August 24 2025. I arrive in Port Vila, capital of Vanuatu on the island of Efate. This is my first visit to Vanuatu, and Vanuatu will be the 99th country I have visited. In contrast to the chaos and misery at Brisbane Airport this morning (see under ‘Travel Horrors’ on this website) the flight went smoothly and after checking in to my hotel I went for a wander in the late afternoon heat.
I walked down the hill to the waterfront, to which sadly access and views are mostly blocked by private development such as the big Chinese resort on the left and the big ugly casino you can just see on the far right of the right-hand picture here. The casino is currently under repair from the earthquake of last December, which killed 14 people and injured 60, according to the taxi driver who pointed out similar destruction to me and the jolly Aussie couple who shared my lift.
(The online guides advise that the taxi fare from the airport to town is 2500 Vatu, which is about $AUD 32 for a 6km, 20 minute ride, not bad. They don’t say that the taxi driver will make you wait while he fills up the cab with other folks paying the same! But I don’t mind…it’s a poor country and at least there’s no hustling for tips.)
Note the Private Property sign in Bislama, the creole English also called ‘Tokpisin’ here and elsewhere in Melanesia.
Such a pity these otherwise lovely vistas are off-limits to ordinary folks.
It was stinking stenching hot and humid as I slogged back up the hill to the Melanesian Port Vila Hotel which has, god bless it, good aircon and good wifi.
That night they had the weekly Sunday night cultural show and barbecue around the pool. I thought it might be a bit kitsch and touristy but it was roolly excellent, with dancing and singing and commentary and everyone, even little kids, in authentic costumes. So I stuck it out and even, at the end, got up to join the farewell dance, brandishing some kind of bamboo totem thingy. (I’d had a couple of chardies by then.) Pity I left my camera in my room and didn’t want to miss anything by going back to get it.
Re the language: there are 80 islands and almost as many different languages on Vanuatu. According to the knowledgeable folks at the Tourist Information Centre, only a very few are mutually intelligible and would count as dialects. It’s possible to find adjacent villages, according to Lucy at the TIC, where the people don’t understand each other all.
Day 2, Monday August 25.
I went first to the National Museum and then to the big weekly market. Actually I went to the museum twice because first time I didn’t have cash on me to pay the 1500 Vatu (approx $AUD13) entrance fee. As elsewhere in Melanesia, most transactions are done in cash.
I went by the main shopping centre which looks a bit dilapidated. How much is down to the earthquake and how much underlying poverty I don’t know. There is one big modern supermarket – the French franchise Au Bon Marche, but a lot of the commercial development was this typically ugly windowless Chinese outlet (pic, right). The sign on the left shows an idealised version of the ‘downtown’ district after ‘Yumi rebildim’ or in English after we (you, me) have rebuilt it.
The museum was wonderful. The building, modelled on Melanesian steep-roofed open architecture, wasn’t damaged during last December’s earthquake. Some of the exhibits were but they’ve done a great job of putting things to rights.
Inside the entrance there’s an enormous reproduction of a painting done in the 1880s by a European visitor of several dozen men gathered round the bodies of two men they are about to butcher and eat. The artist/observer watched on part-hidden and later wrote a fuller description of what he saw and heard, which is reproduced here and which I found a bit upsetting, as it wasn’t clear that the men were dead before being brought there! I didn’t take a photo of the painting or the text because it was just too gruesome.
The guides and local people are all very frank about this. Lucy at the Tourist Centre told me yesterday the last known act of cannibalism on Vanuatu was in the 1970s!
I didn’t take a photo of the image…thought it might have seemed a bit ghoulish.
This man gave a talk about the local culture, languages and history. He also played a haunting native flute and a kind of piano made of bamboo pipes (on which he played the Aussie and Vanuatu national anthems) and he also sang.
He also did this traditional sand drawing of the nangol legend. Nangol is land-diving – the original bungee jumping. It originated on north Pentecost Island, part of the Vanuatu chain. The mythology says a man was chasing his wife to beat her, and she climbed up a banyan tree to escape him. He climbed up after her, not noticing that she had tied vines around her legs. He attacked her but she dived off the treetop and the vines caught her before her head hit the ground and survived. He dived after her without vines and hit the ground head-first and died. The way the museum guide told the story, it was as if it was normal for the man to beat his wife, but that she was to be admired for her cunning.
The ritual then evolved into a male status thing. Only men do it now, and they start practising as young as 5 or 6. The more you do it the more status you have in the tribe.
There were other demonstrations of sand drawing. They are amazingly good at drawing straight lines and circles in one seamless move.
From there it was past Parliament House and a little clothes market beside it, the sign in English, not bislama, appealing for support for earthquake recovery.
I was headed for the big market down on the waterfront, further along from the casino. In the picture on the left it’s blocking the view again, but further along from the market you can see the waterfront.
