When you come from a world of shops, fixed prices and hard currency it’s hard to imagine how you’d go about trading goods or swapping skills in exchange for your family’s food. Yet, in the last year, sailing in Vanuatu, the Solomon islands, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, it’s been something that we had to get used to pretty quickly.
We set off prepared, having taken advice before leaving New Zealand about the best things to stock up on in places where they were cheap and readily available. Items like rice, sugar, flour, fish-hooks, matches, soap, tinned fish and corned beef, crackers, second-hand clothes, books and medicines. We were also well supplied with all the bamboo toothbrushes, clothes pegs, cotton buds and vegetable scrubbers that the nice folks at Go Bamboo sent to us to hand out in the most remote places to combat the use of their plastic equivalents.
In exchange for such offerings we receive papayas, pineapples, coconuts, bananas, oranges, limes, plantain, soursop, starfruit, fish, squid, crayfish, chillies, watercress, cabbage, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, peppers, nuts and more. There are countless funny negotiations in broken English about whether both parties feel satisfied with the swap, if we’ve got the amounts right. There are also countless places where we are simply gifted these items, just as a gesture of goodwill, or given flowers in welcome, woven hats and bags, shell necklaces and ornaments.
In Paeva, in the Solomon islands, they are well known for their artistry and we combine the last of our local cash with trade items in order to buy a beautifully carved wooden octopus and a shell inlaid bowl. Other places see us swapping some skills, learning the art of making coconut cream, offering help on someone’s winch, trading music and films on a computer memory stick. James patiently gives islanders lessons in making flatbreads and pancakes while I’m approached to bake cakes for local children.
It all happens very organically and naturally. After all, money becomes somewhat meaningless on islands with no shops, no banks, no roads. The kids get used to people canoeing up to our boat and offering various items. Rocket even starts writing the labels on bags of sugar and rice for us.
All too soon, when we arrive back into the towns and cities of Indonesia, we’re thrown back to the more normal way of getting groceries. There’s still trade to be done here, but only in the more remote parts. And we have a whole new currency to adjust to, with many confusing extra zeros to play with…