VANUATU, THE LAND OF COMPLEXITY IN SIMPLICITY/1: SANTO
Coconut palms, grass skirts, hula music - this was our slightly exaggerated image of the South Sea islands in the Pacific Ocean. This part of the world was not a corner we knew a lot about, but we were certain we wanted to get a taster of it once we happen to live so close! We chose Vanuatu from all the Paradise destinations, because we researched that it's less developed than most islands around, so it better preserved its authenticity, it has plenty of natural beauty including marine life, fantastic beaches and active volcanoes, and it's directly connected to Sydney with flights, We embarked on our trip with a lot of excitement to experience a completely new culture with only some vague stories from a (very) few colleagues who have been to Vanuatu before! To give a short summary of this post, after our holiday we felt so overwhelmed by what we had seen and experienced that the only word that comes to mind is "Wow!" We'll try our best to explain why.
Leweton village boy in traditional clothes
A bit of background
First of all, hula music is out of scope, being a Polynesian tradition which is completely different from Melanesia, where Vanuatu is. Melanesians migrated to the region from Africa 30-50,000 years ago (when Neanderthals were painting caves in Europe) and settled in the Western side of the region, such as Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Australia. Polynesians, on the other hand, migrated from Taiwan only 6,000 years ago, and arriving in the region they found that the closer islands were already settled, so they kept moving further East to Tahiti, Hawaii and New Zealand (among other islands). We hadn't realised what a difference there was between these two peoples, but it impacts everything from skin colour to traditions and culture!
Leweton village warriors in traditional clothes, Santo - On many islands in Vanuatu people still wear these clothes
Vanuatu used to be a joint English-French colony until independence in the 1980's. A funny quirk of history is that this duality meant that every government position had an English and a French appointee, and apprehended criminals could chose to be tried under English law (supposedly stricter sentences but more lenient prison conditions) or French law (lenient sentences but harsher conditions). Also, English would drive on the left, while the French would drive on the right of the same road! Vanuatu was later the site of several huge American military bases during WWII, which was the first time many islanders came into contact with the outside world. Vanuatu usually doesn't make headlines around the world, with the exception when 14/52 members of the Parliament were arrested for accepting bribes in 2015 - they had an email trail on the deal on their work laptops, as they didn't feel they did anything wrong, since it's the way the world works! Vanuatu's other claim to fame is to the amusingly named "Coconut War" in 1980, which was a post-independence separatist movement on the island of Espiritu Santo: after a single casualty, the leader of the rebellion (armed with bows and arrows) surrendered, saying he had "never intended that anyone be harmed".
Vanuatu is the second closest Pacific island to Australia being only 3 hours' flight away. It's located West of Fiji and East of New Caledonia, and has 250,000 inhabitants across 83 islands. From Australia it is only served by Air Vanuatu since the other airlines cancelled their flights due to damage to the runway 2 years ago - we were told politicians have been arguing over who gets the contract to repair the runway ever since, even if they had found the funding (from the World Bank) to fix it a long time ago... On our journey we split our time between the 3 most frequented islands, in decreasing order of development: Efate (with Port Vila, the capital), Espiritu Santo and Tanna.
Our first stop was Espiritu Santo, and its capital Luganville (the 2nd largest town in the country), an island famous for its WWII past, the world's best wreck dive (according to many) and its beautiful beaches. We found that there's just so much more than this to experience on the island!
1. The Food
First of all, there's the food - the good and the bad. Firstly the good: all produce grown on the islands is organic - because there's no money to use pesticides or synthetic fertilisers -, and delicious. I always considered grapefruit to be too bitter for my taste until I tasted the ni-Van (the adjective for the noun Vanuatu) grapefruit, which was as big as a melon, sweet as honey and cheap. Some of our other favourites from the Luganville market were the peanuts still on the plant(!), the avocado (again the size of a small melon, and slightly sweet to the taste), bananas, pawpaw (we think it is the same as papaya but locals are convinced it is different), tangarines, passionfruit and pineapples. Unfortunately we'd missed the season for mango... (we still wonder how we could travel somewhere this unprepared???).
