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AIR TRAVEL

November 15-16, 1997
By Rusty Isler

LAX — I just came from where all Delta employees first go after they die - Atlanta. . Getting ready to get on an Air New Zealand flight from LA to Sidney.  The flight will bo on a Boeing  747-400

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Romance is in the salt air we're breathing. We felt it at dawn this morning, when we sailed past a tiny coral atoll inhabited by millions of birds, and watched two fish eagles take flight. We felt it again when we anchored next to Yanamba, one of the Marshall Bennett Islands. A fantastic coral reef skirts one side, and a small village graces the other. Several dozen thatched huts were strewn along a pristine white beach, small canoes were lined up on the sand, and the sea beyond was colored in stripes of turquoise and deep blue.

Several larger sailing canoes were covered with banana-leaf mats. These are the craft that ply the kula ring — a cycle of ritual and trade that connects the region's scattered islands. Moving clockwise from island to island, some kula sailors pass along ceremonial bead and shell necklaces called soulava. Others travel counter-clockwise, transporting conch-shell armbands known as mwali. The objects are never bought or sold. Rather, they are transferred from island to island, circling the entire kula ring time after time. It's like an endless chain letter where nobody gets rich.

This is how the people of these far-flung islands transcend their isolation, creating a sense of community. This is how they carry news, make new acquaintances, and even find mates. Separated by great expanses of water, without benefit of telephones, radio, or even mail, people yearn for contact. They need to know that they're not alone in this world.

James Kinjimali, the Melanesian Discoverer's assistant cruise director, also seems to be reaching out for contact from his roots deep in his culture's past. Convinced that education was the key to his children's future, he left his village on the Sepik River and moved to the coastal city of Madang. Raised among the Sepik's crocodiles and spirit houses, he's equally at home with tourists and video cameras. Once he showed Jacques Cousteau the way around these islands. This week, he showed me the way around local customs, including those that govern sexuality.

"Sometimes people think of us as unsophisticated," he says, "but that's not true. In the spirit house of my village, the elders use carved dolls to teach the boys about sex, including the parts of the woman's body."

And do the boys learn that a woman must be satisfied sexually? "Of course," James chuckles. "The elders teach us how to make a woman feel good. They also teach us that sex can sap a man's strength. Sex during the daytime should be avoided. That's the time we must work." The boys also learn strict rules and regulations prohibiting sex during menstruation. Menstrual blood is said to be a source of bad magic.

After childbirth, James continues, a man may not approach his wife for a full nine months, while she breast-feeds. "That's a long time," I say. "What happens if the man takes up with another woman — even if only temporarily?"

"The wife may become very sad," says James. "She may leave her husband and return to her own family."

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James yearns for the day he can return to his village. "When my children finish school," he says, "I'll retire and become the village chief. Then my kids will help support me." But for the time being, James is still at sea, along with Captain Leonard.

Leonard loves a good story. He told me how whales sleep with their heads down and their tails in the air, catching the breeze, drifting from place to place by night. "It's like sailing on autopilot," he says. "Once, a whale swallowed a man by accident. The man made the whale so sick to his stomach that he vomited him up, still alive."

Does he really believe those things, I ask, or are they just seafarers' yarns? "You can never tell," says Leonard. "That's what I heard from the old men. They know lots of things."

As the days pass by in this island realm, all sorts of things can happen. We've sailed to the Islands of Love, drifted past tiny coral atolls, wondered at endless ranks of coconut palms, and enjoyed the unwavering hospitality of bright-eyed villagers. In a way, it becomes repetitive. Yet that's what makes the magic happen. The scenery and sensations slowly take over your nervous system. The serenity sweeps away the memory of anywhere else. There is no New York, London, or Paris, no Rome, Moscow, or Tel Aviv. Just before you have to leave, you realize that an entire universe of love begins and ends right here, in the heart of the South Pacific.