South Pacific - Vanuatu

We were really keen to go to Vanuatu - specifically to Tanna, where Mount Yasur, an active volcano, is easily accessed and guaranteed to be erupting.

We flew into Port Vila from Brisbane, and stayed overnight in an Airbnb quite a long way out of town, close to a village out on one of the many peninsulas that break up the water. The next day we flew out to Tanna and were collected by Robert, whose accomodation is directly opposite the entrance to the volcano. It took about an hour to drive across the island to Mount Yasur, and we had a stop out on the enormous ash field along the way. We were booked to stay three days and made a real mistake in not going up onto the volcano immediately on arrival, when the weather was fine; we thought we had lots of time and would go tomorrow.

Robert had been badly hit by the two cyclones that came through Vanuatu earlier this year, and conditions were fairly primative, but the friendliness of everyone more than made up for it. We had only three hours of electricity in the evening and no electricity in the huts, and a single shower and toilet (without running water) out in the yard to share between ten of us. We all settled in and figured out that the only place to sit was in the communal dining room, which wasn't always open, but things sorted themselves out by dinner time.

That decision to go up the volcano the next day turned out to to be a bad one. The weather, unseasonably, turned cold, wet and windy, so that the next day wasn't very nice to walk around on the ash field and when we did go up onto the volcano it was shrouded in steam from the rain, and we couldn't get any view at all of the caldera, although we did see lava shooting up in the steam cloud, and the whole area glowed red as the sun set and we wandered around the rim in the dark. Geoff was very disappointed - he had hoped to see the lava lake in the caldera. I was really impressed by what we did see, and by the wind that screamed across the top of the volcano.

The next day was seriously cold and wet. We spent our time watching two local men carve a statue out of a tree fern trunk - a commission from a French family who took it back to Paris. We might normally have gone out to the village where the John Frum cult live (look it up!) but the weather was too unpleasant to do anything, and in any case Robert wasn't there, having driven some visitors back to Lénacel and been trapped there by flooded rivers out on the ash plain. Our own trip back to Lénacel was easier, although we did have to drive through a rushing stream of flood water along the way.

We spent another couple of days on Tanna at an Airbnb outside of Lénacel town - very quiet; we were the only guests. Although we did have a very welcome surprise visit from Darlene and Deidre, fellow travellers who had left Mount Yasur a day before us. Then it was back to Port Vila, and on to Fiji.

Vanuatu was great - I would recommend it to anyone who wants to visit the South Pacific, and I'm sorry we didn't schedule more time there to visit other islands, and to actually look at Port Vila instead of just passing through.

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