The traditional staple foods on the islands are the dozen varieties of yam, cassava, tapioca and breadfruit which we thought all tasted like potato. Recently people have started eating white rice instead of these though, because it is considered a modern food, which (besides having to be imported) is causing big problems with obesity and diabetes. In general, everyone grows their own food in the 'garden' (basically a patch in the jungle behind their hut), and they don't tend to eat any sugar, so you might think they live pretty healthy.
Market vegetables and boiled bread fruit
And then there is the bad: Besides these fruits and vegetables, everything you can buy in a store is imported, uniformly unhealthy and full of preservatives, like rice, dry biscuits, canned vegetables and low-grade fish or chips. We really struggled to find anything meaningful to eat in the store, so instead we went to the local fruit and veg market daily. In other parts of Santo there was even less choice for food without a market or without a good selection of restaurants, so we ended up eating overpriced food in some mediocre eatery or stocked up on avocado in Luganville for later. So on aggregate, probably it is not too healthy a lifestyle for the average person...
The other shocker was how everything was imported - there was literally nothing produced locally, to the extent that the whole thing felt ludicrous! A few examples:
The market was full of people selling peanuts and fruit, but the extremely poor quality peanut butter and jam, which has only seen fruit on the label but not in the jar, were all imported from Malaysia and China.
The islands were full of cows and free range chickens, but no one has thought to milk them or collect the eggs yet - these were imported from Australia and Fiji respectively. When we asked people who had livestock about the reason, they came up with various excuses such as 'we don't have machines', 'they would kick us' or - my favourite - 'we can't find the eggs' as the freely running chickens hide them! When we explained the concept of a chicken coop - so they can go home at night and lay their eggs there -, they looked at us slightly incredulously, and you could see them thinking "that would never work in Vanuatu...'.
Tanna coffee is supposedly famous throughout the islands, but you could only drink instant coffee on Tanna as the local coffee beans are all sent to the capital and subsequently exported.
2. Locals
According to various surveys Vanuatu is the happiest country in the world. This must be mainly due to people accepting things as they are and being positive about their lives overall. We experienced this also in the way locals treated us: everyone we met on the streets stopped to say hello and were happy to chat to us - most of them speak good English or French. Tourism is relatively undeveloped even on the most visited islands, so locals value those tourists who visit their country bringing work to many of them. In general, locals are also open to share their traditions with foreigners and to talk about their everyday lives and culture. This helped us make conversations with a village chief, school kids, bus drivers, our chef at a home stay and fellow passengers on public transport to mention a few, where we could learn about local life of the main and of more remote islands as well.
Sharing is part of the local culture too - we ended up sharing food with other passengers on trucks that serve as the public transport which works as an ice-breaker too. At another time when walking around the market near closing time, a vendor offered to give us a taste of his paw-paw when he saw we weren't sure what that was, and seeing that we liked it (well, we politely smiled) but didn't want to buy it (as we 're not big fans, but he might have thought we didn't have money) he insisted that we take the whole fruit for free.
There were loads of children all around (36% of the population is below 14, and a further 20% is below 24), in a 30-minute walk around a tiny village we saw at least 5 schools. Despite there being so many schools, somehow the children never seemed to actually be inside the classrooms studying - they were either in the school playground, talking on the side of the road, or at home with their parents. Lots of times they would run up to us and say hello, or sing to us.
On many of the islands locals still wear their traditional clothes made from natural materials from the woods. On Efate and in the less remote parts of Santo locals have westernised their outfit, but in many corners of Tanna "grass skirts" are still widely used.
3. The Language
Bislama, the local language is actually a form of pidgin (or 'broken') English, most of which you can understand quite easily. Some of the basics:
mi / yu / yumi = me / you / we (you + me)
plis / tangkyu / tangkyu tumas / sori / sori tumas = please / thank you / thank you very much (too much) / sorry /very sorry (too much)
mi go / mi no save / Yu save toktok English = I will go / I don't know / Can you speak English
No one gets any prizes for deciphering the largest billboard in town: "Mi wantem Tusker" (Tusker is the local beer brand)!
"Helti" food kiosk
The Bislama language has a tragic origin though: in the 1860's Australia needed labourers to work on the sugarcane plantations in Queensland, so they 'recruited' labourers from the Pacific Islands - in reality this indentured labour was far from voluntary and ended up being not that different from slavery. They were at the mercy of the landowners in a society completely different from anything they had known. They couldn't even communicate amongst themselves, since every tribe in Vanuatu had its own language, and while they could kind of understand their neighbouring tribe, there were hundreds of separate languages on the various islands. They ended up learning English to communicate with the masters and each other, however there was no formal education, so they learnt the best they could by listening.
