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CHAPTER 3

Eco-Trip

‘I’m the joint winner of the David Thomas Prize!’ exclaims Nicola, tearing open a newly-arrived letter.

‘Great, brilliant, but who does David Thomas play for?’

‘No you idiot, it’s the prize I entered…’

‘The one I said was a waste of time? Well, I’m a complete durr brain. You’re a genius. Let me give you a hug. What’s the prize?’

‘My essay gets published in the Financial Times and there’s a prize of £5,000 that I can use for an FMF project to promote sustainable forestry in the Solomon Islands! Isn’t that brilliant. And I get to go to the Solomons again!’

It turns out that David Thomas was a Financial Times journalist who was killed while on a foreign assignment; his family set up the prize in his honour. This year it’s being awarded to whoever wrote the best piece about ‘development issues’. Nicola’s written a great piece on logging in the Solomon Islands and it’s won the prize and I’m really pleased for her. Although, of course, this may not bode well for our relationship. The last time she went to the Solomons she stayed for two years. Will she want me to go? And what good would Pete May be in a canoe?

We celebrate and over the next few days Nicola finalises her plans. She wants to take a study group of Solomon Islanders to a project in Papua New Guinea that has already been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) as practising sustainable forestry. What’s sustainable forestry exactly? She tries to explain, and it seems it’s where you tell the bloke with the chainsaw to chop down only selected trees. Nicola’s ability to organise new projects is always surprising to a man like me who struggles to order his sock drawer. She keeps saying that I should open a credit card account with the Co-operative Bank because it doesn’t invest in the arms trade, but I haven’t even managed to do that yet.

Nicola is still besotted with the Solomon Islands. She plans to take a flight there, via Australia, pick up her islanders and then take them on to PNG. After that she’s been offered a job helping with the administration of the FSC-certified project somewhere in the remotest bush of PNG. She’s going to be away for five months and everyone agrees long-distance relationships don’t work. She says that I can come and live with her there if I want. Or if I don’t, then that’s fine too.

‘What do you think I should do?’ I ask my mate John in the pub.

‘Women don’t ever mean what they say,’ says John, sagely. ‘When they attack you for not squeezing the bottom of the toothpaste tube you know it’s really for something else. So if she says you don’t have to go then it probably means you do.’

‘But I’m not sure I want to leave everything. I’ve got a book to write and columns to write, I’m getting published in Time Out, Loaded, Midweek and FC and everything’s going really well,’ I sigh into my pint of IPA. ‘And I’m useless in the heat.’

‘Well, maybe you should compromise. Agree to stay with her for a few weeks. That way at least you’ve tried it.’

‘Yeah, good idea. That way it’s a holiday and not an exile. And there might be loads of models from James and Tim’s photo-shoots throwing themselves at me while she’s away. Women who wear make-up. And don’t mind if I eat takeaways and turn the heating on. Do you want the same again?’

Should I be so reluctant to leave Britain? My travel experience is mainly in safe English-speaking countries such as Australia and New Zealand. Living in places that didn’t have bars or Sky TV is, to be honest, quite terrifying. So Nicola and I end up agreeing that she’ll go to the Solomons first and then I’ll fly out to visit her for three weeks.

We go to the David Thomas Prize ceremony at the FT. It’s full of people who know about development stuff and I feel proud of Nicola as I consume their white wine and kettle crisps and chat to previous winner Nick Clegg.

It does occur to me that soon we’ll be flying to the other side of the world and emitting tons of carbon during this tree-saving sojourn, but surely it’s worth it to save the rainforest? Blimey. I’m in danger of thinking like a Green.

A week later I travel with Nicola to Heathrow and kiss her goodbye at the departure gates as she heads for the Solomons. After two years with her, I’m suddenly alone in London, living the life of the Loaded lothario. But it’s not like the stories I’ve been subbing. Isn’t London full of babes? Well, no, not in N5. Life continues as previously, working till late most nights filing copy, attending PR dos, but it all feels a little lonelier. Nicola sends faxes to me and phones; I send her the news about Hugh Grant. He’s been arrested by the police after being caught asking prostitute Divine Brown for a blowjob in LA and girlfriend Liz Hurley isn’t happy. He’ll surely be number one in Loaded’s Platinum Rogues, a monthly top ten of bad behaviour. He looks suitably embarrassed in the police mug shots. But at least Hugh has been tested by temptation. Single life doesn’t seem quite as good as in the lad mags.

