- “Nomoa, hem no kam yet”, the cheery response I invariably receive from the string of people selling betel nut, cigarettes and ring cakes from their little stalls.
Thus my day begins; the outcome of this little exchange a 30 minute walk down a dusty track to town and work. I have no complaints, however. Even when it rains heavily during the night, as it frequently does, leaving me slipping and sliding my way down certain sections of the route, I still take pleasure in this daily routine and wouldn’t swap it even for the whitest Hilux in Honiara.
It is strange how the strongest memories of a time and place tend to be connected with activities and events that are seemingly at the periphery of life. Forget all those thousands of hours spent in lessons in primary school, or the theory of Pareto efficiency I was supposedly studying at university. No. Instead, the types of memories that spring to mind from those respective times are kicking a flattened soft drink can around the playground with other munchkins, and the man playing a penny whistle beside the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, who I would walk past on the meadows each morning. Perhaps those sights and sounds that enter, as it were, on the sly, find some direct route into the long-term memory; sneaking past the everyday garbage of the mind such as telephone numbers, lecture notes and Big Brother.
In particular, the everyday routine of walking to school/work sticks strongly in the mind, and for me seems somehow to capture the entire atmosphere of a particular era in my life. What at the time might have seemed a boring trudge, in hindsight now gleams with meaning and an epic quality. When I think about it, the number of such walks I’ve experienced is actually very few, but they are so familiar I’m sure I regularly walk them in my dreams without knowing it. First was the short walk to Brookfield Primary School, escorted in the very early days by me mam and sisters or various Scandanavian aupairs, and a little later often in the company of a couple of wee friends. Later came the even shorter walk to and from my secondary school, the regular walk from my house in Paraguay to catch the Numero Once bus to Asuncion and the various icy meadows marches in Edinburgh that I have previously referred to in the blog.
And now… and now the morning wander down the Mbokona valley (but never back!!) joins this select list. Who knows which aspects of the walk I will remember in the swirls of time, if any? But for now, perhaps because I am no longer a lazy teenager/gapyearer/student and I am more than 4ft tall, this current edition seems easily the most pleasurable. Past the betel nut sellers and over the first ramshackle bridge. Past the cassava patches and the women hacking away at the heavy soil with their hoes. The teetering makeshift houses inhabited by a few Malaitan families, overflowing with pikininis and looking like they’re about to collapse at any second. The hordes of little boys and girls walking barefoot to Mbokona Primary School, in their striking uniforms of purple flannel shirts and dresses. The bus that has been in the ‘roadside workshop’ for several months and which is now apparently an elaborate climbing frame for kids. The sounds (and smell) of the pigpigs being fed their morning slops, or whatever it is that Solomon pigpigs eat. And betel nut stalls every 50 metres, I suppose just in case you get caught out by a particularly sharp craving pang.
I toyed with the idea of buying a car for a while not long ago. But the pleasure of this daily walk has been one of the major factors in my changing my mind, as even though I was trying to trick myself into believing I would only use a vehicle at weekends, in reality I knew deep down that I would be waving this morning wander goodbye.
Photos from top: The road begins; An inspired artist's impression of a ring cake (otherwise known as a donut); The 'roadside workshop'; One of the more elaborate betel nut stalls; Pikininis on their way to school; A wee Malaitan scally; Just one more bend...
There are a hundred other little snippets I’d like to relate (but which will have to be forsaken for the steak dinner I am about to eat). Like the fact that the native language of Savo is one of just a handful of languages in the Pacific which has no connection with the Australasian family of languages (stretching from the East Pacific to Indonesia and even Madagascar), and no-one knows why this is. Like little naked Ryan, who every time he saw me threw back his head and roared in fear, till finally on the last morning I offered him a lollypop and he bravely wobbled forward, before tottering back to his mami with it proudly clutched in his little grasp. Like my slightly worrying evolution into an archetypal Melanesian male, so that on the last morning I found myself sitting in the shade of the palm trees, chewing betel nut and storying with Solo and the local chaps, while our girlfriends packed the bags and tidied up.