Unfortunately, the story becomes even sadder, since the Pacific Island labourers were constantly discriminated against (e.g. barred by law from performing higher paid work), before being deported according to legislation passed in 1901 as part of the "White Australia" policy, which intended to keep non-whites from immigrating to Australia, and in some cases to remove people that were there legally. Upon returning to their native lands, this pidgin English spread and became the national language, the first universal language among ni-Van tribes.
4. No Concept of Money
Ni-Vans have a very different relationship to money (outside the capital at least). Everyone has his own garden, where they can grow all the fruit and vegetables they need. When they get hungry during the day from a snack, they just collect some fruit from the first tree they come across, hence people - including children going to school - walk along with huge knives to be prepared for this - it feels a bit like the garden of Eden. They also build their own homes. from plants in the jungle So the only thing they consistently buy from shops is rice and some canned food, but other than that, no one really needs money. Of course, money is convenient, but it just isn't an essential part of their life, and they consider it as a materialistic element of the outside world which they (supposedly) reject. As all the necessities are guaranteed, there is no need to work hard or efficiently to make more money, so everything flows at a super-relaxed "Island time" pace, to the extent that even people from other tropical places struggle to get used to it.
Remote tribal village in Santo
This also leads to ni-Vans not really having a concept of the monetary value of something. They will argue with conviction that charging tourists $150 for a 30-minute drive from the airport is a fair price, because there have been examples of tourists being ripped off for $1000 for a 1-day excursion, hence $150 is fair for 30-minutes. To give you a perspective of the price level in the country, the price for a local to do the same trip is $4 (albeit on the back of a pick-up) and the monthly minimum wage is $400. As long as they've heard of someone who has paid any exorbitant price they can imagine, it becomes a fair price to charge everyone.
Being experienced with similar attempts from our past trips, we didn't get ripped off, but we still had to endure the extremely high price levels when we wanted to do something where there was no alternative way, as negotiating isn't really a concept. There is some justification behind the extreme price levels that it is a remote island with no economies of scale due to a small population size, but it doesn't sound normal that overall during our holiday on a day-by-day basis we spent more money than in Japan (the most expensive country in our round-the-world trip), and it was not because we lived in opulent luxury in Vanuatu!
When we tried to explain to locals that lower prices would lead to more people coming to visit and the country being better off in the end, it didn't seem to gain any traction. Today even on Santo, which is probably the most picturesque of all the islands and have some infrastructure to cater for tourists, during our stay we kept meeting the same 10 couples over and over again, it seemed there were not too many foreigners. We heard from local expats that this is likely to change soon due to heavy Chinese investments in the tourism industry to build new hotels and airstrips in the next couple of years.
5. Transportation
Transportation on Santo owes much to the legacy of WWII, as the airports were built by the Americans, so all the ni-Vans had to do was choose which one to keep after the war (there were 5 airports on the island of Santo alone, with additional airports and a harbour on Efate). The other landing strips were then used as normal roads, which are still some of the smoothest tarmac on the island!
There is a single paved road on the island, from Luganville city up the East coast to Port Olry (built with American aid and completed in 2010), The only other proper paved road in the country is the ring road around Efate, the main island, everywhere else is gravel or dirt. Completing the road must have been a big change for the island, as people can now commute to work to Luganville in about 45 minutes.
The pick-up trucks leave Port Olry in the morning for the 40km journey, picking up workers along the way, and return in the afternoon around 3-5pm. During the day the pick-ups serve as Luganville's public transportation - so it's a quite well thought-out system. We realised this was the only way to get up to Port Olry on a budget (alternatively tourists are charged $60-100 for the drive), so we went to the petrol station in Luganville where all the pickups gather before heading back. The routine is to let the petrol guy know how far North you want to go, and since he knows everyone on the island, he will tell you when a car going to your destination pulls up!
