This week’s dream: a little visited South-Pacific archipelago
The Trobriand Islands gained notoriety in the 1920s thanks to the Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, whose books – notably The Sexual Life
of Savages – spawned an image of them as “the islands of love”, a place where sex between unmarried young people was encouraged and where no one believed that intercourse would lead to pregnancy. A century on, they remain right off the tourist track, and very little integrated with the wider world, says Mark Stratton in The Daily Telegraph. An archipelago of 28 coral atolls in the Solomon Sea – to the east of Papua New Guinea, from which they are ruled – they have virtually no cash economy, and no TV, radio or internet.
From Port Moresby, the capital, there are two flights a week to Kiriwina, the main island, where the Butia Lodge hotel often goes weeks without seeing a tourist. Custom demands that dimdims – foreigners – make themselves known to the islands’ paramount chief, a septuagenarian who knows Malinowski’s work and can confirm that young people are still encouraged to have many sexual experiences, though extramarital affairs are frowned upon. He lives with his five wives in Omarakana, a settlement of stilted wooden huts and yam houses – tall, richly decorated, “beehive-like” structures where the islands’ staple crop is stored. Yam cultivation here follows complex social norms, culminating in the harvest festival of Milimala, which involves feasts, “exuberant” dancing and cricket matches. Introduced by the first Christian missionary to visit the islands in the 1890s, the game has taken on its own rowdy form here, with plenty of war paint and “lewd” communal mockery.
Like Kiriwina, the outer islands are heavenly — “palmswathed” and “lassoed” by white-sand beaches. As you sail between them over “multi-hued” corals on sunny days, sky and sea are so “blindingly blue” they seem to “lose juncture”.