Vanuatu

Population: Fuzzy Wuzzies
Located: In the Pacific
Known for: Luxury Resorts

I always thought Melanesians looked like the guy that ate hamburgers on Popeye. Wimpy. It was something about the nose, because Wimpy is short and white and fat and clothed and Melanesians are nothing of those thing. They are tall and tanned and svelte and nude.

Melanesians are found from Irian Jaya to Fiji. Papuans are Melanesians as are Solomon Islanders. Vanuatans are Melanesians and are the nicest. I base this on, a) they don't have 'internal strife' like the Solomon Islanders and Fijians, and, b) they were voted the happiest people in the world. I could have just listed the latter fact, but wanted to increase my worldliness in the eyes and hearts and minds of my four person deep readership.

Wimpy was Popeye's best friend. Popeye was born in a typhoon and Vanuatu is often hit by typhoons, which we call cyclones and I don't know what Vanuatans call them. They speak a funny language, called Bislama, which we would call Pidgin English. Without dragging you along a coral reef of boredom with my long-winded explanation canoe, it was a language created so the different Melanesians could communicate with each other on the cane plantations, it is a collaboration of English words and Melanesian grammar. The Vanuatu national anthem, for example, goes:

Yumi, Yumi, yumi i glad long talem se
Yumi, yumi, yumi ol man blong Vanuatu

God i givim ples ya long yumi,
Yumi glat tumas long hem,
Yumi strong mo yumi fri long hem,
Yumi brata evriwan!

and this translates as:

We, we, we are happy to proclaim (literally you-me = we)
We, we, we are the people of Vanuatu (all man belong Vanuatu)

God has given us this land (is giving place yes long you-me)
This gives us great cause for rejoicing (you-me glad too much long him)
We are strong, we are free in this land (you-me strong more you-me free in him)
We are all brothers! (you-me brother everyone).

Maybe you, like me, fell in love with yumi. You and me means we, goddamn that is charming. How about this one, yumitufala, or you and me two fellahs, or us. Erection inspiring shit. How about blong. Blong is one of my favourite words and comes directly from belong. Everything blong something. Headlights on a car are literally translated to fire belong truck.

They say that near the end of his life Ernest Hemingway spoke like this, that the economy of words that he was famous for got to such a point he just started speaking pidgin. He was one of the best manipulators of words the world has ever seen.

During World War 2 Popeye fought the Japs in the Pacific, many good ol' American patriots did. The kindness of one of them, or perhaps many of them, inspired a cult called the Jon Frum cult. This is a cult on certain Vanuatu islands that worships an unknown American called Jon Frum, who is set to return to Vanuatu and deliver prosperity to the people. It is said that when the Yanks turned up on these islands they had such amazing things and were so seemingly prosperous, that they were treated like Gods. Perhaps one, who identified himself as "John from America" (Jon Frum), promised to return one day. Some of the more bizarre Jon Frum cults believe that he is inside a volcano that periodically erupts, perhaps hoping he will be shot out of it one day, raining white goods upon the villagers.

They also speak French and English in Vanuatu, and are truly happy people. Some of the islands are remote, really remote, and some are covered in resorts. There is surf in Vanuatu, and volcanoes galore and cyclones sometime and no native mammals, bar a small rat.

It is also where they do that bungy jump without the bungy, just with vines. They do that when the boy becomes a man. They do it when they are younger, their bones supple, their environmental circumstances forcing them to mature earlier than us cream puffs in the developed world.

I would do it sometime next year, I hope, probably after my thirtieth birthday.