After catching the pickup, we thought it would be a quick trip, but we didn't calculate that we would stop to pick up some groceries for some passengers, some cement and building material for another, some more groceries, some more people, then we would stop at the kava bar to buy some kava, followed by the kindergarten to pick up some children - but finally we were good to go. It was completely natural that the locals made such huge side-trips, while if we wanted even a slightest detour, they would try to charge us an arm and a leg. Szilveszter really enjoyed travelling on the back of the pickup as you got a much better line of sight of everything that was going on - even if you had to hold on tightly and endure the rain if you were unlucky.
Travelling on a pick up with locals
6. Water Music
Women from the Banks Islands in the North of Vanuatu have a tradition called Water Music, where they stand in the water and create music by rhythmically splashing the water, with creatively named melodies such as "Farewell to Guests", "Hummingbird above the water" and "Duck". This tradition of "water slapping" belongs to women only. Dressed in their traditional costumes made from flowers and leaves, coconuts and pandanus, they stand waist deep in the water, originally in the ocean to create music. This practice has been handed down among women over generations. Today the tradition is undergoing a resurgence after a few elderly women codified the elements of the practice in the '70-ies. We would recommend going to see it once (the actual music lasts about 15 minutes) purely due to the uniqueness of the experience.
Word of warning - there are two different groups offering water music in Santo (with both claiming to be the real one): the Leweton Cultural Village and the Torgor Flower Garden, within 100m of each other. The main difference between the two is that the former includes a more comprehensive experience (with men and womens' castom dancing and kava preparation), while the latter usually only does the water music for the same price. We found it out the hard way, by accidentally going to the second one. Luckily the first place gave us a discount when we said we had just come from their competitor and wanted to see their water music too (I'm not sure they had ever come across someone this enthusiastic before)!
Listen to the music here
7. Millenium Cave
The Millenium Cave is one of the top adventure experiences in Santo - it is advertised as a "4-in-1" adventure, involving trekking, canyoning, walking through a cave and swimming in a river (I'll let you decide whether these qualify as distinct types of activities). Some of the highlights of the trip:
30-minute walk through a pitch-black cave knee-deep in water with hundreds of bats sleeping above your head (I forgot to mention to Renata on the way that I also saw some scorpions in the cave)
Clambering across huge moss-covered boulders in the riverbed as part of the canyoning, with so limited handrails that it would not pass safety standards elsewhere...
Swimming and floating in the sky blue river and enjoying the incredible scenery with fantastic waterfalls dropping into the river
Making a vertical ascent on wooden ladders, up the face of a small waterfall (not everyone listed this as a highlight)
Trekking through two local tribal villages and talking to the guides and chiefs of the village about their every days and culture. The owner of the tour company is from one of the villages and all the profits go to developing the communities
Bring good closed shoes though as the path gets incredibly slippery even when it isn't particularly rainy, and don't be afraid to negotiate with the tour operator if you approach them directly. They can be found shortly after the market on the right side of the road just before the bridge in Luganville.
8. WWII Sites
The attractions that make Santo famous worldwide are the WWII remains: from airplane wrecks in the middle of the jungle to Million Dollar Point and to one of the top wreck-dives in the world, the SS President Coolidge.
The SS President Coolidge was a luxury liner which was converted into a troop carrier during the war, carrying over 5,000 soldiers. Her sinking was the result of an unfortunate accident: the harbour was heavily mined to protect it from any Japanese attack. The base radioed the ship the direction they should enter the bay from, but couldn't tell the captain why, because they didn't want to give away the fact that all the other entrances were mined. Not knowing the context, the captain decided to take a different route which he felt was safer, with predictable consequences. After the ship hit the first mine the captain decided to go full steam ahead and beach the ship on the shore - as a consequence only 2 people died; however most of the equipment was lost when the ship sank, and then slid down the coral reef. Today it is one of the best shipwreck diving sites in the world.
When diving, we saw a huge amount of military gear, from cutlery to gas masks, artillery shells, jeeps and overturned tanks, giving it a very eerie feeling. The ship is huge (over 200m long), so you can do dozens of different dives on this one wreck. We didn't go down to take a picture with the famous porcelain tile of a lady riding a unicorn (which was in the ball room when it was still a luxury liner) as we felt it was a bit deeper than we felt comfortable (39m deep when our advanced certificates would only allow us to go 30m).
