Visiting Vanuatu

Forest and Bird, Issue 298, 1 November 2000, Page 36

Visiting Vanuatu

ANN GRAEME

ANN GRAEME discovers how Forest and Bird ecotours help save forests far from home.

e stood on the edge of the escarpment, looking down on the village of Matantas. Below us, like matchstick figures, we could see the village women beating clothes on the banks of the stream, and beyond them the forest rolled from the beach of Big Bay to the distant Jordan River and _ the Cumberland Mountains. This was the forest of Vatthe, on the island of Espiritu Santo. At about 5000 hectares it is the last big lowland forest on the islands of Vanuatu. I was travelling on Forest and Bird’s

Vanuatu tour, led by our Southern field officer, Sue Maturin. I had come because I wanted to see the rainforest and the coral reefs, and I wanted to see and support our Pacific island conservation project. And I was glad I had come. I knew Sue, and I had read about the project, but it hadn’t really prepared me for the reality of conservation in the Pacific islands. Conservation work is different and difficult in another culture. In their villages the native islanders, called Ni Vanuatu, don’t have electricity and they are not in thrall to television, so their material wants differ from ours. They seem less concerned for the future than we are, perhaps because the climate is always warm so they do not need the ‘squirrel mentality’ so essential to our ancestors in order to survive the winter. But the Ni Vanuatu population is growing rapidly and the people need some money, particularly for the education of their children. Forest conservation must pay its way. The Vatthe conservation project aims to protect a forest which is owned by several large families in two separate villages, Matantas and Sara. The rest of Sara’s forests have been logged. And once funding from international aid and the South Pacific Biodiversity Conservation Program support finishes in two years’ time, the fate of Vatthe forest will rest upon the villagers: on the determination of the women, and the vision, the egos and the aspirations of the chiefs; on the Forest and Bird tours and other money from tourism — and on the blandishments of the logging companies. Sue Maturin has been involved from the beginning, from the first ecological assessment through the endless village talks, and the search for funds from the aid sources that slosh around the Pacific and are now the mainstay of the island economy. These funds have enabled the people of Matantas and Sara to build the bungalows where the tourists stay, and Sara’s people to buy a van to bring them here. Now a tidy profit from accommodating and guiding visitors is tucked away in the village account. This is vital, for the conservation project will have to stand alone. The project is meticulously designed.

Every landowner must share in its profits. Every family in Matantas contributed to our stay, and every family was paid. One family baked the bread, others were guides, some prepared the barbecue at the Jordan River, distant villagers came to perform custom dances, some took us to find coconut crabs (but no eatum!), and every family brought food to the feast. Purity is in charge of the project accounts. She is the wife of Solomon, the customary chief elected by the villagers. Sue Maturin helped Purity to straighten out such anomalies as the half-day escarpment walk (led by men) being paid much more than Phelma’s garden tour, which included a delicious lunch of garden produce. (Are men the same the world over?) We walked a good deal in the forest. It is a benign place — no poisonous snakes nor dangerous insects — dim below the dense canopy with great looping lianes and bright fungi. Many of the trees have large leaves and buttressed roots and belong to families which are unknown in New Zealand. Recognisable, however, were members of the Myrtaceae family (our ratas) with showy stamens designed to plaster pollen on the heads of those visiting bats, the flying foxes. The song of the golden whistler filled the forest and we heard the strange call of the rare and endemic megapode bird, which incubates its eggs in a compost heap. We swam a lot too, in the warm turquoise waters of Big Bay, and at night the bathers were outlined with phosphorescence. When going to swim and walking about the village, we women wore long skirts or sarongs in deference to the sensitivities of the local culture.

Forest and Bird Tours orest and Bird field officer, Sue I Maturin (above) from Dunedin, is loved and respected by the people of Matantas and she speaks fluent Bislama. For more than a decade she has visited Vanuatu. ‘The Vatthe conservation project is very dear to my heart. she says. ‘It has been one of the biggest and most difficult challenges of my life. ‘T am glad that I can keep on helping by bringing tourists to Vatthe. ‘Every year when I return, I see the progress that the people of Sara and Matantas have made.’ Sue Maturin will lead a Forest and Bird trip to Vanuatu in June 2001. If you would like details, ring her on 03-477-9677 or e-mail her at suem@earthlight.co.nz

id money is not always spent Many foolproof projects dreamed up in air-conditioned offices fall over under the tropical sun and the weight of misunderstanding. Vatthe is not immune. For example, someone had advised the villagers to provide showers and flush toilets for the visitors’ bungalows. But the water wasn’t connected, a cyclone had toppled the water tower . . . Sue Maturin sighed. "We really should have had dry toilets and simple, solar-bag showers. Alley cropping is a good idea that has so far foundered. Traditionally, villagers have cleared patches of forest to grow their crops. When the soil is exhausted, they clear another patch and shift the gardens, planting coconut palms in the abandoned clearings. But around the growing village of Matantas there is no more land to cultivate without moving into the conservation forest. So Sue Maturin came up with the idea

of alley cropping, which involves planting crops between hedges of nitrogen-fixing plants. When the crop is harvested, the hedge foliage is cut and composted in the rows between, enriching the ground for the next crop, and the next and the next. But introducing new technology into a 4000-year-old culture is difficult. Sue has high hopes for Eric, the full-time Peace Corps volunteer living at Matantas. ‘He'll have to sweat away digging with the gardeners, says Sue. "Telling people what to do and leaving them to do it just doesn’t work. You've got to get stuck in alongside them. Mistakes and problems aside, the Vatthe conservation project is working. The people are proud of their forest and keen to show and share it with their visitors. Their friendliness and good manners put many New Zealand tour operators to shame. If sufficient tourists come — and it need not be many — their money will provide the modest wants of the village. There is no local school, and for most families, their largest financial commitment is the 18,000 vatu ($NZ250) a year needed to send a child away for education. Besides the Vatthe conservation project, there is lots to see and do in Vanuatu. After five days at Vatthe we went to Lonnoc, to the famous Champagne beach considered one of the most beautiful beaches in the world and destination of the cruise ships. For us — happily — it was deserted, as was Elephant Island where we picnicked and swam and played card games on the fine silver sand. Then we flew south to the cooler island of Tanna where crimson splashes of a rata-like flowering tree lit the higher altitude forest. There we looked into the crater of the active

volcano Mount Yasur which, apart from a few red splutters, was resting that night. We snorkelled through soft coral gardens where I had my most memorable encounter of the trip. For 10 minutes or more I swam slowly beside a dugong, a great, gentle beast with a calm eye and a pilot fish suckered to his belly. Finally we returned to Port Vila on the island of Efate, the portal for international flights to Vanuatu. A stone’s throw from the town, we stayed on Hideaway Island where the fish and the hard coral are the most beautiful and diverse I have ever seen. I saw an anemone a metre wide with bold little clown fish swimming amongst its tentacles. I saw tube worms, like the blue tentacled ones with chalky white tubes glued on the rocks of home. But the big tropical ones have tentacles of every imaginable colour and their red, blue, pink, orange and even striped cones disappear at a snap of your fingers. The fishes vied to outdo each other in colour, pattern and shape and it was a delight to watch one stand on its tail, vibrate its fins and have a busy cleaner fish dash in and service it! Even the non-swimmers of our party could share the experience as the reef is so shallow that, with a mask on your face, you can crouch down and look at the fish and coral under the water. So the trip had something for everyone, and for me, it made me proud that Forest and Bird, my conservation society, was playing such a vital part in conservation in the Pacific.

runs Forest

and Bird’s Kiwi Conservation Club from her base in Tauranga.