Voyage of the dim-dims

By Tom Huth

updated 1:49 p.m. ET Jan. 7, 2008

As the cruise ship leaves Cairns, in northeastern Australia, and heads out over the Coral Sea bound for adventure in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, the captain's voice booms through the overhead speakers: A tropical cyclone is moving west-southwest from the Solomons, and we might feel some unusually large swells. "It will be interesting," he muses, "to see what happens."

That night, we fall asleep to the sound of the waves surging against the hull and retreating back to the deep. Then, after a day spent at sea (and after the cyclone has torn up the coast we've left behind), the new dawn finds us slipping silently through a mirrored bay amid the green mountain fastnesses of Papua New Guinea.

Smoke from campfires hangs low over the jungle. Shacks on stilts appear at water's edge, children waving our way. A mahogany-chested fisherman glides past in a dugout canoe. From Deck 5 I try out my pidgin, asking his name: "Wanem nem bilong yu?" Then we see the grass-skirted dancers waiting in the shade.

Is it possible to access real adventure from a cruise ship? That is the plan. Can a passenger have genuine cross-cultural encounters during his limited time ashore? That's the challenge, and I'm sleepless with anticipation. The vessel for these schemes is a small luxury-expedition ship: the MV Orion, the length of a football field, with only forty-six guests for this maiden itinerary. She has a shallow draft (twelve and a half feet) for getting where most cruise ships can't, plus ten motorized rafts to beach us through the surf like the Marines at Guadalcanal.

Papua New Guinea and the Solomons look to be ideal candidates for small-ship exploration: They have two of the world's most intriguingly primitive societies, unfortunately with tourism infrastructures to match. If you fly in, you have to lay over in a capital known for street crime (Port Moresby) or the afterglow of ethnic cleansing (Honiara) — then pray that your internal flights aren't canceled. If you drive, the few bad roads don't go far, and if you're involved in an accident, you're advised to keep driving to escape potential roadside justice.

We cruisers instead merely trip down the gangway, our tummies full from breakfast, and we're in the port town of Alotau, at the eastern tip of New Guinea's mainland. We have seven and a half hours to nose around, by guided tour or on our own. Locals wearing secondhand Western clothes pad along the shoulders of the one paved road, barefoot or in flip-flops, their mouths stained safety-vest orange from chewing betel nuts, and I fall in with them, exchanging good mornings. One man presumes, "You come from big ship?" A billboard warns: "Lukautim Yu Yet Long AIDS" ("Beware of AIDS"). A young guy gives me a low five. I ask another man, "What is there to see here?" and he intones, "The slow development of the town." He thinks. "Maybe you could invest." I parry, "That would help you." He smiles. "And help you too."

As a white American traveler, I have always reveled in rubbing shoulders (it's the Detroit in me) with ordinary people at the ends of the earth who have had scarce contact with my own kind. I like the freshness, the nakedness, the sheer unlikelihood of these engagements. I hunger to see that flash of recognition in their eyes.

Most of Alotau's business takes place outside. In a shaded marketplace, sellers hunker behind meager piles of homegrown betel nuts, peanuts, bananas, waving towels against the flies. Children stare at the alien in their midst. I greet a man squatting with his family, "How you doing?" He answers politely, "We just sitting around." It's hard to know where to begin.

The Orion's self-styled anthropologist, Justin Friend, says there's a word in the local pidgin tongue for people like us. A white person is a dim-dim. Dim-dims are revered in New Guinea for their wonderful possessions but snickered at because, for example, they blow their noses into rags that they put back in their pockets, or they work so hard in order to have things which don't make them happy.

Dim-dims cast long shadows. The war we once fought on the shores of New Guinea and the Solomons, the one we call World War II, left lots of wrecked weaponry lying around. Near Alotau, a dozen of us inspect a rusted-out landing craft at the spot where the Japanese stormed ashore in August 1942 on their triumphant sweep through the western Pacific after bombing Pearl Harbor. Here at the Battle of Milne Bay, a larger Australian force dealt Japan its first land defeat of the war — just the tonic the Allies needed.

At the edge of a dark forest, we marvel at the sight of nine U.S. Marine landing barges being devoured by the many-stilted roots of the banyan trees. I'm sitting on a log with a guide named Trouble, and he's talking cannibalism — how it was practiced around here until the war. It was ritual: "To get rid of all your frustration with your enemy, you cook him up and eat him. But quite a number of missionaries also were killed and eaten," he assures me. Back in town, colorful workboats ferry people and cargo to and from outlying islands. Alotau's main export, I'm told, is betel nuts. This addictive stimulant is the runaway pastime and, it appears, the linchpin of the economy. Billboards remind: "Do Not Discharge Spittle or Scum in Public Places or in the Rubbish Bin." But the whole town is polka-dotted with orange betel juice. Vendors of the green palm fruits, all charging the same price, line the waterfront.

I approach one woman to ask, "Would it make me sick?" and a crowd begins to form. With my teeth, I crack open the husk to get to the grape-sized fruit. "Don't swallow the juice," she advises, and kids giggle. I start chewing as instructed, adding a bite of pepper root (for flavor) dipped in crushed lime (for potency).

Suddenly I gag — every drop of moisture sucked from my mortal being. This inspires the first of several choruses of good-humored laughter. At last I spit the thing out, to one more peal of hometown satisfaction.

I wave good-bye and walk away. A hundred paces later, I have to uncap my precious bottle of purified water to rinse out the taste, and I hear them laugh again, still watching the dim-dim return to his ship.

Diane Cook and Len Jenshel / Condé Nast Traveler The Orion's Delphinius Cafe presents a locally inspired menu under the stars.

Yet when the Orion pulls away at five that evening, there is no doubt where this explorer stands on the pivotal question: Would you rather be chewing on an authentic hunk of taro root tonight and sleeping on a straw mat under a mosquito net in the name of realism, or would you like to eat your Tasmanian oysters and kingfish with parsnip root and your loin of lamb with eggplant polenta, not in the Constellation Restaurant where you dined last night but on the upper deck under the stars at the Delphinius Café with those new Aussie friends you're running with — the drinkers and dancers, the smokers and jokers?

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