Boy was I glad to see the meat grinder.

Traditionally, an intrinsic part of making kava is the chewing – the root of the kava plant is passed out in chunks to a small group of friends and honoured guests, masticated thoroughly, spat out into a bowl, mixed with water, filtered through a cleanish sarong and drunk. I had been invited to watch the kava being made, and the presence of the new-fangled, hand-powered meat grinder meant that I wasn’t about to have to drink too much of other people’s spit.

We are on the north tip of the volcanic island of Ambrym in Vanuatu, in Chief Sekor’s village on top of the cliffs looking out over the reef towards Pentecost Island, famed home of the Pentecost land divers. It is a very special place. We are a three hour boat trip around the coast from the nearest rough airstrip, and I am about to have my first bowl of kava:

• Appearance: cognac comes in a balloon snifter; Bordeaux comes in a finely-crafted Riedel glass; kava comes in a bucket
• Ritual: down in one, but slowly. It’s not so much about proving your drinking prowess as a necessity, there being half a dozen people and only one cup
• Colour: what comes out of the meat grinding, mixing, rough filtration process looks like incredibly muddy pond water. A muddy clay pond, to be precise
• Taste: an unmistakeable flavor of mud, a hint of vegetal cucumber, and an aftertaste of deepest Numb Mouth (which may be the sixth and most recently discovered axis of taste, with umami being the fifth)
• Impact: there seem to be as many different types of effect as there are kinds of kava root. Ours was a relatively old root, but not really old and therefore not too powerful. For some it can be pleasantly stupefying. For others, there seems to be no effect for a couple of hours, at which point you get a terrible puking hangover and an angry girlfriend without the fun happy drunk bits beforehand. For me, the numb mouth spread a little to my brain, but nothing too worrying. Nothing, that is, until I went to bed and lay awake for FIVE HOURS listening to the waves break on the shore below without being able to get to sleep
• Next morning: utterly exhausted, but otherwise right as rain. Just in time for the mind-bendingly extraordinary festival dances and pig killing ceremonies next day, of which more elsewhere

They are very proud of their kava on Ambrym. For some reason, the delicacy hasn’t travelled.

[A truly artistique iPhone shot … of a pair of buckets]