My columns are written in advance and in August 1995 it’s time to fly to the Solomons. It takes three days, via a night sleeping in a Brisbane hotel. After a month apart we embrace in the stifling heat of Henderson Field airport on Guadalcanal. It’s good to see her; maybe I’ve been missing her ethical monitoring of my life. And maybe, soon, I’ll be able to match the Oxford Greens and their tales of PNG with my own stories of the SI.

But first I have to cope with one of my main phobias about travelling to equatorial states – my body’s capacity for exuding large amounts of sweat. You don’t want to smell my sandals. Nicola has arranged a gentle introduction, a three-night stay at a beachside resort north of the capital, Honiara. It’s undoubtedly a beautiful country. Coconuts on the beach, white sand, blue sea and all that. Everyone moves slowly because of the heat and the Solomon Islanders seem even more laid back than Bryan Ferry after a three-martini lunch. The pace of life is pleasing. Everything runs on ‘Solomon time’, which means things get done when people turn up. All times are moveable. It’s almost as if the Loaded editorial team is running an entire country. Another plus is that although hardly any houses have televisions, everyone knows Premiership football. Big matches can be watched at a bar in Honiara and luckily I’ve arrived with a stock of football magazines such as 90 Minutes where I’d done some freelance subbing. They’re like hard currency in the Solomons and Nicola’s local friends are very pleased to receive them.

We sit drinking beers in a shaded bar by the beach and it all seems ideal – at least until nightfall. As ever, we clash over sleeping arrangements in our beach hut. At home, she wants to sleep with the window open. Here, she feels ‘trapped’ by the mosquito net over our bed. So she removes it. I soon realise that her body is cold-blooded and possibly reptilian. Mine is hot, sweaty and deliciously salty. Mosquitoes adore it, and spend the night feasting on my flesh. In the morning I’m covered in itchy bites; Nicola is untouched. For her, I’m a one-man mosquito repellant. But for my course of anti-malarial tablets, I’d surely have died a lingering death in the fashion of some Victorian missionary.

After three days at the beach we return to Honiara, staying in a local guest house. From there we take a walk to Bloody Ridge, so named because of the thousands of soldiers who perished there in fighting between US and Japanese troops during the Second World War. We have lunch with Nicola’s friend ML, a journalist with The Australian newspaper who’s researching a book on the civil war in the nearby island of Bougainville. I’m not sure what my own field of research is, although ML does supply some useful information about a riot following an offside goal in the Guadalcanal/Malaita Island derby match. Aggro is universal, it seems.

We take a motorised canoe across the waters to the volcanic island of Savo. As we arrive a group of Solomon Islanders in traditional dress are performing tribal dances. Is this for me? Erm, no, a group of Swedish tourists are politely applauding. Nicola can speak Solomon pidgin (the English/Portuguese hybrid that developed when Europeans first visited the islands), and this helps negotiate our passage. She introduces me to several useful phrases such as ‘What kinda Mary u tu ya? You makem me karange for good now!’ which translates as ‘What kind of woman are you, you make me permanently crazy!’ – sentiments that had often occurred to me in London.

We spend the night with a local family in a traditional hut made of leaves, sleeping on plaited leaf mats. The local taboos take some getting used to; such as women not being allowed to show their thighs (thighs matters?) and the fact that at nightfall the entire village goes down to the sea to wash and, if necessary, go to the loo on the beach. Is there no lavatorial indignity Nicola won’t put me through? At first I think we’re supposed to try to defecate in waist-high waves. When I discover it’s on the beach in the dark, that’s even worse. The tide is meant to wash everything away, but even so, group pooing is a little over-familiar for this Englishman abroad. Maybe if I don’t eat too much there will be no need for a loo trip until Honiara.

The next morning George, a local guide, takes us on a guided walk to the volcano, along with his dog. He carries a huge bush knife and chops away foliage in the casual manner of the Solomon Islander. George strides effortlessly through river valleys and then up a steep sharp ridge towards the volcanic peak. Dense rainforest is all around us. George stops to show us a snake sitting on a vine, just as I’m about to put my hand on it. He yomps up ever-steeper hills in flip-flops and a vest with the air of a man on a Sunday stroll.

