My mother would not have enjoyed this trip.\u00c2\u00a0 Mostly, it’s hot and humid, and there hasn’t been a lot of air conditioning (the A\/C worked great in the hotel and rental car in Noumea, and was somewhat muted in Papeete).\u00c2\u00a0 She would have enjoyed seeing the lush vegetation, the poinsettia hedges in the resort where we’re staying, the palm trees, the colorful birds.\u00c2\u00a0 She wouldn’t have gone in the water to see the fish and the coral.<\/p>\n
We spent a night at the Hideaway Island Resort near Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, located a couple degrees north of New Caledonia.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s a 14-person ferry that shuttles you between the shore and the island.\u00c2\u00a0 Its attraction is an underwater post office box, where you can deposit waterproof postcards.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s kind of far from the town, so we ate at the hotel restaurant, which was just fine.\u00c2\u00a0 In the morning we went into town to get stamps and a disposable underwater camera (name brands were $27 and up, but “Dolphin” brand was $16.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re all made in China anyway.\u00c2\u00a0 We haven’t tried it yet.)\u00c2\u00a0 The town was pretty crowded and not exciting aside from an interesting market. We bought a giant slice of banana bread for 100 vatu ($1) which wasn’t as good as the banana bread at home, either.\u00c2\u00a0 The banana situation in general was vibrant.\u00c2\u00a0 There are more different kinds of banana for sale at the Port Vila market than anyplace I’ve seen.<\/p>\n
We went to the airport and got on a small plane for our ultimate Vanuatu destination, the island of Tanna, home to Mt. Yasur, a continuously erupting volcano (there’s a post office box there, too).\u00c2\u00a0 The plane seated 17.\u00c2\u00a0 No flight attendant: the pilot just announced that we should fasten our seat belts when we took off and nobody to instruct us how to put on the life vests.\u00c2\u00a0 No need to turn off electronic devices, as the plane was flown by two guys, one of whom was reading a paperback most of the way.\u00c2\u00a0 No door between the cabin and the cockpit; we had fun watching the pilots and all the controls.\u00c2\u00a0 The plane, like the underwater camera, was made in China; it’s a Harbin Y12.\u00c2\u00a0 It has been mostly localized, although the Exit sign is also in Chinese.<\/p>\n
We spent four nights at Tanna Evergreen Bungalows, a very cute little resort kind of far from Tanna’s largest town, such as it is.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ve been eating dinner here every night.\u00c2\u00a0 The food is so far all good.\u00c2\u00a0 Evergreen Bungalows is located next to a turtle conservation area, though we haven’t seen any turtles, either in the ocean or on the menu.\u00c2\u00a0 why would a sea turtle come to this place?\u00c2\u00a0 I thought they liked to lay their eggs in sand.\u00c2\u00a0 I have yet to see exposed sand in Tanna; and only a smidgen at the deepest parts of the reef channels and holes.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s a shelf of rock which is exposed at low tide, and under two feet of water at high tide — there are coral and fish where this shelf drops off.\u00c2\u00a0 Low tide has been in the morning:\u00c2\u00a0 it’s easy to walk out on the rock, but a little tricky to find a place to climb from the deep water back up onto the shelf.\u00c2\u00a0 High tide is in the afternoon:\u00c2\u00a0 it’s tricky to swim out in two feet of water, but you can pull yourself hand over hand along the rocks.<\/p>\n
The included continental breakfast is a delightfully large plate of fruit (grapefruit, oranges, tangerines, bananas, papayas, and pineapple), delicious toast.\u00c2\u00a0 And both Vanuatu resorts have served coffee in French presses, a wonderful respite from the Nescafe-based drinks we had in Polynesia.\u00c2\u00a0 Perhaps it’s even Vanuatu coffee.\u00c2\u00a0 On the first morning, a chap from New Zealand spotted a small pod of humpback whales swimming south just offshore, perhaps on their way to Antarctica where people can see them from cruise ships in December.<\/p>\n
The first day we went on three of the tours sponsored by the hotel.\u00c2\u00a0 First we went to the Kalagia custom village (or is it costume village?)\u00c2\u00a0 It’s about a half-hour drive towards the center of the island, and the residents have decided to protect their culture and do things pretty much the way they always have.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re happy to dance for tourists according to their customs, wearing their costumes, which are various kinds of shredded bark.<\/p>\n
When we arrived, there was nobody around.\u00c2\u00a0 Apparently the hotel forgot to phone ahead.\u00c2\u00a0 However, some kind of jungle telegraph involving a small plastic box that doesn’t have a touch screen was invoked, and after about twenty minutes came sauntering down the road a woman in a modest grass skirt.<\/p>\n
