Day Trip to Tami
by Nancy Sullivan

Beautiful Tami Island--so close and yet so far. Three hours by boat from Lae, just across from Finschafen, Tami Island is a world apart from the mainland. It's a quiet, simple island idyll. Actually, Tami is four islands--really atolls, including one that's barely more than a white sandy beach, all cradling a circular cove that's a popular snorkelling spot for day-trippers from Lae. There are two main villages on the two large islands that face each other across the cove, which is filled with reef and deepens to a volcanic pit at its centre. Put of the sun and off the beaches, these are cool and comfortable villages. A sign on the inland path to one of them says, "Welcome to Tami. Enjoy the freedom feeling" and has a sketch in faint marker of a smiling ëGrassroots.' Mounds of coconut shells buttress all the young sak sak trees in the gardens, and mangroves reach out from the shoreline everywhere, their knotty root making good fishing and resting places under the tall leaning coconut palms. Here and there babies swing from bilums in the shade of small trees near their mother's gardens. Not a bad way to spend the day.

These villages are like those in the Siassi islands: small, warm, dedicated to fishing, with traces of West New Britain in their decorations and even their faces. Tami Island outrigger canoe prows are distinctive, with beautifully painted shields that resemble Trobriand and southern Milne Bay prows, only finer and more rectangular. Villagers also paint them now with brilliant pink and blue housepaints. Tami Islanders also wear the typically Milne Bay chama shell necklaces--made of hundreds of whittled and bored amber-coloured shells, which are sure signs of the extensive trade networks through Morobe and Milne Bay. Alongside one of the villages is a neatly tended graveyard where all the plots are ringed with the circular glass knobs of upended beer bottles--clear Ice Kol beer bottles in the case of recent graves.

Everywhere in the villages you see pandanus and coconut palm fronds drying in the sun, to be woven into attractive sleeping mats and baskets. And the bowls Tami is renowned for are stacked in everyone's house. Much like the Siassi island oblong bowls with clan totems carved along the spine and either end, these are elegantly sculpted but absent the black ash colour and white lime outlines, making them more subtle looking and easier to use.

Snorkelling in the cove is always rewarding. Spanish Dancer jellyfish wiggle their skirts in the shallows like Moulon Rouge chorus girls, and spectacular blue starfish dot the rocky shoreline everywhere The colours are muted by expanses of soft whites and yellows and blues, so occasionally brilliant orange or pink or blue pelagic fish flit by and turn a snorkeller's head. They say the dive spots just outside the cove are filled with reef sharks and beautiful coral bommies.

The women here wear diagonal lines of star tattoos on their dark handsome faces, and are wry and comfortable with visitors. Occasionally the Melanesian Discoverer stops at Tami, and visitors from Lae and Finschafen wouldn't be uncommon in these villages. And yet the last time I came, I was about to waddle backwards off the beach at the back of one of these villages for a snorkel with a friend and a crowd of friendly kids, when a young woman carrying a baby at her hip called out my name, challenging me to remember her from my last trip to Tami, almost three years before. Yu kam bek eh? she said. How could I possibly forget her?