My outfit is an entirely appropriate pair of luminous green surfing shorts, as modelled by English lager louts abroad, a navy-blue Fred Perry T-shirt, trainers and a baseball cap. Soon poor Fred Perry is saturated with sweat later analysed as containing 90 per cent beer. Here is my personal Bloody Ridge. My thoughts turn to the Second World War battles fought here and how hellish it all must have been. The heat is relentless and Nicola and I find ourselves drinking copious amounts of water. They don’t train you how to be an explorer at comprehensive school or, indeed, during days at Loaded. It’s worth the effort though, when we finally reach the summit and find a plateau of smouldering sulphur, boiling streams and hot geysers.

Our next trip is a flight to the island of Bellona in a tiny twelve-person light aircraft. We fly over idyllic islands covered in coconut palms and surrounded by sand and coral reefs. The islands are only a metre or so above sea level and the huts are built on stilts. ‘They’ll be the first to go when the sea level rises,’ says Nicola. If it’s true, if the sea level really is rising because of human-created global warming, then this is the consequence of Westerners sitting in centrally-heated flats wearing just a T-shirt in winter. Other people’s homes became obliterated.

We fly on, over taller, conical islands. They’re still covered in rainforest, but from the air, you can see the ugly red scars of logging roads. Nicola tells me of islands where clear-felling has occurred. Without the protection of the rainforest, the fertile soils leech into the sea, swamping the coral reefs and ruining the villagers’ fishing grounds.

Bellona’s airport is a stretch of grass. It’s all rather pleasing after Heathrow – and the whole island has turned out to greet the plane, a vital source of supplies. The terminal building is one open-air stall selling instant coffee. It’s windier than on Guadalcanal, and the welcome breeze keeps the mosquitoes away.

Nicola has booked us into a cave with a double bed. The cave doubles as a hotel room. We’re met by John and Nita, the owners of the cave hotel, and several of their children. They’re hugely hospitable throughout our stay. First we walk for an hour through the trees. John points out various giant spiders sitting in huge webs spanning coconut trunks. His son Edmond shins up a gigantic coconut palm in roughly two seconds and presents us with a fresh coconut.

Reaching some cliffs, we descend steep coral paths and find our cave, standing some ten metres above an angry sea. John and his family own the cave and use it to shelter in whenever cyclones hit the island. Eventually he had the idea of turning it into a hotel. It’s certainly more salubrious than some of my short-life addresses have been. A double bed rests under a coral overhang, with a tarpaulin above it to keep off any drips from the rocks. A rock plateau in front of the bed area forms a natural balcony overlooking the sea. It has several chairs and a shelf of books. Our view is of white breakers. We can glimpse a bay below where thousands of green coconut crabs – capable of crushing a coconut with a squeeze from one immense pincer – congregate during their breeding cycle. At night the room is lit by candles resting in natural rock shelves.

The cave has a ‘drop loo’, a Tardis-like cabinet in the corner of the plateau area. It’s basically a bog seat set over a twenty-foot drop. Again I can’t look down it, for fear of testicle-crushing pincers grabbing my privates. What if the coconut crabs climb the rocks? Unfortunately I’m old enough to remember The Macra Terror, a Doctor Who adventure from the Patrick Troughton era, where giant crab-like creatures menace a human colony, probably having infiltrated through the sewage system.

Toilet terrors aside, our nights are comfortable and indeed, romantic. Candlelight flickering on coral, stars flickering over the sea. I’m a tanned cave man in a Fred Perry shirt. John takes me through a tiny hole into the rock into an adjoining bat cave. We’re covered in slimy mud. His torch reveals hundreds of the things, upside down.

The food is wonderful. Nita, John and various children arrive as part of ‘cave service’, carrying cassava, yams, taro, sweet potatoes, fish and many other delicacies, all stored in traditional baskets made from the fronds of coconut palms. For three days we chill. John sits and talks about UK politics and religion; his son Edmond is very impressed to receive a copy of 90 Minutes. Nita and her daughters paint a tattoo of a bonito (a tuna) on my arm, the symbol of their island. It looks good with the shell necklace Nicola has bought me. My life is all getting a bit Robinson Crusoe, but without constant threats to our survival. At least until our final night.

