Voyage of the dim-dims

After we go ashore to snorkel, I walk around Kennedy Island (it takes only a few minutes) with Orion botanist Tony Roberts and ask him if the future U.S. bigman was correct in concluding that there was nothing to eat here. Tony surveys the foliage. "There's beach lettuce." With relish now he looks up: "You can make fishhooks from the branches of these casuarina trees." He looks down: "The islanders make string from the fiber on those washed-up coconut husks, and you could use those hermit crabs for bait." He moves on to consider rain-catchment systems, having heard enough of great Americans.

Another day in the Solomons we play in and around the expanses of double-reefed Marovo Lagoon, and I try two optional tours. The first, a visit to a remote village, feels too staged—too worldly, in fact. The afternoon tour is more relaxed: going fishing with an islander.

I had pictured a dugout rather than a fiberglass skiff with a forty-horse motor. I tell my man Robert that I want to fish like the locals fish, so instead of a rod and reel he shows me three outfits — a wooden stick with the fish line and hook wrapped around it, a stub of PVC pipe with a similar drop line, and (my ultimate choice) an empty can of cockroach insecticide, rigged and ready for big game.

We angle out through the open sea for twenty minutes. Then he shouts, "There are tuna!" and points to a swarm in the water like pelting rain. "Prepare your line, Tom!"

A young guy, he likes to call out my name. "Pull it, Tom!" "Good, Tom!" "Pull it in, Tom!" We troll for an hour or so, talking about our dreams and bad habits.

Diane Cook and Len Jenshel / Condé Nast Traveler A snorkeling trip in Deboyne Lagoon, in the Louisiade Archipelago, reveals wrecks of Second World War Japanese Zeros and an unihabited isle called Nivani (pictured), worthy of Robinson Crusoe.

Last stop for adventure? Let's climb an active volcano.

We're back in Papua New Guinea, at the out-island port of Rabaul, which is encircled by six volcanic cones. In its colonial heyday, Rabaul was a gem of the South Pacific. Then in 1994, two of the cones blew at once and buried the city under several feet of ash. One volcano, Tuvurvur, is still steaming. That's the one we'll try to climb.

Twelve of us set out in a van through a wasteland of grayish-black ash grown over with sugarcane. At a village overrun with naked children, we crawl into outriggered dugouts and paddle (without our life vests, for once) across a wide inlet toward Tuvurvur, which looks more forbidding the closer we get. Wisps of steam vent from the crater and, eerily, leak out the sides. The dark slopes are streaked white and yellow with sulfur deposits. We land on a rocky shore and start trudging.

It's tough going, scrambling over loose boulders — especially in a pair of open-toed sandals. Half of the party drops out right away. We try to avoid stepping where steam is hissing out, white-hot, between the rocks. The drill is: If you smell rubber burning, move your foot fast.

I catch up with the guide: Bruce Alexander, an Aussie who moved here in 1992, owns the Hamamas Hotel, and has gotten into politics. He says Tuvurvur stopped spewing ash and rocks four months ago but could start again at any time. We struggle down a rocky ravine and steeply up the other side. Bruce points to a crest a hundred feet above: "What we do is head straight up there, which is probably the hardest part, and then we get on a ridge and we get this nice wind." Once on the ridge, however, we see that it's merely the prelude to a vastly longer ridgeline which knifes up agonizingly, at a forty-five-degree angle, to the sky.

Eventually, only two of us are left climbing, and it's a recreational hell. The rocks are of lightweight pumice and give way underfoot, so half of each step is lost to the backslide. At midday under an equatorial sun, the rocks are too toasty for steadying myself with my hands. I manage twenty steps and then have to stop, heaving for breath, my eyes burning, the air stinking of sulfur.

My new Aussie friend Terry summits first, to find a brown-skinned teenager already there, one of Bruce's workers. Then I make it, and we lie down to peer over the lip into the crater. It's a dizzying view into a rounded cauldron marbled with gassy yellows and slime greens.

I hear the teenager, Blue, reminding his boss about the time they rolled a tire down Tuvurvur into the sea.

I'm baffled: "Who'd want to drag a tire way up here?"

"See," Bruce tries to explain, nodding toward Blue, "these fellas, they're called mungies. M-u-n-g-i-e-s. And they're all my mungies. So I bloody just tell 'em!"

We perch on Tuvurvur's rim, gazing dumbly down upon the sea and the buried city. The vista is timeless and so, it seems, is the dialogue. That spirit of King Cameron, of the taim bilong masta, lives on. Still, all I can think of right now is how lucky we are — we paying customers, we dim-dims — to be sitting here on top of a volcano in a land that the world has left behind. How lucky all of us are: to have cruised so far from the planet we call home.

I hotfoot it safely down the volcano, return to the ship for one last lunch, and burn my fingers on a hot dog.

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