Excerpted from the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey:
It’s 6:15 on the Erakor Lagoon near Port Vila, Vanuatu. Women in bright print skirts paddle canoes across the lagoon from villages into town. Small, yellow-billed birds call from the grass by the water’s edge, roosters crow from somewhere, and the low rumble of the surf hurling itself against the reef is as much felt as heard.
Like every morning, the sky is grayer than blue. Clouds hang close to the hills and the water is green glass, reflecting jungle. We’re staying on a tiny island near the capital city, Port Vila. This is the morning of our third day and after snorkeling from an outrigger in the midday sun yesterday, we're well burned already.
**
Thursday in Vila was a rainy day. Every other morning was heavy with water, too, but on Thursday in Vila, the cloud never gave way. Offshore, south beyond the reef remained seductively blue but clouds swept from the east over our little Erakor Island and before long delivered over-ripe drops driving across the lagoon which, when they arrived (and we could watch their progress in waves from the far shore), fell with real heft.
A partnership of 2 yellow-billed, yellow-eyed, yellow-legged birds with a remarkable range of chirps, clicks and warbles and endearingly monogamous, toward whom we came to feel proprietary, worked a 10 meter radius of our back porch the whole time we lived there, building a nest with all the languor of the people of Vanuatu, until the rain forced them undercover.
It didn't rain non-stop though, and since we were horrified at the splotchy crimson we'd turned in maybe 40 minutes of sun, we decided on the only rational course of action for the day. Go to town for beers.
An affable crazy expatriate clued us in to the red buses on the other side of the ferry - hop on, hop off, wherever, for 200 per couple (250 would be a dollar each). You can even hop out and do your shopping (he did), and the driver will wait.
Vila has been left more British than French (the two governed the New Hebrides in a condominium arrangement lasting until independence - and a name change -for Vanuatu in 1980) even though the French paid three times as much to their administrators while the Brits thought it was an embarrassment to be posted here.
In a restaurant one dinnertime, the Chinese proprietor who had been here 20 years said simply, "It was better then." She meant that there was outside money here then. But it's not entirely somnambulant now - there's a busy mile or so full of taxis and pink tourists and banks, services and things to buy.
Capitalism Vanuatu style: I wanted to buy two beer glasses (with the logo of the local brew) from our waitress at the terrace. She checked the price and came back brightly to proclaim, "It cost 500 so I charge you 450. I already put it on your bill!"
At mid-afternoon the skies broke apart and we scurried inside to watch the oil run down the street of Vila and pedestrians sprint while trying to cover their heads.
**
The Vila domestic flight terminal is like the one in Kathmandu, or in any former communist East European provincial town. Desperately under-performing countries in the first place, their inclination is to spend their tiny wad on their international terminal for transits and arrivals, their countrymen and the few who venture by plane beyond the gateway be damned. It's cute.
Our flight to Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu’s largest island, would stop that Craig's Cove, Ambrym Island. I broke out my map of Vanuatu and found two airplane symbols on Ambrym Island and asked the check-in desk which it would be.
Blank looks. Much consultation. Studying the maps. Asking the boy in the back, the baggage boy. No one knew, but eventually I found it, a light blue marking of a physical landmark, not a town, and that brought grateful smiles from the check-in boy.
The door to domestic departures spoke three languages English, French, and Bislama. Respectively, it read: passengers only,
reservees aux passagers, pasensa no mo.
We filed in. 20 seats in this Twin Otter, today 16 full. One European family with their little girl, one huge white man in seat one, carrying on a running conversation with the pilot (it's not a big plane) who brought his son, a 20-ish couple-in-love, students from New Zealand (you learn these things because in about a day and a half you meet every expat in Santo), four locals, Mirja and me.
Our home island of Efate, where Vila is, brooded in cloud - its out-islands just north likewise brooded steely gray. But Malakula, just northwest in sight of Efate, was fine, sunny with a blue chop off its shore. By our arrival at Ambrym, just 40 minutes later, there were no low clouds on the coast, only in the center.
Craig's Cove was just a few houses in a pretty bay maybe three-quarters of a kilometer wide, gleaming in the morning sun. The airstrip used to be paved. Now it was pot-holed with grass growing through it and landing shook the wheels pretty bad. This is apparently not unusual. At the domestic check-in a chalkboard announced, "Longana air strip closed until further notice - tall grass."
Dirty boys with gleaming smiles ran out to meet the plane. A torn and ratty windsock had gone so into disrepair it had lost its utility, though it still hung on its pole. We let off two and took two on in Ambrym, along with a bag of coconuts.