Her name is Lorine.\u00c2\u00a0 She is a nurse at a small clinic built out of concrete blocks up the road.\u00c2\u00a0 The clinic was built by World Vision International.\u00c2\u00a0 It offers traditional and Western medicine.\u00c2\u00a0 She doesn’t wear a grass skirt at work; she does for tour guiding to blend in with the village people.\u00c2\u00a0 She grew up in this area; she was one of the ones who went to school.\u00c2\u00a0 (At one point someone explained about the society that usually the parents will send a couple of kids to school and the rest stay home to carry on the Custom.)<\/p>\n
Lorine took us around and showed us all the plants they use for food:\u00c2\u00a0 taro, manioc, banana, coconut, hibiscus leaves, onions, etc.\u00c2\u00a0 She also showed us a coffee plant, whose small fruit tasted slightly sweet, and contained two coffee-bean-shaped seeds, which didn’t taste very coffee-like when we bit down on them.\u00c2\u00a0 We hung out with the women and children for awhile — first they gave us a snack of a roasted piece of taro and a roasted plantain with some shredded coconut (they use a seashell to shred the coconut meat out of the nut).\u00c2\u00a0 One woman grated a plantain on a stick over some hibiscus leaves which in turn were on top of a large banana leaf.\u00c2\u00a0 Another mixed in some coconut milk.\u00c2\u00a0 After awhile they folded up the mixture, tied it up, and put it on the fire.\u00c2\u00a0 We watched several little dances and games while waiting for the lap-lap to cook.\u00c2\u00a0 After it was ready, they unwrapped it, sliced it with the seashell, and served it — it was quite yummy.\u00c2\u00a0 (There were plates of lap-lap with chicken wings at the Port Vila market, but I’m sure it was much tastier fresh.)\u00c2\u00a0 We then headed up to an area around a massive banyan tree (with a treehouse) where the men were hanging out.\u00c2\u00a0 We talked to a few of them (the guide translated) and they showed us how Their People Make Fire.\u00c2\u00a0 How many kastom village males does it take to make fire?\u00c2\u00a0 Most of them, as it turned out.\u00c2\u00a0 That whole business about rubbing sticks together looks great in a Boy Scout manual but how many times have you actually seen it work?\u00c2\u00a0 To their credit, the men of la-Kalangia did make fire, without having to resort to butane lighters, which are childproof now anyway, easier to bring fire back from the volcano.<\/p>\n
Then they danced.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a delicious and informative tour.\u00c2\u00a0 I bought a drawing on a piece of bark paper.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not sure what the USDA thinks about wood products but paper is easy to hide.<\/p>\n
By the time we got back, it was almost time for the next tour, to the volcano (the Vanuatu weather service, accessed the night before when the electricity was on, picked this day as having the best weather).\u00c2\u00a0 It’s about a two-hour drive, in a four-wheel-drive vehicle.\u00c2\u00a0 After driving down to the main town, we headed up the main road across the island which was your basic dirt road.\u00c2\u00a0 Much of it was in good shape, but there were many places where we slowed from 50 kph to 5 kph to go over a rock or rut.\u00c2\u00a0 Fortunately the drivers know every inch of the road.\u00c2\u00a0 Louis (our driver) said he’d driven to the volcano 700 times in the last 5 years.\u00c2\u00a0 As we approached the eastern shore, we took the road to the volcano.\u00c2\u00a0 First we saw ash dunes.\u00c2\u00a0 Then we drove across a vast ash lakebed which had been a lake as recently as 2000 until it washed out the ash dam that had been holding it in place, and still floods during the rainy season (which isn’t now).\u00c2\u00a0 The road went around the back side of the volcano (where a guy we met today had gone ash-boarding, like snowboarding but much dirtier).<\/p>\n
Finally we ascended to the viewing area, after picking up an Australian volcano expert who’s been to 150 volcanoes (and has been to this one 150 times!)\u00c2\u00a0 He’s well-connected enough that he managed to get to Iceland four days before the large explosion there.\u00c2\u00a0 He said.\u00c2\u00a0 I want to verify all stories I hear from Australians.\u00c2\u00a0 We got there just before sunset so we could see the crater of the volcano.\u00c2\u00a0 The main viewing area is a bit back — you wouldn’t want to walk to the rim to see the pool of magma sitting in it.\u00c2\u00a0 Every three minutes or so, Yasur throws up a bunch of glowing blobs of lava with a great boom.\u00c2\u00a0 With the clouds over the crater and the humidity at 100%, the booms were often followed by a visible shock wave of condensing water in a rapidly expanding sphere.\u00c2\u00a0 Then the lava shoots up past the rim and several hundred feet in the air and hangs there, the blobs changing shape the way liquids do wen experiencing drag (remember the retro fixtures are called “lava lamps”) and drifts down like the last shot in “Koyaanisqatsi”.\u00c2\u00a0 People who are staying at the hotels near the volcano say the shock waves rustle their mosquito netting.\u00c2\u00a0 We stayed until well after dark (sunset is around 5:20 here, in the dead of winter), which made the eruptions appear much more dramatic.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s an official “danger level” which determines how close you can get to it, but the volcano guy said that’s completely ridiculous — it can have any size eruption at any moment.\u00c2\u00a0 The level was at 1 or 2, this evening.\u00c2\u00a0 They curtail the visits when the Threat Level reaches Orange.<\/p>\n
