Tick on a Dragon: What I Learned Interviewing J. Maarten Troost in Vanuatu

🌏 The Hook

The mosquito landed first—tiny, black, vibrating just above my left eyebrow—then the rain came: warm, sudden, and thick as broth. I stood barefoot on the cracked concrete porch of a borrowed bungalow in Port Vila, Vanuatu, soaked through, clutching a damp notebook and a pen that had already smudged three answers. J. Maarten Troost sat across from me, barefoot too, wearing faded khakis and a sun-bleached shirt, sipping kava from a coconut shell. “You’re not here to verify the book,” he said, his voice low and dry as wind over coral rubble. “You’re here to find what the book left out.” That sentence—delivered mid-downpour, under a sky the color of wet slate—was my first real lesson in how to read a place, not just a memoir. How to interview an author in their lived reality—not the literary one—is less about questions and more about presence, patience, and letting go of the narrative you came expecting.

✈️ The Setup: Why Vanuatu, Why Then

I’d read Getting Stoned with Savages twice—first at 24, laughing so hard I startled strangers on the subway; second at 31, re-reading it while planning a six-month solo trip through Melanesia. Troost’s voice—wry, self-aware, unflinchingly honest about his own cultural missteps—had become a quiet compass. Not a guidebook, but a warning label: This place will unsettle your assumptions. Bring humility, not expectations.

So when I booked a flight from Fiji to Port Vila in late October—shoulder season, lower airfare, fewer cruise ships—I wasn’t chasing celebrity. I wanted to understand the gap between the memoir’s satire and the daily rhythm of life on Efate Island. I’d spent three weeks in rural Tanna, staying in family-run guesthouses, walking volcanic trails with guides who corrected my Bislama pronunciation gently but firmly, learning that “long taim” didn’t mean “later”—it meant “when the coconut falls.” I’d watched women weave pandanus mats at dawn, heard church choirs rehearse harmonies that vibrated in my molars, and accepted kava offered not as performance but as protocol. By the time I reached Port Vila, I wasn’t looking for Troost the author—I was looking for Troost the resident.

I’d written him a single email three months prior—not requesting an interview, but asking if he’d be willing to meet for coffee, no recording, no quotes, just conversation. I included a photo of the hand-carved wooden turtle I’d bought from a boy named Lenny in Lenakel, and mentioned how his description of kava’s “muddy euphoria” matched exactly what I’d felt after my third bowl in Isangel. He replied in nine days: “Come to the bungalow behind the old market. Bring rain shoes. And don’t ask about the dragon.”

🌧️ The Turning Point: When the Script Dissolved

I arrived at 2:47 p.m., precisely as instructed. The bungalow was a single-story structure of corrugated iron and weathered timber, shaded by a towering mango tree whose roots buckled the path. A handwritten sign taped to the door read: “Tick on a dragon = not literal. But yes, it bites.” I knocked. No answer. I waited. A gecko skittered across the wall. Then, from behind me: “You’re early. Or late. Hard to tell when the clock’s broken.”

Troost emerged from the garden path, holding two coconuts he’d just hacked open with a machete. His hands were stained green at the knuckles. No handshake—just a nod and a gesture toward the porch. We sat. I opened my notebook. He poured kava into two shells. I asked my first question—about the ethics of writing satire rooted in real people—and he paused, watching a frigatebird circle overhead. Then he said, “That’s the wrong question. Try this: What did you notice today that didn’t fit your idea of ‘Vanuatu’?”

I froze. My meticulously prepared list—on expat dynamics, colonial legacy in infrastructure, kava commodification—vanished. I thought of the woman at the market who’d refused my vatu when I tried to pay for her taro, saying only, “You eat. You come back.” I thought of the generator hum beneath the Sunday hymns, and how the schoolteacher in Lamap had laughed when I asked if children used tablets: “We use sticks and sand. Better for memory.”

That was the turning point—not the rain, not the mosquito—but the moment I realized my framework was the problem. I’d come armed with literary analysis, not observational readiness. Troost hadn’t written a travelogue. He’d written a record of his own recalibration. And I’d shown up expecting to extract wisdom, not undergo it.

🤝 The Discovery: People, Not Plot Points

We talked for four hours. Not about deadlines or publishers or film options—but about the weight of a dugout canoe, the sound of a pig’s squeal at 4:17 a.m., the way humidity made ink bleed on paper. He introduced me to his neighbor, Sera, who ran a small weaving cooperative. She showed me how to split pandanus leaves—not with a knife, but with a smooth river stone, tapping the fibrous edge until it parted like silk. Her hands moved without looking. “If you watch your hands, they learn faster,” she said. I tried. My fingers fumbled. She didn’t correct me. She just handed me another leaf.

Later, Troost walked me to the wharf. Fishermen were mending nets under fluorescent lamps powered by a diesel generator humming like a tired heart. One man, Jean-Paul, recognized Troost and called out, “Maarten! Tell your friend—the tide doesn’t care about your schedule.” Troost grinned. “He knows. He’s been waiting for high water since breakfast.”

That night, I didn’t write notes. I sat on my hostel balcony overlooking the harbor, listening to the slap of waves against rusted pilings and the distant, looping melody of a radio station broadcasting in both French and Bislama. I realized Troost hadn’t given me answers—he’d modeled a posture: Listen longer than you speak. Accept silence as information. Let discomfort clarify, not confuse.