The two we let off had boxes from Telecom Vanuatu Limited Radio Systems Department and an antenna bundled into sections. It was so hot on the ground, and, like prior to take off in Vila, the plane began to sweat again, dropping beads of water from the ceiling onto my right thigh.
Two ancient pickup trucks appeared out of the jungle for the Vanuatu Telecom men, and while we sat in Craig's Cove we let in hordes of flies. From Ambrym it was a brisk 20-something minutes up to Santo, flying at 4,000 ft., from where you can gaze intimately at the blue chop of the South Pacific. I read over the shoulder of a ni-Vanuatu man across the aisle. He was reading Charles Capps' "The Tongue A Creative Force."
"Watch your words" was the chapter.
I read the phrase, "I'll deny you before the Father," and a sub-heading, "God's word is wisdom."
**
It took until Friday afternoon, almost 4:00, to get thunder, the rumble you feel through your bare, pink feet in the grass, through the earth. Clouds welled up over an island south across a narrow channel called Segond from our garden perch near Luganville, Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu.
To the north the weather remained fine - high cirro-stratus - but predominantly blue. But out to the south, past the perimeter road (track, really) it wasn't 10 minutes after I remarked on the threatening clouds that were gathering low over Aeor Island that we heard the first rumbles.
We were hiding in the safety of the covered, cement porch of a bungalow near Luganville, Vanuatu's second city. Hiding because Mirja, as it was, could just about be served as steak tartar, and our bungalow porch afforded shade.
We'd combed the beach in the 1:00 sun beside kids and a man checking fish traps with a snorkel until we knew we were acting foolishly, pushing our luck. So here on the porch we savored the gathering storm as the wind kicked up, the cranberry hyacinths and a pink and yellow symphony of picked flowers fluttered beside our booty.
Arrayed to dry on the porch: Mirja's shells, a rusty spoon I fancied as from a World War two aviator's mess kit, and a 14 inch end to end lower jaw bone with two remaining teeth and an abscess. I found it to floating up and down with the tide and asked three men who conferred and decided it was bulu. Later a man thought it was a pig. Maybe bulu is pig but regardless, why is a pig jaw (and a damned fine pig it must have been!) in this sea?
We made our home at the Bougainville Resort, some metal-roofed bungalows around a garden 2 or 3 km outside Luganville. I like visiting a country's second city, and although we drove through Luganville - only several thousand people around a wide place in the track that doesn't even circumnavigate the island - it remains unknown to us. One day at a time.
**
The first we heard of a cyclone was Monday afternoon back in Vila. We sat, sweat pouring, at a terrace on the only proper street trying to lunch on burger and beer but ultimately deconstructing a thing on a bun that starts with the kitchen sink and then throws in all, but not limited to, the following: beets, onions, carrots, eggs, bacon, cucumber, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, salt, pepper, chilies, ketchup-and maybe a little tiny speck of free-range, no insecticides Vanuatu beef.
Next table over a bright pink corpulent fellow was telling his friend "Bluh bluh rain bluh bla cyclone bluh Fiji." I leaned out from behind my mound of discarded non-hamburger and inquired.
"Yeah," he said, "Its southeast of here, toward Fiji. We just had a look at it on the Internet, a big, mean thing. It's what's been causing all the rain."
We were bound for Fiji in 18 hours so this was notable, although just then it was sunny, hot and about 600% humid in Vila and we were just in from Santo where we'd passed a gloriously sunny day blistering in relentless sun the day before. But in the taxi home we heard the cyclone warnings in three languages on Vanuatu's only AM radio station, with a particular warning for the southeast island group centered around the cult-and-volcano Island of Tanna. By now the cyclone had a name. May I introduce you to Jo.
This night we stayed at one of those swishy over-the-water bungalows at a resort called Le Lagon Park Royal, five minutes out of town across Erakor Lagoon from where we started out in Vila (before flying to Santo). There was a healthy chop in the lagoon and the water lapped the pilings underneath us like smacking lips but it was the usual towering clouds at sunset, lit long after the ground went dark, and not much more than the usual brief dousing of rain on the deck. We let ourselves imagine the pounding reef out at the end of Erakor Island was meaner that it ought to have been, and maybe it was.
For three unrelenting days Santo had been humid, roasting and still, and our over-the-water luxury hut had air conditioning (and even a TV, fed taped day-old ABC news from Australia every couple of hours from down at the front desk), so we barricaded ourselves tight, turned it up and endeavored to freeze.
Next morning we asked the desk clerk while settling the bill, what about that cyclone? "It's gone," she smiled brightly.
Really?
