fajrdrako | Getting Stoned With Savages...

Grounded by a bad back, I read Getting Stoned With Savages. This is the second book by J. Maarten Troost, whose first book, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, I found fascinating. It's about how Troost - born in Holland, raised in Canada, worked and married in the US - spent two years living in the nation of Kiribati, a series of islands in the mid-Pacific. These islands are very far from anywhere else and life is difficult: no medicine, no sanitation, inadequate food, minimal contact with the rest of the world - yet, with all the difficulties, the people of Kiribati have a strong and simple way of life.

After two years working for the World Bank in Washington DC, Troost and his wife decided they'd had enough of civlization and stress, and went to live in Vanuatu. It's a little more part of the world than Kiribati. They moved to Port Vila, where rent was higher than in Washington, and they lived on a hill that was occasionally washed out with floods, or visited by foot-long venomous centipedes. But he loves the place because he gets to drink plenty of the local recreational narcotic, kava.

Seemed to me that this book had neither the depth nor the pathos of Sex Lives of Cannibals, despite Troost's rather sensationalist desire to talk to a real cannibal. Bits I liked:

The autobiographical parts; the really autobiographical parts, such as the birth of Troost's first child: Bookquote>It's funny how time passes when you have a child. Before Lukas arrived, I had always been able to press the pause button on life. I'd fnd a nice place somewhere between jobs and rest there for a while, a still live in a moving picture. But there was no pausing with Lukas. Just as I'd grown accustomed to his ability to sit upright on his own, he went ahead and started crawling... No, there was no pausing now.
The terrifying and awesome account of visiting a live volcano.
The account of the social set-up in Fiji, and the divisions between native Fijians, settlers from India, and forgeigners. I wanted to hear more.
A glimpse of the truly appalling nature of the democratic governments in these places. Makes Stephen Harper look like a saint. (More because of opportunity than nature; I suspect he'd do fine in Vanuatu.)
The quotes from Captain Cook.
The chapter about the prostitutes of the town of Suva. Perhaps because most of the book is more about the men of the various places Troost encounters, and this is a glimpse into the eyes of some women, street prostitutes in bars or on the street, on work-permits from elsewhere - China, for example. Later Troost is walking in Suva with his wife:
With Sylvia beside me, the pssts had stopped, though here and there, I'd receive a friendly hello from the ladies of the night.

"And who was that?" Sylvia asked.

"That was Ramona."

"And did you meet many women during your week alone in Suva?"

"Many women. They're very friendly in Suva. But Ramona's not actually a woman."

"Ramona's not a woman?"

"Fooled me too."