The Cascades, Vanuatu!

Am currently writing a horror film script set at a waterfall in Fiji, very loosely based on something horrible and definitely praeternatural that happened to us when we were kiddies.  However, focusing so much on waterfalls, I keep remembering the most beautiful waterfall I have ever seen in my entire life:  The Cascades just outside Port Vila in Vanuatu.

It's most annoying because, more and more, I notice The Cascades - known as Ma'al Mele to the locals - dominating my thoughts and I'm accidentally mentally recasting the film action from its current setting at Wailoku Waterfalls in Fiji to The Cascades, and I'm not at all happy about it because my very annoying characters are increasingly alive and don't want to do what they're told and it isn't helping that my mind isn't allowing them a single 'concrete' site to exist within.

Do you know Longinus, the ancient Roman literary critic?  If you don't, I highly recommend you change that!  His "Treatise on the Sublime." is without doubt the BEST how-to-write book I have ever read. And what is worth noticing most is his stricture to always place your fictional action within real life settings you know and can visualise strongly. "If you can't see it, your readers can't see it!" he says, maybe not in those exact words but something very like them!

So it's something I always do when I write fiction: place the action in real places I know.  Apart from everything else, visualising where everyone is within the known space helps me keep the action straight in my head.

And speaking of action, I have to say, these characters (all based on old friends just for a private laugh!) are the most disobedient I've ever written! Like, so far I've killed off Simon, Jean and Denise with spectacularly horrible deaths but none of us have stayed properly dead and keep popping up in later scenes and simply won't leave ... and so, yeah, yeah, I have to go back and rewrite so they survive ... and now Jean wants a rescue party to come save her so I have to go back and rewrite huge chunks of stuff I thought I'd finished with and 'set in stone' ...  and so unless I get them under control soon this is going to end up being the slowest and unscariest horror film ever conceived.

And now the film appears to want to be set at The Cascades in Vanuatu, although just about everything, on so many levels, from geographic to logistical to political to economic, is wrong with that!

On an aesthetic level however it's a different story, especially if we mentally replace all the rare and exquisite orchids that used to grow at no other place on earth except around those Cascades (except a bunch of French hotel-landscaping guys from New Caledonia came in and stole thousands of plants and so the locals have hidden the others much deeper in the jungle where no one can see them) which means we'll then have my film's "the horror, the horror" take place against a backdrop of 'the absolutely sublime'.

LOVE that concept?

And if you've ever been to The Cascades, you'd completely understand and forgive me. Even without those orchids, we are talking about the most incredible beauty you can imagine.

I notice in other folks' travel blogs, it now costs V$20.00 per person to get to see them - and that the Chief of the land-owning village still comes out personally to greet you, welcome you and collect the money himself - but when we went in 2000 it was only V$15.00 - and since there were eight of us, that was already wayyyy too much - but ...

... well, let me tell you that story.  We were already all in a bad mood, having been screwed around for over an hour by a great many cousin-brothers of the van-hire ilk who play these stupid tag-team games - obviously to spread around the wealth (you hire a van to your destination but, as a visitor, you have no idea where you are so when the driver stops and says "here!" you think you've arrived and get out and he promptly drives off and you discover you're stranded in the middle of nowhere ... but another van arrives immediately and the van-driver says he'll take you if you pay again and so, without a choice, you do and ... etc, etc, etc!) so watch out for those ...

... and so, already cross, being stung by the village Chief during his faux-welcome feels like the last straw and so we're talking about a bunch of people taking a supposed pleasure jaunt while actually murderously cross, cross, cross! And, trudging up the steep and muddy mountain path through the jungle, stumbling and slipping, and grumbling about how much it cost and saying mean things like "For that price, I'd expect a local to carry me up this bloody mountain on his back", when we came to a very pretty waterfall we were only a little mollified and began to unpack our stuff ...

... but then a local hunter surrounded by a swarm of skinny red dogs walked past on the cliff above, saw us and shouted out getting our attention then indicating we were meant to go up higher.  Almost didn't!  Truly, we almost stayed where we were, but the hunter was insistent and adamant - and armed with a bow-and-arrow he obviously knew how to use - and kept shouting so we reluctantly and crossly packed up again and set off upstream.

But then we finally rounded a corner and instantly stopped dead in our tracks!

We are talking about a beauty beyond imagination; beyond words; certainly beyond my powers of description.

I wonder if Heather still has those photographs. You need to see them!

And I must say that you cannot remain cross in the face of this much beauty, so it was all instant "Ahhhhh!" and forgiveness and the sure knowledge that if you knew just what you were going to see you'd have willingly paid even more.

Lovely swimming too. And diving. And a very scenic spot for lunch. And the Chief has locals placed around The Cascades too as potential life-savers in case of accidents and, since you'd never get a rescue helicopter in there to pick you up, these guys are clearly there to haul you down the mountain - probably on their backs - if you get injured, and so you feel even more forgiving knowing that your money to the Chief is probably is intended to pay their wages.

So, I have to tell you, if you're ever jaunting around the Pacific, I strongly recommend you put Port Vila in Vanuatu on your itinerary if only to visit the Ma-al Mele Cascades so you too can just stand there and feel yourself exhale.

So this is where this script is longing to be set! And mentally, more and more, with a vast amount of reluctance, I'm doing it, even though I've been in this horrible business long enough to know it doesn't matter where I want to set it because, if the producer involved buys it - and fingers-crossed about that - it'll probably end up being set somewhere like ... shudder! ... California!


Later:  Hey look at what I just found on youtube:  



 Seems The Cascades were pretty much destroyed in a massive earthquake several years back.

Oh, boy!  They were so sincerely beautiful, isn't that just so very, very sad! And isn't it annoying that there's no attempt in the short above to show you a wide shot of what it looks like these days, although I think it does seem that a great many of the more spectacular rocks - the ones that made for those amazing sprays of water - tumbled down and they're the reason why the pool below is so very much smaller.

And isn't it even sadder that our world loses a spot of such major MAJOR beauty and it didn't even make the outside-of-Vanuatu news!

Still, isn't it nice of that chief to put up those ropes on the walk up the mountain!  They weren't there in 2000. Guess he now has to actually do stuff to get his tourist dollar!

However, what this means for me is I can stop mentally casting The Cascades as a setting for this film since it is no longer, on an aesthetic level, the most beautiful waterfall on earth, so there's no point even thinking of making a film there! So I'm back  at Wailoku in Fiji!

I'm OK with that.

However, I do have to add:

Ma'al Mele Cascades; once you stopped my breath with your beauty ... but then I felt myself exhale, coming back inside myself to a different place. Your place!  R.I.P.