Sign of the times

Nakamals Visited
Couldn't tell you.  I think one place was called bamboo, one was just in someone's back yard and they clearly did not have a license to sell kava, and one was over by Yumi Tu store.  All of the places were quiet and dark, which is more than I can say for most of the other places in town.  One of them had all these old bus seats inside the nakamal which was great for the back.  Technically, we were drinking in Freshwater, but it was right behind Stade.  Here's a random Stade photo:

Kava Kwaliti
The kava was good, actually, considering I mixed a lot.  Nothing negative to report.  I think that area has good kava in general, mostly from Epi and Pentecost.

Company
I met up with Kelep after the TVL Cup final (Amital took it 2-1 over TAFEA, and I hear it's because they have recruited Solomon Islanders to their team), and walked over to Freshwater to meet up with Mark (another brother I just met two nights before on a nakamal run with his brother Kaison).  Walking over there, I got a call from Wotti asking where I was and a shit-ton of other questions, and he was right behind me the whole time.  He couldn't join us though, his cousins were back from picking apples in New Zealand and he wanted to go shake hands with them first.

Amusing Observations
The three of us owned one of those nakamals for a few hours, nobody else was there.  Somehow, the convo turned to religion and beliefs in custom and black magic.  It all started when someone brought up the new appearance of vampires in Vanuatu.  I guess earlier this year, some dude (man Paama) was arrested when it was proved that he had been drinking the blood of his girlfriend.  That is a clear example of outside pop-culture creeping in.  Interesting to note that this custom story of the white man mixes nicely with black magic beliefs here.  Neither Mark nor Kelep claim to believe in black magic, taboos, devils, etc.  Kelep believes there is good and evil and that's all.  Everything evil comes from the one and only devil, and everything good is God's work.  Christians to the core.

This is not, however, what most people on the island believe.  You can stand up in church and denounce devils and black magic till you are blue in the face there, but at the end of the day, you don't walk down certain sections of the road at night holding lap lap banana...Moreover, Kelep is the last one in a line that knows how to stop rain through the sacrificial offering of white chickens and the burning of green leaves (there's certain other things that go along with it that I will never know, like what is said to the dead relatives during the whole procedure).  He said that he does not plan on continuing that ritual.  He doesn't believe that men or women can control nature, even though pretty much everyone on the island does.  Some know how to make the winds shift, some can make the ocean calm or rough, some can cause earthquakes or other natural disasters, and some can even make pigs grow faster.  It's a whole new generation of non-believers.