"Yes, I think it has gone to Fiji."
We were bound just then for Bauerfield airport to catch an Air Vanuatu flight, operated by the national airline of Fiji, Air Pacific, using a leased Qantas pilot and jet (whatever), to Fiji. In the air the pilot showed us the cyclone-200 miles south of our tiny, little, baby 737:
"You can see the associated weather systems out the right side of the aircraft."
Twice he told us there was some "rain in the area" of Nadi airport, and when we came in to land it turned out he was very, very right. Scarcely 100 feet over the ground, already on the airport land, over the grass between the fence and the tarmac landing strip, we were lashed by blinding rain, and Captain Ian Richardson floored it, pulled us up and took us around.
After using the full power of the jets for a time (we were so close we must have been very nearly at stall speed) he eased back, and trying the nonchalant whistling-past-the-graveyard, nothing-happened approach:
Vila has been left more British than French (the two governed the New Hebrides in a condominium arrangement lasting until independence - and a name change -for Vanuatu in 1980) even though the French paid three times as much to their administrators while the Brits thought it was an embarrassment to be posted here.
In a restaurant one dinnertime, the Chinese proprietor who had been here 20 years said simply, "It was better then." She meant that there was outside money here then. But it's not entirely somnambulant now - there's a busy mile or so full of taxis and pink tourists and banks, services and things to buy.
Capitalism Vanuatu style: I wanted to buy two beer glasses (with the logo of the local brew) from our waitress at the terrace. She checked the price and came back brightly to proclaim, "It cost 500 so I charge you 450. I already put it on your bill!"
At mid-afternoon the skies broke apart and we scurried inside to watch the oil run down the street of Vila and pedestrians sprint while trying to cover their heads.
**
The Vila domestic flight terminal is like the one in Kathmandu, or in any former communist East European provincial town. Desperately under-performing countries in the first place, their inclination is to spend their tiny wad on their international terminal for transits and arrivals, their countrymen and the few who venture by plane beyond the gateway be damned. It's cute.
Our flight to Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu’s largest island, would stop that Craig's Cove, Ambrym Island. I broke out my map of Vanuatu and found two airplane symbols on Ambrym Island and asked the check-in desk which it would be.
Blank looks. Much consultation. Studying the maps. Asking the boy in the back, the baggage boy. No one knew, but eventually I found it, a light blue marking of a physical landmark, not a town, and that brought grateful smiles from the check-in boy.
The door to domestic departures spoke three languages English, French, and Bislama. Respectively, it read: passengers only,
reservees aux passagers, pasensa no mo.
We filed in. 20 seats in this Twin Otter, today 16 full. One European family with their little girl, one huge white man in seat one, carrying on a running conversation with the pilot (it's not a big plane) who brought his son, a 20-ish couple-in-love, students from New Zealand (you learn these things because in about a day and a half you meet every expat in Santo), four locals, Mirja and me.
Our home island of Efate, where Vila is, brooded in cloud - its out-islands just north likewise brooded steely gray. But Malakula, just northwest in sight of Efate, was fine, sunny with a blue chop off its shore. By our arrival at Ambrym, just 40 minutes later, there were no low clouds on the coast, only in the center.
Craig's Cove was just a few houses in a pretty bay maybe three-quarters of a kilometer wide, gleaming in the morning sun. The airstrip used to be paved. Now it was pot-holed with grass growing through it and landing shook the wheels pretty bad. This is apparently not unusual. At the domestic check-in a chalkboard announced, "Longana air strip closed until further notice - tall grass."
Dirty boys with gleaming smiles ran out to meet the plane. A torn and ratty windsock had gone so into disrepair it had lost its utility, though it still hung on its pole. We let off two and took two on in Ambrym, along with a bag of coconuts.
The two we let off had boxes from Telecom Vanuatu Limited Radio Systems Department and an antenna bundled into sections. It was so hot on the ground, and, like prior to take off in Vila, the plane began to sweat again, dropping beads of water from the ceiling onto my right thigh.
Two ancient pickup trucks appeared out of the jungle for the Vanuatu Telecom men, and while we sat in Craig's Cove we let in hordes of flies. From Ambrym it was a brisk 20-something minutes up to Santo, flying at 4,000 ft., from where you can gaze intimately at the blue chop of the South Pacific. I read over the shoulder of a ni-Vanuatu man across the aisle. He was reading Charles Capps' "The Tongue A Creative Force."
"Watch your words" was the chapter.
I read the phrase, "I'll deny you before the Father," and a sub-heading, "God's word is wisdom."