Part of the fun was that we went diving with Allan Power, an 82-year old Australian who published the first colour photobook of the Great Barrier Reef, and then moved to Vanuatu and was the first to popularise diving at the Coolidge. Even though he didn't dive with us that day (some of his people did), he still goes diving every so often and still hasn't gotten bored after thousands of dives. After the dive we caught up with him over coffee and buns and listened to his fascinating stories, looked at his early photos as well as his original camera case - underwater photography was a lot more complicated back in the day!
Million Dollar Point
After the end of the war, the Americans faced a dilemma: they had loads of military equipment all over the Pacific, which they no longer needed. Rumour has the car companies agreed to sell the jeeps to the Army at a discount during the war, if they promised they wouldn't bring them back to the USA after it had ended - since adding so much supply would completely destroy the car market. So the Army tried to go with the next best solution: selling the gear (including food, jeeps and construction equipment) to the ni-Van colonial government at a deep discount. However, the colonial government was also aware that the US wasn't in a great negotiating position and insisted on getting it all for free. Unwilling to set a precedent of giving away stuff, the US decided to dump everything in the ocean - presumably this helped convince other countries to cough up some cash for the gear on their islands. This game of chicken resulted in a great snorkeling and dive site, you can just walk in off the shore and see jeeps, tires, cabling, ammunition and coke bottles all rusting in the water - and coral has even started to form around them. Just don't expect to recognize everything you see, most of the time you will just recognise the contours of some jumble of stuff, but the years of sediment have made it hard to realise what you see!
9. Champagne Beach and Port Olry
Most people take at least a day trip up the East Coast of Santo to see the fabulous white sand beaches on the way - there are actually a couple to chose from: Champage and Lonnoc Beaches right next to each other, and Port Olry Beach a bit further up.
We heard that Champagne Beach is the nicest (named after either the curvature of the bay or the colour of the sand depending on who you listen to), but that we should try out Lonnoc Beach if Champagne gets too crowded. Luckily we didn't have any such problem, besides ourselves, our driver and the Danish couple we rented the car with there was only an occasional tourist staying for 30 minutes and a few cows resting in the shades of some palm trees on the entire glorious white sand beach! It was also worth going for a short snorkel on the far right side of the beach around the rocks and corals.
Pristine turquoise water on the almost private Champagne Beach
We were a bit puzzled as the facilities were clearly there for a huge crowd, with space for dozens of hawker stalls - but where were the people...? We found out that Santo is transformed for a day every fortnight when a cruise ship docks and thousands of tourists descend on the island. Locals living near Champagne Beach go into Luganville to buy clothes to sell in the stalls, restaurants run out of food and beer and service becomes even slower (hard to imagine...) Anyway we were glad we missed this aspect of the island.
Although we saw the arriving boat, we avoided the crowd by spending a day kayaking
Port Olry is a small fishing village at the end of the road (literally the concrete road finishes in the village and cows take over from that point), and also the 2nd largest village on Santo. It has a pretty blue church on a hill and a huge religious boarding school with hundreds of children (families tend to have many kids to help parents in agricultural works), plenty of fishing boats and cows grazing underneath the palm trees on the beach. In terms of facilities, it has a choice of 3 accommodations, 2 restaurants and a single 'shop' (strategically located next to the school) in total.
Where the (only) road ends; School children; Village view x2
Our accommodation - one of the fanciest in the village - was very basic and had seen better days, but the beachfront bungalows had ocean views over the bay and the restaurant's atmosphere and hammocks were unbeatable. However, we had a shock on our first night when we realised we were sharing our $100/night accommodation with a rather large rat who was very curious about our biscuits and avocado which we had stocked up on in Luganville (we had to, considering the food options in the village). This turned out common theme elsewhere in Vanuatu, and I never thought I'd hear myself saying the first night with rats is the worst and you can quickly get used to it once you know what the noise is - expectations management is the name of the game!
After this, we didn't even bat an eyelid when we were told the internet had a "little problem", i.e. it had been non-operational since a storm 2 months ago - not that we needed it, but it was just funny to see a sign in the middle of nowhere proclaiming WiFi and then no one thinking of doing something to fix it (or at least taking down the sign...). The fact that our room wasn't cleaned before we arrived (and even I could tell!) or during our stay and that it was completely normal for our arranged driver to be an hour late also showed how "island time" is even slower the further away you get from the "city" of Luganville.
