The village consists of family compounds built along a footpath running through an emerald clearing. The houses have walls of woven coconut fronds and roofs of pandanus fronds. It's a quiet village: no electricity. Water is carried in pails from a spring.

Paul, the man from South Dakota, sighs: "I could live like this." Can he be thinking three wives?

Children follow us, hoping we'll be so generous as to give them our shiny plastic water bottles when they're empty. We pass their school and peek into a classroom. Signs lecture: DON'T LOSE HOPE, and YOU DO NOT BE AFRAID. But school is out because the dim-dims are here.

For lunch, the ship's staff set out a barbecue fit for a king on a pristine beach. The island boys take naturally to our volleyball and inflatable kayaks. Afterward, I walk back up to the village by myself, trying it barefoot. John, a young Kitavan, joins me, and we compare notes. He says that only six or seven people in the village—the teachers and nurses—work for money, the equivalent of eight dollars a day. "The rest are gardening. We work hard in the garden."

"So you eat whatever you grow."

"Or we sell it," he says.

"But who is there to buy it?"

"The teachers and medicals."

Such a small web they weave.

I wonder, "What can you spend the money on?"

"Rice," he says. "Clothes. Spoons. Forks."

Then he looks at me. "How much you pay on the ship?"

"Oh!" I laugh, embarrassed. How much would $5,100 be in his money? Finally I admit, "Twelve thousand kina."

He does a sucking thing with his teeth. Yet what can that number mean to a guy who doesn't know how old he is?

In a pathetic attempt to distance myself from the disparity, I tell him, "My company's paying, not me."

Later, we part at the beach with a handshake, and the day's last tender takes me on that magic carpet ride back to the Orion. That evening, there's a new excitement in the air, as if the trip has just begun. Plainly, Kitava has seduced us. Only the paired ornithologists, Cliff and Dawn, are disappointed. "A bad day watching birds," he laments over sundowners. "The people were too friendly."

Every morning, aerobic walkers circle the top deck and watch the South Pacific dawn coming up in time-lapse images—a frame every sixty-two seconds—while the humped silhouettes of our next treasured islands slide into view. Now we're in the Solomons, running through still waters toward Gizo, allegedly the nation's second-largest city but just a picturesque huddle of one-story wooden buildings looking across the harbor toward a blown volcano. (This was before the earthquake and tsunami of April 2007, which further diminished the skyline and left thirty-three people dead but hasn't disrupted tourism.)