Nicola thought it would be romantic to spend my birthday in a cave when she organised our trip. For all our differences, she thought it worth making a real effort for the world’s worst adventurer. A man whose foot odour could probably finish off an entire indigenous species. She’s bought a pair of turtle-shell rings (‘it’s endangered so we mustn’t tell anyone,’ she warns). The ring is a nice burnished brown colour. But then I start to wonder if this is some huge token of commitment. A sign of some sort of mental engagement. Maybe it means we’re already married on the Solomons? No, no, it’s just a ring, that’s all. I think.

We spend a mellow morning brewing real coffee on the camp stove. I read Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Nicola is sitting in her lava lava (the local version of a sarong) reading up on PNG forestry. I am finally relaxing in this laid-back eco-friendly sort of loafing. We have lunch and then lie in bed away from the sun. We’re making love, listening to the breakers, when ‘SNAKE!!!!! SNAKE!!!!! It’s up there! DO SOMETHING!!!!’

What, a trouser snake? No something worse. Bizarrely, a snake is dangling from the top of the cave’s arch.

‘It’s a sea snake – they’re poisonous!!!’ screams Nicola, whose worst phobia is close encounters with either snakes or worms.

‘OK. Stand back, keep calm, don’t panic,’ I mutter uselessly, hopping from foot to foot, wondering if I should throw a flip-flop at it. For God’s sake! What do you do when confronted with a snake? I try to remember how they coped with Ka the sneaky snake in The Jungle Book. Captain James T Kirk would, of course, roll over on the ground and then fire off his phaser. But I’m armed only with a plastic sandal and am totally useless. The snake falls from the roof and slides towards a fold in the rock.

At this moment, Nita and John arrive with more food, and seem unfazed by the slippery visitor.

‘It must have been dropped by a seagull, that’s the only way it could could have got out of the sea,’ says Nicola, suddenly lucid in all aspects of snake lore.

Our Solomon Island friends take a calm approach to the problem. First Nita throws rocks at the snake until it disappears into a crevice. John waits, ponders and then returns with a kettle of boiling water and a tube. He pours the boiling water down the tube into the crevice and claims to have killed the snake. It’s not exactly a World Wildlife Fund-approved way of removing a snake, but it makes Nicola feel a little better. We spend an uneasy final night, wondering whether the snake is really dead and what else might be crawling through the coral passages.

We’re up at six the next morning to walk to the airport with, seemingly, the whole island there for the plane’s arrival – only it’s four hours late, as the plane had been chartered to move a body, a common practice in the Solomons. Maybe the unfortunate cadaver was another victim of flying sea snakes.

Our hosts have been superb, it’s a beautiful place, but it’s not right for me, not as a place to live. The Greens speak lovingly of wildernesses and the untapped knowledge of indigenous peoples. Being hunted by mosquitoes, coconut crabs and sea snakes has left me desiring nothing more than the iffy cigarette sellers and gridlocked sprawl of the snake-free Holloway Road. Out there in the other world where they have TV, Kermit the frog is singing about how it’s not easy being Green. I know just what he means.

We continue to island hop. Munda has a bit more lad credibility, as it’s full of Second World War memorabilia. Rusting troop carriers still lie in the sea and the road the Japanese built to the airport is pot-holed but still intact. We visit a 73-year-old islander called Alfred who has a Second World War relic shed. He reminisces about his old English commanding officer, ‘Mister Bolton’ and Nicola takes a snap of me wearing a Loaded T-shirt, grenade in hand, US helmet on head.

We arrive at Choiseul Island only to be attacked by swarms of mosquitoes, forcing me to repel them with Rambo-esque towel attacks. It’s a further hour-long canoe ride to visit Chris and Maggie, Australian and English development workers. We stay in the old hospital next to their house, and Nicola has bad vibes about dead souls around us. In their traditional Solomon-style house Maggie and Chris have solar panels and are self-sufficient in energy. Once again, we shower standing under a bucket filled with hot water. For some reason Nicola is under the impression that I can snorkel. Chris takes us out over the coral reef. My swimming is equal to my snake-catching abilities. I flounder and discover just how sharp coral is. The next day is spent indoors, clad in a lava lava, countless plasters on my torn legs.