We returned, had dinner, and proceeded to our third “tour”, a “Jon Frum village” meeting, which happens every Friday.\u00c2\u00a0 The Jon Frum believers are a cargo cult which met Mr. Frum many years ago, and is anxiously awaiting his return.\u00c2\u00a0 We didn’t actually see any evidence of radio worship while we were there — really it’s so arrogant for Americans to call any other society on Earth a Cargo Cult, when you consider the prodigious amount of goods and services we consume in the hope of a better life.<\/p>\n
We got there later than we were supposed to, owing to overstaying at Yasur’s farm and having dinner.\u00c2\u00a0 The Jon Frum adherents seemed a little annoyed by our presence.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe they were about to quit, or maybe they wanted a private moment (no other tourists were there at all), but it seems our driver slipped them a bill or two and we sat down on a bench and the music resumed.<\/p>\n
In the center of a hut without walls were five seated guitar players and a drummer playing a series of short, upbeat, songs, all similar.\u00c2\u00a0 They did not have the feel of hymns, even of the gospel persuasion, but more of tiki hootenanny.\u00c2\u00a0 Outside, people danced: men on one side, women on the other.\u00c2\u00a0 The fluorescent light in the roof allowed us to see the legs of the dancers but not the faces — the light was blocked by the eaves.\u00c2\u00a0 A couple guys near us were incredibly exuberant and had very fancy footwork, and were fun to watch.\u00c2\u00a0 After some time, a guy said to me: “Last song.\u00c2\u00a0 Where’s your driver?” which, you decide what level of invitation to scram that is.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not really sure whether they wanted to get rid of us before going home to sleep, or before getting on with the part of the evening where they burn a cardboard washing machine or whatever we Westerners think is unutterably weird compared with dog psychoanalysis and Botox injections.<\/p>\n
[Ray:]\u00c2\u00a0 There was one person in the congregation who might possibly have been old enough to remember Jon Frum when he visited Tanna in 1936.\u00c2\u00a0 None of the rest of them were even our age.\u00c2\u00a0 I can’t really imagine the psychology of religion even when everybody in your country believes the same one; and it’s quite beyond me, the mechanism by which splinter belief systems survive and propagate in a society with dozens of splinter belief systems and the usual franchises (LDS, JW, Catholicism-Church of England-Science).\u00c2\u00a0 The residents of Tanna must feel no compulsion to be like anyone outside their immediate family.\u00c2\u00a0 No one from a society of followers like America would admit to waiting for Jon Frum unless you starved him on a Rajneesh Commune with no internet connection for years.<\/p>\n
Maybe Mr. Bernoulli can explain the interesting hydrodynamics of the shower in our room.\u00c2\u00a0 First you turn on the hot water all the way, which produces a dribble of very hot water.\u00c2\u00a0 When you turn on the cold water, even by an amount epsilon, you get warm water in the expected proportion at first, but then it gets colder and colder.\u00c2\u00a0 Turning on the cold first and then the hot sometimes leads to hot, which then fades to cold.\u00c2\u00a0 To take a shower, you’re constantly turning the cold on and off and on again, and exploiting the brief interval of warm water each time.\u00c2\u00a0 I can’t even imagine designing a system which would exhibit that particular behavior, let alone breaking one.\u00c2\u00a0 We asked them to look at it but I doubt it’s possible for them to fix without dramatically increasing their water pressure, hot and cold.<\/p>\n
** later.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t think it can be done with fluids.\u00c2\u00a0 The heater is a gas-powered battery-controlled tankless device; I think something about touching the cold water faucet causes the heater to shut off.<\/p>\n
The second day we recuperated from the massive amount of touring by doing basically nothing.\u00c2\u00a0 Ray went snorkeling in the morning, but spent most of the day writing postcards (I added “+ Dave”), and I continued to read my book (Cryptonomicon, which has some scenes in the Solomon Islands).\u00c2\u00a0 We watched the cute birds and butterflies around the hotel grounds, especially the White Collared Kingfisher and a Green Winged Ground Dove; but most of the effort has gone into the fish.\u00c2\u00a0 The bird book in the dining room was not very comprehensive and didn’t include the little yellow and green birds nor the little gray birds with the red heads.\u00c2\u00a0 My headache continues to subside, but it’s still kind of there — an aspirin a day has been enough to make it tolerable.\u00c2\u00a0 Some folks coming back from the volcano tour reported having been clouded out by fog or light rain, so I’m really happy we went the first afternoon, even if it did add up to a 14 hour day of touring.<\/p>\n