**
It took until Friday afternoon, almost 4:00, to get thunder, the rumble you feel through your bare, pink feet in the grass, through the earth. Clouds welled up over an island south across a narrow channel called Segond from our garden perch near Luganville, Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu.
To the north the weather remained fine - high cirro-stratus - but predominantly blue. But out to the south, past the perimeter road (track, really) it wasn't 10 minutes after I remarked on the threatening clouds that were gathering low over Aeor Island that we heard the first rumbles.
We were hiding in the safety of the covered, cement porch of a bungalow near Luganville, Vanuatu's second city. Hiding because Mirja, as it was, could just about be served as steak tartar, and our bungalow porch afforded shade.
Arrayed to dry on the porch: Mirja's shells, a rusty spoon I fancied as from a World War two aviator's mess kit, and a 14 inch end to end lower jaw bone with two remaining teeth and an abscess. I found it to floating up and down with the tide and asked three men who conferred and decided it was bulu. Later a man thought it was a pig. Maybe bulu is pig but regardless, why is a pig jaw (and a damned fine pig it must have been!) in this sea?
We made our home at the Bougainville Resort, some metal-roofed bungalows around a garden 2 or 3 km outside Luganville. I like visiting a country's second city, and although we drove through Luganville - only several thousand people around a wide place in the track that doesn't even circumnavigate the island - it remains unknown to us. One day at a time.
**
The first we heard of a cyclone was Monday afternoon back in Vila. We sat, sweat pouring, at a terrace on the only proper street trying to lunch on burger and beer but ultimately deconstructing a thing on a bun that starts with the kitchen sink and then throws in all, but not limited to, the following: beets, onions, carrots, eggs, bacon, cucumber, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, salt, pepper, chilies, ketchup-and maybe a little tiny speck of free-range, no insecticides Vanuatu beef.
Next table over a bright pink corpulent fellow was telling his friend "Bluh bluh rain bluh bla cyclone bluh Fiji." I leaned out from behind my mound of discarded non-hamburger and inquired.
"Yeah," he said, "Its southeast of here, toward Fiji. We just had a look at it on the Internet, a big, mean thing. It's what's been causing all the rain."
We were bound for Fiji in 18 hours so this was notable, although just then it was sunny, hot and about 600% humid in Vila and we were just in from Santo where we'd passed a gloriously sunny day blistering in relentless sun the day before. But in the taxi home we heard the cyclone warnings in three languages on Vanuatu's only AM radio station, with a particular warning for the southeast island group centered around the cult-and-volcano Island of Tanna. By now the cyclone had a name. May I introduce you to Jo.
This night we stayed at one of those swishy over-the-water bungalows at a resort called Le Lagon Park Royal, five minutes out of town across Erakor Lagoon from where we started out in Vila (before flying to Santo). There was a healthy chop in the lagoon and the water lapped the pilings underneath us like smacking lips but it was the usual towering clouds at sunset, lit long after the ground went dark, and not much more than the usual brief dousing of rain on the deck. We let ourselves imagine the pounding reef out at the end of Erakor Island was meaner that it ought to have been, and maybe it was.
For three unrelenting days Santo had been humid, roasting and still, and our over-the-water luxury hut had air conditioning (and even a TV, fed taped day-old ABC news from Australia every couple of hours from down at the front desk), so we barricaded ourselves tight, turned it up and endeavored to freeze.
Next morning we asked the desk clerk while settling the bill, what about that cyclone? "It's gone," she smiled brightly.
Really?
"Yes, I think it has gone to Fiji."
We were bound just then for Bauerfield airport to catch an Air Vanuatu flight, operated by the national airline of Fiji, Air Pacific, using a leased Qantas pilot and jet (whatever), to Fiji. In the air the pilot showed us the cyclone-200 miles south of our tiny, little, baby 737:
"You can see the associated weather systems out the right side of the aircraft."
Twice he told us there was some "rain in the area" of Nadi airport, and when we came in to land it turned out he was very, very right. Scarcely 100 feet over the ground, already on the airport land, over the grass between the fence and the tarmac landing strip, we were lashed by blinding rain, and Captain Ian Richardson floored it, pulled us up and took us around.
After using the full power of the jets for a time (we were so close we must have been very nearly at stall speed) he eased back, and trying the nonchalant whistling-past-the-graveyard, nothing-happened approach:
"As you could see there," he told us, "It was a bit too rainy for me to put us down, so we'll call it a missed approach and go round and I'll try to have us on the ground in seven or eight minutes time." And that he did, and you could see on the way that it had been raining tons and buckets over Fiji.
Photos from the Vanuatu Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
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