And so to the big food market.
I can understand this sign. It’s asking customers to keep the market clean!
I did try this local thing – Tulum? Tubul? – damn, I should have written it down. It’s a beef and veggie mix wrapped in maybe banana leaf, then fried. Whatever, it was tough and not very nice and I ended up chucking it. But I did buy some of the local water, and I loved the label so much I tried to peel it off so I could put it on my own water-sipper, but alas it wouldn’t peel. I still kept the bottle though.
Next day I took a mini-van tour out of Port Vila to Rarru Falls, the Blue Lagoon and Banana Bay Beach. (Question: is any lagoon anywhere in the world other than ‘blue’?)
Guide/driver Sammy was excellent. This pic shows him handling a vine called ‘American Rope’, which the yanks introduced during the war to camouflage their military infrastructure. I read at the museum that it spread like wildfire and now blankets the island, but Sammy said it had medicinal properties. You rub the leaves together and sniff them to relieve migraine. I didn’t have a migraine so couldn’t try it.
It was a good walk to the falls, past this verdant lagoon. I wished I’d bought my togs because it was very hot and humid.
They’d done a good job of making the path safe and non-slippery. And there were clean(-ish) public toilets everywhere. Some friendly Aussies took this pic of me.
We had lunch at Banana Bay Beach where I met this pretty French girl working as a horse groom in the Sydney hinterland and travelling around Australia, having started in WA. She was very good at spotting critters in the rocks. She saw several little crabs, but try as I might I could not distinguish them from the rocks in which they were hiding.
She – Jade – wanted to know was I going to see the volcano on Tanna. No I most definitely was not, and told her the story about the White Island tragedy in NZ a few years ago, which claimed the lives of 22 people, mostly tourists. I make a point of not getting up close to active volcanoes.
Note to self: re-watch the movie Tanna when get home. It’s set on that island and tells a pre-contact Romeo and Juliet love story between two young folks. I remember enjoying it very much at the time. It was played by non-professional locals who became a bit of a sensation when they accompanied the movie to the Cannes Film Festival.
The wifi here is pretty good. Better than it was in the Solomon Islands, which has the same cheap ugly modern infrastructure imposed on a picturesque but no longer viable subsistence economy. The roads are in a pretty parlous state although they do seem to do a better job of restoration and maintenance and litter control than in the Solomons.
The coconut trees you see here are suffering from some beetle blight, according to Kiki, who drove us back to Port Vila because Sammy had to go off for another job. Note huge but well-marked pothole! Take a close look at what Kiko has dangling from his fourth finger. It’s a big fat spider! He spotted it as we sped along, hanging from a fence wire. He put it on his tummy and then let it run up his face, before enclosing his hand round it and bringing it over to show us. I fought down the impulse to squeal, almost certain he wouldn’t do anything stupid like throw it at me. He didn’t, and moreover he assured us no snakes, spiders, lizards or suchlike in Vanuatu are poisonous.
I sat in the front seat next to Kiko on the way back to Port Vila. Sammy had noticed on the way out that I was the only one asking questions about Vanuatu on our way out in the morning, and also not getting any conversation out of my fellow Aussies (a couple of lumpen proles from Sydney), and he said Kiko would be up for a chat and so he was. Unfortunately he wasn’t as knowledgeable as Sammy and his English wasn’t as good.
He pointed out the building run by the French engineering company that runs the power grid. ‘How do they generate power here?’ I asked. He didn’t know. I googled later: it’s mostly diesel but they are working at mixing in wind, solar, geothermal and wave power.
Some readers of my blog wanted to know about the environmental issues the Vanuatu government has been taxing Australia with, at one stage threatening to sue us over rising sea-water levels. I didn’t see any evidence of that (but I wouldn’t, would I?) and nobody mentioned it to me, but the woman I sat next to on the plane coming in was a young(-ish) marine biologist on her way to teach for 3 weeks at the University of Vanuatu. She was based in North Queensland and had dire things to say about the state of the Great Barrier Reef corals. She said in the end: I know we need energy and I still want to fly to visit my family in England, but things are in a dreadful state. She said yes, the corals could move south as temperatures warm, but with pollution and rapid warming they don’t have time to adjust.
Otherwise, the locals seemed very kindly disposed towards Australia, rather more so than to China. Their view seemed to be that while China spends a lot of money here – see the big resort in the picture above – very little of it benefits the locals. People are generally very warm and welcoming here. Typical of Melanesian culture.
This is the sole souvenir – apart from the mandatory fridge magnet – that I brought home from Vanuatu. I loved the label so much I tried to peel it off so I could put it on my own water-sipper, but alas it wouldn’t peel. I still kept the bottle though.
Good water, good life. Good slogan!