with whoever's wandering past. A good dinner of fresh fish, vegetables and breadfruit follows, is topped off by a trip to the village kava bar to sink a few hot ones with the locals.

"Pas de jetlag, pas de tipping, pas de visa," is the French territory of New Caledonia's come-on to visitors. Its capital, Noumea is a Berlitz version of the tropics — yachts and croissants, plus high minded colonial intentions gone slightly to seed. Use Noumea (on Grande Terre Island) as your stepping stone to the Loyalty Islands, just to east, but first visit the capital's new Tjibaou Kanak Culture Centre (designed by architect Renzo Piano), perhaps the most outstanding example of contemporary architecture in the Pacific. This spectacular museum-cum-art gallery celebrates the renaissance of Kanak culture and is a reminder that for New Caledonians, their land ("Kanaky") is much more than a French flagpole in the Pacific.

Les Isles Loyauté — Lifou, Mare and Ouvea — are just 35 minutes flight east of the capital. They float like coral platforms on a turquoise sea, with interiors and beaches not ravaged by logging or mining. You land amid floral print shirts and mission frocks worn by handsome people of mixed Melanesian-Polynesian blood. If it looks like Tahiti with a perm, it sounds like a Jamaica with the handbrake on: the local pop music is a languid swing reggae — as though Bob Marley were smoking Prozac.

Lifou, at around 70 km by 30 km, is the largest of the Loyalty Islands. Its araucaria pines, villages dotted with conical-roofed "fare" ceremonial houses and balmy waters are the stuff of postcards. Due to heavy French subsidies, the Loyalty Islands are also the South Seas with decent roads, schools and health clinics. Pale French gendarmes, seemingly plucked straight from Paris point duty, look lost directing the coconut trees.

We drag ourselves from the warm waters of Chateaubriand Bay to meet our somewhat moody guide, Rose. Our visit to the now serene Baie de Santal (Sandalwood Bay) is a reminder of the early, traumatic intrusions here by European whalers, sandalwood cutters, convicts and colonists. Does Rose blame me, I wonder?

No, she just wants to make sure that, according to "la coutume" (custom), I have ready a suitable donation when we meet a local chief at the large, traditional "case" house in Hnathalo village. We organise the money, but the meeting seems an anticlimax for all parties, and soon Rose leads us off
to enjoy Lifou's most scenic spots.

From a cliff at the Lifou village of Jokin — one church, one guesthouse, sundry pigs, dogs and kids — we look down on a stunning lagoon vista. Coral heads, reef sharks and parrot fish shimmer beneath a plane of water so translucent, that a dinghy moored there not so much floats as levitates.

At an Edenic vanilla plantation I seem to blow it again by announcing that a cup of the house speciality, a subtle, vanilla-flavoured coffee, tastes to my cappuccino-ravaged palate much like Nescafe. Finally, along the white-sand Louengoni Beach, we visit a traditional carver, as well as check out several well-appointed "gites" (guest-houses).

"Horse, goat, sugar, 'espoon' — and numerals. On Mare Island we still say these words in English," explains our driver, Marean Jean-Pierre Yeweine as he shows us around his island. This residual English vocabulary is the legacy of the London Missionary Society that gained a foothold in the Loyalty Islands in 1841 and maintained for years a staunchly Anglophone, anti-Catholic, anti-French posture.

Mare's coral landscape is pitted and tunnelled like Gouda cheese. At a spot known as L'Aquarium Naturel, we come to a beautiful, 50-metre-wide sinkhole pool with a floor of white sand. Jean-Pierre throws a little bread and soon the water is alive with fish. As though on cue, a turtle surfaces long enough for us to take a few shots, before it drifts back to its
hiding place.

Lagoons like the one in front of Nengone village invite lazy, or vigorous, sea-kayaking. "Dive here and you'll see fish, not just bubbles." says our guide Philippe Delpais, extolling the virtues of scuba diving on New Caledonia's prolific reefs. Indeed, the waters — and the menus — are full of fish with exclamatory names like wahoo and mahi-mahi.

The tranquil Loyalty Islands are not a mass-market, budget destination. Instead, they are unspoiled Melanesia, complete with modest but good resorts, where Kanak and European cultures have achieved what once seemed improbable, a dignified co-existence.