Voyage of the dim-dims

For lunch, the ship's staff set out a barbecue fit for a king on a pristine beach. The island boys take naturally to our volleyball and inflatable kayaks. Afterward, I walk back up to the village by myself, trying it barefoot. John, a young Kitavan, joins me, and we compare notes. He says that only six or seven people in the village — the teachers and nurses — work for money, the equivalent of eight dollars a day. "The rest are gardening. We work hard in the garden."

"So you eat whatever you grow."

"Or we sell it," he says.

"But who is there to buy it?"

"The teachers and medicals."

Such a small web they weave.

I wonder, "What can you spend the money on?"

"Rice," he says. "Clothes. Spoons. Forks."

Then he looks at me. "How much you pay on the ship?"

"Oh!" I laugh, embarrassed. How much would $5,100 be in his money? Finally I admit, "Twelve thousand kina."

He does a sucking thing with his teeth. Yet what can that number mean to a guy who doesn't know how old he is?

In a pathetic attempt to distance myself from the disparity, I tell him, "My company's paying, not me."

Later, we part at the beach with a handshake, and the day's last tender takes me on that magic carpet ride back to the Orion. That evening, there's a new excitement in the air, as if the trip has just begun. Plainly, Kitava has seduced us. Only the paired ornithologists, Cliff and Dawn, are disappointed. "A bad day watching birds," he laments over sundowners. "The people were too friendly."

Every morning, aerobic walkers circle the top deck and watch the South Pacific dawn coming up in time-lapse images — a frame every sixty-two seconds — while the humped silhouettes of our next treasured islands slide into view. Now we're in the Solomons, running through still waters toward Gizo, allegedly the nation's second-largest city but just a picturesque huddle of one-story wooden buildings looking across the harbor toward a blown volcano. (This was before the earthquake and tsunami of April 2007, which further diminished the skyline and left thirty-three people dead but hasn't disrupted tourism.)

We go ashore, and the Melanesians look darker than those in New Guinea. The harborside market is boisterous, with low-stakes games of chance. Gizo has a faint tropo-panache — the hip-hop beat pulsing from taxis, the PT-109 Bar & Restaurant, the Chinese general stores faced off across the dusty main street. A few dim-dims even seem to be living here: on Solomon time, as they say.

The waterfront road leads out of town past the police station, where Australian officers help keep the peace under Operation Helpem Fren; past uniformed boys walking to school; past the hospital, so poor that the beds have no sheets; past the prison, where a murderer talks through the fence ("At least I admit it"); to road's end, where a boy in a Linkin Park T-shirt sits on the seawall with nothing to do.

In the streets of Gizo, we can buy finer wood carvings than we saw in New Guinea. But I'm happy with the deal I strike at the dock, swapping a guy the T-shirt off my back (it says MOONDOGGIE'S, PISMO BEACH) for the one off his back, which proclaims, more mysteriously, HELPEM FREN.

During lunch the Orion repositions us four miles away, off an island that looks undistinguished: tiny and unevenly forested, with the white beach we've come to expect but no beckoning coco palms. This is Kennedy Island, to which the young JFK first swam with his men in August 1943 after their patrol boat, PT-109, was sunk by a Japanese destroyer. From the Orion's top decks we can see how the drama played out, the survivors swimming through shark-laden waters to this island, then the next one, then the next, in search of food and water. Through the clouds the sun casts a spotlight on Kennedy Island, and I'm touched anew by those old what-ifs.

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