Kava is a drink made from the pounded root of a plant in the pepper family, Piper methysticum, mixed with water. It is drunk across Melanesia and in Vanuatu it is central. The place where it is drunk is a nakamal, a word that across the archipelago means meeting house and, in the city, a place where kava is served.
01 The light at the door
The entrance to a nakamal is usually marked by a dim light or a lantern. It is not an ornament: the lit bulb signals that the place is open and that there is freshly prepared kava. When the kava runs out, the light goes off. That is why nakamals need no written hours, and why arriving late can mean finding that somewhere open half an hour ago no longer is.
The custom has ended up naming them. Some places are known simply by the colour of their light, and others are identified by three differently coloured lights at the entrance. The signs, where they exist, are hand-painted and in Bislama: “grin kava” means green kava, that is, fresh kava, made from freshly pounded root rather than powder.
02 The shell is the unit
Kava is not served in glasses but in half a coconut shell or a small bowl, and that measure is called, in local English, a shell. In a study from the late 1980s a large shell of about 100 millilitres cost 100 vatu and a small one 50. The logic still holds: you order by size, the number you say is the price in vatu, and payment is cash.
It is drunk in one go, without pauses, because the taste does not improve with time. Then you step outside for a moment. The effect is sedative and arrives within minutes: it relaxes the muscles, numbs the tongue and turns the volume down on everything, conversation included. The quiet of a nakamal is not an imposed rule of courtesy so much as a consequence.
There is a takeaway version. It is sold bottled in plastic, in formats of around 350 millilitres — roughly the equivalent of one large shell — and part of the clientele, women above all according to studies of urban consumption, buys it to drink at home rather than sitting in the nakamal.
03 From a handful to a whole neighbourhood
This is recent. In 1980, when Vanuatu became a country, Port Vila had barely a handful of nakamals and the dominant urban drink was imported beer. Ten years later there were more than sixty scattered across the city, in a capital that then held around 20,000 people out of a national population of 145,000.
The consumption figures of the period explain the scale: a survey from 1987-88 calculated that urban nakamals were getting through 400 tonnes of root a year, and that each man over twenty in Port Vila accounted for an average of 321 shells annually. Almost one a day. A licence to run a nakamal cost around twenty dollars a year at the time, which helps explain how fast they multiplied.
Today the city has 49,034 inhabitants and the nakamals are spread through all the hillside neighbourhoods, not along the tourist strip by the harbour. Finding one does not require an address: it requires walking a residential street at six in the evening and looking at the doorways.
04 Why the city drinks differently from the islands
On the islands, kava is grown almost universally and circulates as a gift: adult men gather at the end of the working day, the preparation is part of the occasion, and the sharing follows kinship. There is no price.
In the city, the nakamal prepares in bulk, charges money and serves anyone who walks in, related to the house or not. Bislama has a word to mark the difference: “redimed”, from ready-made, which names the commercial kava prepared in advance as against the customary varieties. The word exists because somebody found the distinction necessary.
That is what makes the urban nakamal interesting to a visitor. It is not a tourist version of a ceremony: it is a new institution, born in the capital over the last forty-five years, that solves — in a city built on 138 languages of origin — the problem of where neighbours who share neither village nor family sit down together in the evening.
05 What not to do
Do not drive afterwards. The effect is sedative and affects coordination; if you came in a hire car, leave it and take a taxi back. Do not use flash inside: the place is dark for a reason. Do not carry the conversation from outside in with you; people come to a nakamal precisely to slow down.
And one useful warning about the order of the evening: because kava is made for the afternoon and then runs out, the nakamal is not a midnight plan. You arrive early, stay a while, and eat afterwards. Do it the other way round and you are likely to find every light already off.
- Look for the light, not the signMany nakamals have no name you can read from a distance, but they do have a bulb or a lantern lit at the entrance. Lit means open, with freshly prepared kava.from dusk
- Order by size and pay cashThe unit is the shell. You order it by size, and the number you say is the price in vatu. Bring small notes: there is no card.cash only
- In one go, then outsideThe shell is drunk whole and without a pause, because the taste is bitter and earthy. Then you step out to the yard or the street, spit, and wait for it to take hold.one minute
- Keep your voice downA nakamal is a quiet place: low light, low voices and no loud music. If you arrive talking loudly, it shows immediately.unwritten rule
For an easier first contact, the country's tourism office points to three places in Port Vila that are accessible to visitors: Waterfall, on the downtown waterfront, with food stalls beside it; Banyan Beach Bar, on the beach, where kava is served alongside tapas; and Kava Lounge, in the Nambatri area, with a more traditional nakamal atmosphere. They are no substitute for a neighbourhood place, but they are a good spot for a first shell.