The third day started out kind of cloudy, but it was possibly my last chance to snorkel at low tide, so we walked out, found a good place to sit down and spring off from the edge.\u00c2\u00a0 The sun came out enough to illuminate the walls of the dropoff, covered with large amounts of a great variety of coral.\u00c2\u00a0 There weren’t really a lot of fish, for some reason.\u00c2\u00a0 I was fascinated by two tiny fuzzy creatures on a rock, one of which retracted into its shell when I touched the rock nearby.\u00c2\u00a0 Some clownfish hung out in some tubular anemone-like creature, a pretty classic pose.<\/p>\n
On our walk back we saw a fully exposed blue starfish, and three little shells which looked like little raviolis, so we went back to the room, exchanged snorkels for camera, and walked back out and took some tidepool shots.\u00c2\u00a0 California has different stuff in its tidepools, but I’ve never seen such a large flat area there.<\/p>\n
After lunch we went on a little walk with young Adam from Sydney, checking out the rocks near adjacent resorts (which turned out to be fairly similar to our own) and walking up the hill to “the plains”, where there were some cows grazing and some allegedly wild horses wandering around, trying to stay cool under the trees and to stay out of any pictures we might try to take of them.\u00c2\u00a0 Eventually four children showed up and grabbed at our beards in the custom of this planet.\u00c2\u00a0 Sensing without any useful amount of common language that we wanted to take pictures of wild horses, “Albert” ran off across the savannah and returned in about three minutes riding a “wild” horse which he had bridled with a piece of rope.\u00c2\u00a0 The horse was chewing what looked like mango leaves.\u00c2\u00a0 Albert had his t-shirt wrapped around his head like Peter O’Toole.\u00c2\u00a0 One of the other guys held a machete and had dangling on a necklace a home-carved slingshot, which his friend said was sandalwood and they shot flying foxes with it.\u00c2\u00a0 “Wild Boys” is more like it.\u00c2\u00a0 William S. Burroughs would make them right at home in his worldview.<\/p>\n
After that the all the clouds went away and Ray and Adam went back out through the high tide to get one last look at the fully illuminated coral.\u00c2\u00a0 Folks visiting the volcano Sunday afternoon had excellent weather.<\/p>\n
The dinners here have by and large been really good.\u00c2\u00a0 There are lots of “curry” dishes — the lobster curry and Thai green chicken were awesome, but the Thai red fish curry was primarily peppery and had large amounts of oil pooling on the plate.\u00c2\u00a0 The garlic prawns and the lobster Thermidor were also quite nice, as was the tender beef fillet in garlic sauce.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s all tourist food, and though it uses local meat and fish and root vegetables, it’s far from what the islanders eat most of the time.<\/p>\n
We returned to Port Vila on a larger plane on which we were asked to turn off our electronic devices.\u00c2\u00a0 We used intermittent appearances of the sun between the clouds to look once more at the cute fish swimming around the Hideaway Island lagoon, then went back into town.\u00c2\u00a0 By the post office we met Clement, a man from Tanna who we’d said hi to a few days earlier.\u00c2\u00a0 We told him about our Tanna trip and he told us he thought we did it all wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 We both had a good time there but maybe next time we’ll ask him how to get the “island experience”.\u00c2\u00a0 We asked him and a few other people if there were any restaurants with Vanuatu food.\u00c2\u00a0 The answer was basically “no”.\u00c2\u00a0 So we went to a vaguely French place which had as its house specialty a dish of braised flying fox (which is a polite way of saying “fruit bat”).\u00c2\u00a0 It tasted pretty gamy, but that’s kind of what you would expect of a creature that eats real vegetable matter instead of the cardboard or grass or grain fed to cows or chicken or geese that make up the meat we usually eat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My mother would not have enjoyed this trip.\u00c2\u00a0 Mostly, it’s hot and humid, and there hasn’t been a lot of air conditioning (the A\/C worked great in the hotel and rental car in Noumea, and was somewhat muted in Papeete).\u00c2\u00a0 She would have enjoyed seeing the lush vegetation, the poinsettia hedges in the resort where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}