If time travel exists, then Erromango is probably the closest thing to it I had seen by that point.
From Tanna to Erromango we had only about fifty nautical miles to cover. After leaving Tanna in the middle of the night, practically chased away by bad weather, we found ourselves off the next island about twelve hours later. The day was grey and overcast, but the sea was calm compared with what we had left behind.
We entered the bay at Port Narvin and dropped anchor. We had no grand plan for the day. The idea was to eat something, rest, and maybe decide later whether we even wanted to go ashore.
Erromango had other plans.
We had not been at anchor for more than half an hour when someone started knocking on the side of the boat.
I went outside and saw two men in a canoe unlike anything I had ever seen up close before. The main hull was a hollowed-out tree trunk, so narrow I could not understand how they even managed to sit in it, with a wooden outrigger lashed to one side for stability. A few pieces of timber, some rope, and a great deal of experience.
The men were Charlie and his friend John.
They had brought us bags full of fruit as a welcome gift from the village. The bananas had very little in common with the tidy, identical ones you see in supermarkets. These were huge, thick things, straight off the tree. There was other fruit as well, all of it growing practically within arm’s reach around the village.
We invited them aboard.
Charlie very quickly forgot why he had come and started inspecting our Lagoon 450 as if a spaceship had landed in front of him.
He looked at the cabins, the galley, the deck, the instruments, then out through the window at his canoe tied alongside us. What fascinated him most was the idea that there was a factory somewhere producing boats like ours in series.
We explained that they built hundreds of them and that a boat like ours took roughly a month to make.
That completely destroyed him.
He needed three weeks to make his canoe.
Sometimes four.
We tried to make him feel better.
“Well, they have machines.”
Charlie looked at us very seriously.
“We have a machine too. A chainsaw.”
There was not much left to say after that.
Technically, the man was absolutely right.
We had a drink and talked for a while about the island, the people and travel. Charlie was friendly, curious and incredibly open. He told us he had even been to China and had travelled around some of the surrounding islands, so he was not a man who had never seen anything beyond his village.
That made his fascination with our boat even more interesting.
When they climbed back into the canoe and paddled ashore, we looked at each other and quickly changed our original plan.
We were definitely going ashore.
There was another yacht anchored to starboard, flying a Swiss flag. We would get to know them later, but first we lowered the dinghy and headed toward the village.
Port Narvin felt completely different from anything we had seen so far.
There was very little infrastructure. A few simple buildings, a small dispensary, a community market, the local council office and a school. Most of the houses were built from timber, palm leaves, bamboo and whatever nature provided within a few metres of where you wanted to build.
Chickens and chicks wandered freely between the houses.
No chicken coops, no complicated system. They walked around, scratched for food, and when lunch was needed, one of them ended up in the pot.
We also met the village chief.
What I remember best about him was his Superman cap.
I have no idea what symbolic importance Superman had in the local hierarchy, but the cap suited him.
He welcomed us and immediately assigned a few people to show us around and explain how things worked.
That was when we started to understand how simple, but at the same time how organised, village life was.
The village operated as a community. Not every family cooked only for itself. Each day one family took responsibility for preparing food for everyone. There was a central place in the village where people gathered, ate and talked.
When a cyclone comes, the whole system changes.
When the weather becomes serious, the villagers retreat into caves. Their lightweight houses are not designed to resist cyclones. There is not much point trying.
When the storm passes, they come back, see what is left, and build the village again.
Sometimes something survives.
Sometimes almost nothing.
But the materials are all around them, and they have known how to build this way for generations.
It was one of those moments when I realised how relative our idea of something being “permanent” really is.
We build houses to last fifty or a hundred years.
They build a house knowing that the wind may take it away in a few seasons, but also knowing they can build another one.
The only more substantial building in the village was the school.
On one of the large walls was a painted map of the world that the children used for geography lessons. Naturally, it did not take long before they asked us where we were from.
I pointed to Montenegro.
Serbia was more or less missing.
This concerned them greatly.
They immediately said the map had to be corrected and that they needed to find the teacher so Serbia could be added.
We tried to explain that it really was not urgent and that the world could probably survive another few days without Serbia on the school wall.
They were not convinced.
If a country exists, it should be on the map.
Fair enough.
There was another device in the village that played a surprisingly important role.
A chest freezer.
One.
Half of it was used by the village, while the other half was reserved for a local fisherman. He kept his catch there until he could transport it to market, and instead of paying rent in cash, he paid in fish.
The system could not have been simpler.
This half of the freezer was his.
The other half belonged to the village.
For the use of his half, part of his catch moved over to theirs.
No invoices.
No banks.
No cards.
No VAT.
No accountant.
Fish in exchange for electricity and cold storage.
And it worked.
The longer we stayed, the more interesting it became to see how little equipment was actually needed to keep an entire village functioning.
One chainsaw.
One generator.
One freezer.
One laptop.
One projector.
And people.
That was about it.
The next day there was supposed to be a football tournament.
A team from another part of the island arrived on foot. As far as we understood, the journey had taken them almost two days.
