Voyage of the dim-dims

The ship's passengers are mainly over-fifty Aussie couples — chipper, can-do, inquisitive, droll. We attend PowerPoint lectures by war historians, ornithologists, and botanists. The dress is casual, the chatter breezy to balmy. The tropic nights are atmospheric enough without a casino or a climbing wall or a midnight buffet.

The Orion is an attempt to marry the go-anywhere ethic of a Lindblad cruise with some of the luxury of a Seabourn. It's two years old, with mythology-themed artwork on its richly wood-grained walls, and mirrored ceilings that reflect the ocean's surface racing past. The cabins have marble baths and flat-screen TVs, but for these ten days all I watch is the channel that maps where the Orion is in nautical space as our digital latitude ticks down toward the equator.

Next stop is the Louisiade Archipelago — ten volcanic islands and coral reefs that see zero mass tourism. By eight in the morning we drop anchor off uninhabited Nivani Island, a mound of jungle rising like bread from the sea, with cowlicks of coconut palms shooting up and a white beach peeking out from the far side. We are spirited over in Zodiac rubber duckies, the water so clear that we seem to levitate above the ocean floor. Even ninety-four-year-old Phyllis comes ashore and sits propped against an almond tree. Most of us go snorkeling off the beach, and our prize is a Japanese fighter plane — one of the legendary Zeroes that controlled the Pacific skies early in the war — nestled among the coral in twelve feet of water. We float above it as in a dream: the propeller bent, the cockpit empty, the control stick fuzzed over with algae, the fish ghosting in and out of the fuselage. Back on the beach, we have visitors. Some men and boys have canoed over from the next island. The elderly one is their bigman, or chief, and he tells me that Nivani was left to him by an Australian man who ran a coconut plantation here until twenty years ago. "When Dusty Miller leave, he leave everything — store and houses. It was very good!" the bigman recalls. "Then cyclone knock down all the buildings." He laughs heartily. "The worstest one!"

His name is Milia Losane, and his nose is so upturned that his nostrils vent horizontally. He holds a pointed walking stick that he's hoping to sell. "We used it to spear the people," he says, laughing incongruously again. Two grandsons cling to his legs. He explains: "They want to see dim-dim. Because dim-dim give them lollies and water. They never see a big boat. When they see you, they say, 'Oh, Grand, good people are coming!' "

"You're very hospitable," I vouch, ambassadorially.

"Thank you for coming," he replies. "We can see the boat, and lots of dim-dim."

After the visitors return to their own island, Paul from South Dakota discovers that his pack has been rifled, his camera jimmied open, his six-thousand-dollar hearing aids taken.

That evening at sunset, as the Orion carries us away from the Louisiades, I linger at the portside rail, watching flying fish zipper the fabric of the sea while the sky resolves into brushstrokes of butterscotch and clouds of battleship gray begin marshaling over the horizon.

Good people coming, indeed.

Here come the dim-dims!

Diane Cook and Len Jenshel / Condé Nast Traveler Boatmen offer local wares to cruise ship passengers who stop on Nuratu Island, a tiny cay across from Kitava in the Trobriand Islands.

In anthropological circles, residents of the Trobriand Islands are famous for groundbreaking studies of their reverence for yams and their uninhibited sexual mores (especially during the yam festival). The Islands of Love, they've been called, and when we anchor off Kitava, an out island of this out-island chain, we are welcomed exuberantly by fishermen in dugouts encircling our bow, grinning orangely. Now a grander canoe decorated with carvings and shells appears, propelled by nine bareback oarsmen. This is one of the ceremonial kula canoes which still, to this day, are used to carry out ancient exchanges of shell jewelry with distant islands — necklaces moving clockwise and armbands counterclockwise in a two-hundred-mile-wide circle: a kula ring of trust and social status that Westerners have a hard time understanding.

On Kitava's beach, still wearing our dorky life vests, we are greeted by bare-breasted teenage girls who drape flower necklaces over our sun-hatted heads. Then we are treated to round after round of enthusiastic dancing by skimpily costumed children in all stages of development (except that nobody on the island looks fat). Kitava's entire population must be here, the adults laughing as six-year-old boys pump their pelvises erotically, then fall down exhausted. (I notice, too: The men don't go bald.)

An islander named Abraham Cameron leads us on a walk up a rutted path toward their village. We take a detour to see the grave of his grandfather — an Australian colonial administrator who jumped ship in 1911, started a coconut plantation, and renamed himself King Cameron. The grave is atop a cliff, alone, with a knockout view of the beach and its mint-green waters and our faithful ship tethered to the sea. The tombstone honors Cyril Barneveldt Cameron, born in Tasmania in 1887, died on Kitava in 1966. Abraham says his grandfather — alone among Kitavan men — had three wives. That's why some islanders, like him, are lighter-skinned. Since the king died forty years ago, no other dim-dims have shown up to claim the position.

The village consists of family compounds built along a footpath running through an emerald clearing. The houses have walls of woven coconut fronds and roofs of pandanus fronds. It's a quiet village: no electricity. Water is carried in pails from a spring.

Paul, the man from South Dakota, sighs: "I could live like this." Can he be thinking three wives?

Children follow us, hoping we'll be so generous as to give them our shiny plastic water bottles when they're empty. We pass their school and peek into a classroom. Signs lecture: DON'T LOSE HOPE, and YOU DO NOT BE AFRAID. But school is out because the dim-dims are here.

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