‘But you said you could snorkel!’ exclaims Nicola.

‘No, I said I once did an hour’s diving off the Barrier Reef in Australia. That was OK. We had oxygen tanks. I’ve never bloody snorkelled in my life and I can’t do it.’

Ernest Hemingway I am not. Helping indigenous people fight loggers clearly requires what Thomas Gradgrind would term ‘an eminently practical man’ – and I am an eminently unpractical one.

We miss our first return flight back to Honiara because Nicola refuses to board the small plane in a thunderstorm, as she is sure it’s going to be struck by lightning. But rule one of a successful relationship is to never question your partner’s emotional intelligence. Or emotional stupidity if you’re worried you’ll never leave the Pacific.

After a further day’s wait we finally return to Honiara. We stay with friends of Nicola’s, a lovely hospitable local family and their wantoks (extended family). In one final dashing of my lad credibility, they tell me I look very like Prince Andrew.

On my last day in the Solomons we visit Matanikau Falls. Nicola has told me to be careful not to fall from the rocks at the top of the waterfall – one man stumbled a few years ago and his body was found two miles downstream. Oh, and there are crocodiles in the river.

After a sweltering walk we take extra care on the rocks. We view the falls from a safe distance, climb down to a lower area and relax by a rock pool. The surface is level here and a mere handful of centimetres above the pool, so there’s obviously no danger now. That’s until my sandal somehow slips on an apparently solid rock and my body is propelled through the humid air and plunged straight into the rock pool. Cold water surrounds my pathetic form as I’m completely immersed. Then from underwater my body emerges like some Arthurian apparition, holding my sodden Canon Sure Shot camera above my head. It’s whirring uncontrollably, the film is rewinding in demented fashion, and the flash bulb is going off. The camera hasn’t appreciated its dunking. Nicola is laughing uncontrollably, clearly not appreciating how close to death I’ve come.

‘I told you not to fall!’ she chortles.

‘It was my sandal! Look, I’m hurt!’

Desperately I swim the metre to the edge of the pool and clamber out. My camera refuses to work and the film is probably now useless. My right foot has hit a rock and is missing a small square of skin. Maybe it’s an inept explorer’s equivalent to a bullet wound.

Luckily, I’m departing these humid and dangerous parts that night, returning to London. Nicola’s flying on to PNG with her team of fact-finding Solomon Island community foresters, and then staying for a further three months.

‘I love you,’ she says, at the airport.

‘Even when I’m falling in waterfalls?’

‘Even then.’

‘I love you too.’

What am I saying? Has the soaking affected the lad side of my brain? She’ll be working on an isolated project in the bush. And they’ll probably ask her to stay longer. And she won’t be able to say no because she loves the tropics. And there’s bound to be some hunky forestry-type man involved in the project who’ll impress her with his knowledge of tropical hardwoods.

‘Come on, you’d better go through.’

‘Bye, I’ll see if I can salvage the film.’

The flight to Brisbane is at the horrible time of ten past two in the morning. Then it’s a six o’clock internal flight to Sydney. I book into a youth hostel on arrival and immediately place my sodden clothes from the waterfall debacle into the YHA’s washing machine. Sleep can come later. The sweat-encrusted clothes go through their cycle and I remove them, only to find my trousers still have my camera in them. If it hasn’t been destroyed by its saturation in the Matanikau Falls it certainly has now.

Exhaustedly, I stare at my pile of laundry and my sodden camera and think that I’ve failed. Failed to be a global citizen. I’ll never be able to mention ‘PNG’ or ‘SI’ at Oxford Green parties or talk about ‘development issues’. Development issues to me are when your pictures don’t come back from Boots because they’ve been immersed in a waterfall, not anything to do with saving the planet.

Foreign languages are too difficult, and I don’t want to seek wilderness or be like indigenous people. My girlfriend wants to save the rainforests and that’s good, but I need my urban space, my consumer durables and an open pub.

Looking at my ruined camera, it seems that my flirtation with the Greener side of life may be at an end. It seems my sodden relationship may be over too.