They arrived, rested, ate, and were ready for the match.
We happened to have several footballs on board, bought somewhere along the way for reasons I no longer understood, so we donated some to the village.
That instantly promoted us to honoured guests of the tournament.
Along with the Swiss.
The football itself was a spectacle.
One player had two shoes.
Another had one.
Another had none.
Someone had a proper shirt.
Someone else played in whatever he had put on that morning.
The pitch was whatever the terrain allowed, and the main tactical philosophy seemed to be to get the ball toward the other goal by any available means.
But the amount of joy on that field was incredible.
Everyone laughed.
Everyone cheered.
No swearing.
No fighting.
No referee who needed to be murdered because he missed a foul.
They played football because playing football was fun.
The children around the pitch were running, jumping, shouting and creating an atmosphere as if we were watching the World Cup final.
At one point I found myself thinking that practically none of these people had what we would call the necessities of modern life, yet nobody seemed short of a reason to smile.
Erromango looked good from the coast, but the mountains above the village attracted me even more.
The island has some beautiful peaks rising above the shoreline, and I had an overwhelming urge to climb one of them, just to see what the island looked like from above.
I had also read about a waterfall in the guidebook.
Naturally, I set off.
I had been walking for a while when Damjan caught up with me.
The chief had sent a message telling me to be careful if I continued further.
As Damjan understood it, some of the people living deeper inland were not used to strangers, especially white people. If they saw me, they would not attack me, but they might run away and hide deeper in the forest.
I had to ask him again.
“Are you sure you understood him correctly?”
Damjan went back toward the village and I continued a little further.
The forest there was not forest in the way we usually imagine it.
Palm trees, bananas, papaya, coconuts and another ten things I could not even name. Practically every few metres you could reach out and pick something.
Then I heard voices.
After that, movement in the forest.
I could not see anyone.
I stopped and thought about it.
If people really were hiding because they were afraid of me, there was absolutely no reason to push deeper into their home just because I wanted to see a waterfall or take a photograph from a mountain.
So I turned back.
The waterfall could manage without me.
So could the summit.
By then, Charlie and I had become quite friendly.
One day he decided to show me his major technological advantage over the rest of the island.
The chainsaw.
The same “machine” he used to make canoes.
We went to see how he worked and how they cut timber.
There he was, barefoot, ear protection on, standing on a massive tree and cutting through branches as if this were the most ordinary job in the world.
The island has long been associated with sandalwood, and a good part of the cash coming into the village came from timber. As they explained it to us, Chinese buyers arrived from time to time to purchase sandalwood.
I had no idea what they were getting paid per tonne or per cubic metre.
The difference between what the village received and what the wood was eventually worth somewhere else was probably enormous.
But this was their main source of cash.
And this is where the story became even more interesting.
That evening there was going to be a meeting of the oldest and most important people in the village.
The subject: what to do with the capital they had accumulated from selling sandalwood.
I was exhausted and decided to skip the meeting.
Damjan and a few others went.
Some international organisation had previously given the village a laptop, a projector and a screen.
And so, in the middle of Erromango, in a place where the chainsaw was more or less the peak of industrial technology, an Excel spreadsheet appeared on the wall that evening.
The spreadsheet showed how much money the village had.
A few thousand dollars in total.
Then everyone sat down to discuss what the community should invest it in.
When I heard about it later, I could not decide whether the system was incredibly primitive or incredibly modern.
Probably both.
No financial analysts.
No investment fund.
No consultant.
There was a village.
There was money.
There was Excel.
And everyone had to decide together.
I thought it would have been nice to simply add a donation and increase their budget.
But then I realised it probably would not have been that simple.
They had not asked for help.
They had their own system.
And perhaps that was exactly why it worked.
As evening approached, we would leave the island and return to the boat. We did not want to stay ashore at night, so we spent the days with the people and the evenings at anchor.
Toward the end of our stay, Charlie brought us a gift.
A large shell.
There was an opening at the tip, and when you blew into it, it produced a deep, dull blast loud enough to carry across the whole village. Charlie explained that the chief used a shell like this to call people together.
To finish the gift properly, he took a black marker and drew local motifs on it: houses, palm trees and a sailboat.
Then he wrote:
ERROMANGO – VANUATU.
It was not a souvenir from a shop.
There was no souvenir shop.
It had been made by a man we met because, one grey morning, he climbed into a hollowed-out log, loaded it with bags of fruit and paddled out to our boat simply to welcome us.
We left them several footballs, clothes and various other things from the boat that were probably more useful to them than to us.
By the end, it became difficult to tell who had given more to whom.
We gave them things.
They gave us fruit, time, stories and a shell.
I think we got the better deal.
On our final morning we went ashore one more time.
We said goodbye to Charlie, the chief and the others. They wished us a safe journey, and we returned to the boat, raised the anchor and set course for Efate and the capital of Vanuatu.
Erromango disappeared behind us.
An island that, by our standards, had practically nothing.
And yet we left feeling as though we had received far more there than in places that had everything.