The most unexpected discovery wasn’t about Vanuatu—it was about my own travel reflexes. I’d trained myself to optimize: fastest route, cheapest meal, most ‘authentic’ experience. But authenticity wasn’t a destination. It was the friction between intention and reality—the missed bus, the misunderstood phrase, the shared laugh over spilled kava. Troost’s writing worked because he let those moments accumulate, unedited, unvarnished. He didn’t curate. He witnessed.

🚌 The Journey Continues: Beyond the Interview

I stayed in Vanuatu for another 17 days. Not because Troost asked me to—but because the question he’d posed kept echoing: What didn’t fit your idea?

I took the Port Vila–Saratamata bus (a repurposed school van with peeling paint and no seatbelts), paying 200 vatu and riding with five schoolchildren, two roosters in wicker cages, and a grandmother selling boiled peanuts from a cloth sack. The road wound inland past plantations where men swung machetes in rhythmic arcs, sweat darkening their shirts like inkblots. At Saratamata, I found a guesthouse run by a retired teacher who taught me to count to ten in North Efate dialect—not with numbers, but with hand gestures tied to harvest cycles. “One is the first yam pulled. Five is the hand full of seeds.”

I visited the National Museum—not for exhibits, but to sit on its shaded veranda and watch staff repair a ceremonial mask. The conservator, Lavinia, let me hold a fragment of carved wood, its surface worn smooth by generations of fingertips. “This isn’t history,” she said. “It’s memory with calluses.”

And yes—I went to see the “dragon.” Not a mythic beast, but a limestone formation near Mele village locals called Nakamal Dragon, its scales formed by millennia of mineral deposits. A group of teenagers posed for photos beside it. One girl adjusted her headphones, scrolled TikTok, then turned and pointed to a tick clinging to her ankle. She flicked it off without breaking stride. “Tick on a dragon,” she said, grinning. “Tourist thing.” The phrase wasn’t poetic. It was practical. Literal. Unremarkable. Which, of course, was the point.

💭 Reflection: What This Experience Taught Me

This trip didn’t change how I travel. It changed why I travel.

Before Vanuatu, I measured success by coverage: how many islands visited, how many interviews secured, how many “unique experiences” documented. After? Success became measurable in slowness—in the number of times I sat still long enough for a story to arrive unprompted. Troost’s work endures not because it’s funny (though it is), but because it refuses to flatten complexity into punchlines. He writes about boredom, logistical failure, linguistic exhaustion, and moral ambiguity with the same attention he gives volcanic sunsets.

I learned that interviewing an author in situ isn’t about extracting quotables—it’s about testing your own frameworks against lived reality. His memoir described kava ceremonies as chaotic, disorienting, hilarious. In practice, I saw them as deeply structured: order of service, hierarchy of bowls, precise body language signaling respect or dissent. The humor wasn’t in the ritual—it was in my initial misreading of it. That gap—between text and texture—is where real understanding begins.

Budget travel, I realized, isn’t just about spending less. It’s about investing more: more time, more attention, more willingness to be inconvenienced. The cheapest transport—the bus, the walk, the shared ride—was also the richest conduit for observation. The $3 guesthouse room with no Wi-Fi forced me to look up, not down. And the absence of a rigid itinerary meant I could pause when a child offered to show me how to skip stones, or when a fisherman invited me to help haul a net—not because it fit a plan, but because it was happening.

💡 Practical Takeaways: Woven, Not Listed

You won’t find bullet-pointed tips here—because none of these lessons landed as advice. They arrived as corrections, quietly, in real time:

• Language matters—but not the way you think. I’d studied Bislama phrases before arriving. Useful, yes. But what mattered more was learning when not to speak: pausing after someone finishes, mirroring their pace, accepting that silence isn’t empty—it’s active listening. A local told me, “English is fast. Bislama is wide.” That stuck.
• Transport isn’t just logistics—it’s ethnography. The bus driver who sang gospel hymns while swerving around potholes, the teenager who translated fare negotiations between tourists and vendors, the grandmother who shared her betel nut with me—these weren’t “characters.” They were teachers offering context I couldn’t Google.
• “Authenticity” is a trap when it’s a goal. I stopped seeking it. Instead, I noted contradictions: solar panels next to thatched roofs, Bluetooth speakers blasting reggae at a kastom ceremony, teenagers filming dances on phones while elders recited oral histories. Vanuatu wasn’t preserving tradition or abandoning it—it was layering, adapting, negotiating. So was I.

One afternoon, Troost and I sat on the same porch, watching storm clouds gather. He handed me a small, leather-bound notebook—blank, no title. “Use it for what you see, not what you think you should see,” he said. “The dragon’s real. The tick’s real. Everything between them—that’s yours to map.”

🌅 Conclusion: How This Trip Changed My Perspective

I boarded the flight home carrying two things: a notebook filled not with quotes, but with sketches of woven patterns, phonetic notes on Bislama intonation, and lists of sounds—rain on tin, pig calls at dawn, the scrape of a knife on a coconut husk—and a deeper, quieter certainty: that travel’s value lies not in accumulation, but in subtraction. Subtract the agenda. Subtract the assumption. Subtract the need to “get it right.” What remains isn’t emptiness—it’s space for something true to enter.

Troost’s memoir remains brilliant. But the person who wrote it—the one who lives in Vanuatu, fixes his own roof, argues with the power company, and teaches English to kids who’d rather be fishing—that person taught me more in four hours than any book could. He didn’t offer shortcuts. He offered slowness. And in a world optimized for speed, that may be the most radical, most practical, most budget-friendly travel skill of all.