Finally, our experiences were spiced up with Renata accidentally dropping her wedding ring on the floor in our bungalow, which quickly disappeared under the bed between one of the finger-wide holes of the floor. We had to convince the management to partly dismantle the floor and lift a plank in the room, hoping that we pick the right one, as we weren't sure about the actual location of the ring underneath. Luckily on our last day the staff gave up on hoping we would give up trying and we got some help and found her ring - it would have been sad losing it on our 3rd wedding anniversary trip.
Despite these inconveniences we would still recommend spending at least a night in Port Orly to experience the sunset and the feel of the village. Many people just stop for an hour as part of a day trip and miss its magical atmosphere.
Once in Port Orly, you will be encouraged to try a local delicacy, the coconut crab. This is the world's largest land-dwelling crab (more than 1m long and 4kg), and is called a "coconut" crab not because it is cooked with coconut milk, but because it eats coconuts, supposedly giving it a very distinctive taste. The crab has an extraordinarily hard shell and about 20cm long claws, so catching it is a dangerous activity which falls on the village's men. Szilveszter's view is that the taste and process of eating it is very similar to lobster: loads of work for a little but delicious meat. After having tasted it we found out that it used to be a vulnerable species due to its growing popularity on the plates, however it is now supposedly OK to eat again due to some conservation measures that somewhat helped the population to recover. We're still not quite sure how we feel about having eaten it...
10. Turtle Bay and Blue Holes
Our last stop on Santo was to take in some luxury at the Turtle Bay Lodge - we would definitely recommend it to any visitor as a base of operations for the island. The incredible thing was that you get peace and quiet as well as clean, Western-quality accommodation (no rats in case you were wondering), lounge chairs and a swimming pool - for the same price as a rat-infested bungalow in Port Orly (see earlier point about having no concept of the value of money and reasonable prices). Skye, the Australian hotel manager, was incredibly helpful in offering tips for activities, and we ended up kayaking up from the hotel on the Matevulu river to the nearest Blue Hole - where we also managed to avoid the huge crowd that arrived to the island with a cruise that day.
View from the lodge
Vanuatu has numerous "Blue Holes", which can be either fresh or saltwater spots with crystal-clear water filtered through rocks in the base of the lake. These have been turned into designated tourist attractions by the tribe owning the land hoping to earn some money from entrance fees. Other than Matevulu we'd also visited the Thar Blue Hole, but skipped the Nanda Blue Holes, which is meant to be the prettiest one on Santo, as they didn't bother opening when we showed up an hour after the opening time :D The quality of the blue holes actually changes over time as minor earth-tremors cause the settled silt to rise and the water to become less clear and blue but rather brownish. Besides the actual blue hole, kayaking through the dense jungle was also a fun experience, which reminded Szilveszter of his high-school days canoeing down the Tisza in Hungary.
Matevulu (left) and Thar (right) Blue Hole
No wonder why we could not find Szilveszter's name tag...
While staying at Turtle Bay, we were invited to the closing-down party of the neighbouring Oyster Island resort, whose Sunday Buffet Lunch BBQ is a weekly gathering place for local expats on the island. We were told a Chinese developer had bought the hotel and is now looking to demolish and rebuild the place, expanding from 15 to 50 bungalows; disregarding concerns about the sewage implications and insufficient water supply in the process (according to the people we'd talked to). This seemed to be another recurring theme across the islands in Vanuatu, with Chinese developers making significant investments in hotels and infrastructure (roads, airports and ports), but that would dramatically change the face of the islands - and very little local control over how the change should be managed.
There is a little ferry that takes visitors over onto Oyster island, and there is a unique system for signalling the ferry should it happen to be on the other side of the channel: an empty dive tank and a big drumstick are suspended to a tree, which you're meant to ring to attract the ferry's attention!
The farewell BBQ event was an emotional one for the expats and staff (all 20 of whom would become unemployed the following day), but they pulled out all the stops to make the last party the best one. The celebrations started off with a professional castom warriors' dances to say goodbye to the old spirits of the place and welcome the new ones, which was possibly the best dancing we had seen on the islands. It was followed by a delicious buffet lunch (including their signature chocolate ribs) and wrapped up with the staff band playing away into the night. It was also our wedding anniversary that day so it was our celebration event at the same time!
After an eventful visit to Santo, we continued our way to the much less developed Tanna island further South, which is home to the world's most accessible active volcano! Stay tuned for the details!