by Judy Handley | Aug 10, 2007 | Sailing Logs Year 2, Vanuatu |
Day 108, Year 2: An Evening on the Edge
Date: Friday, August 10, 2007
Weather: Party-Sunny; Threat of Rain in the Evening
Location: Port Resolution, Tanna Island, Vanuatu
Last night around 10 PM I went up into the cockpit and saw the red glow of Mt. Yasur in the night sky. We can’t see the volcano from the anchorage but it is just over the hills to our west. This was the first red glow we have seen since arriving here and although it is beautiful it leaves you feeling very tiny and defenseless. I can only imagine what it must be like to live here in the shadow of this very active volcano all the time. I can see why the people here are mystics. Some believe that
when you die you go into the volcano. So when you do something that displeases the dead, they send grumblings from the middle of the earth to punish you. I’m a definite coward and would do nothing to displease my ancesters if I lived here!
Tonight we went to Mt. Yasur and stood on the edge of the crater rim to watch the fireworks. It is truly spectacular to see the red fire coming out of the center of the crater and to listen to the growling and whooshing and the periodic thundering earth as the volcano sends the red molten lava high into the air. As well as standing on the edge, I felt we were living on the edge this evening. We took a break from watching the volcano and picture-taking to sit down and eat something. The biggest
kaboom of the evening happened while we were sitting and you could feel the earth tremor. The sound was deafening and the lava went up and up and up . . . just a little too far for comfort. We were really in no danger, but for a few seconds it was hard to tell if any pieces of lava were going to come our way. They all fell well short, but there was certainly that moment of tenseness. We stayed on the crater rim for more than an hour and half and just enjoyed the show, but even getting to the
volcano was a adventure. Let me disgress a little and tell that story.
At 3 PM Paul and Marie of Ranger and Dave and Kathy of La Vie were at the Yacht Club with us waiting for the truck to return from Lenakel with the other cruisers who were signed up to go to the kastom village. The truck returned late and Stanley explained that a man had died in the kastom village today, so there would be no dancing today. I guess we’ll have to see this on another island. So at 4 PM the other cruisers from the anchorage came into the Yacht Club ready to go to the volcano. Now
there were twenty-some of us ready to go, but only the one pickup truck. Stanley had arranged for other trucks, but this is Vanuatu, and time really has no meaning here. So half of us got in the one truck and could only hope that another truck would come soon. To make a very long story short, eventually everyone did make it to the volcano. That in itself was a miracle. Our truck had to back down the steep grade up to the volcano’s edge more than once to get us up there since we were so heavily
loaded. That truck had to go back to get the other half, but eventually we all made it. When it was time to leave, again the organization of figuring out how to get most of us to the John Frum village, but some back to Port Resolution seemed to take forever. And even once Stanley figured it out, he had to go back up to the crater’s rim to find the drivers. On the way to the John Frum village, Simon from New Zealand asked me what I thought we would see at the John Frum village. I really didn’t
know. I just knew that the villagers play music and dance from dusk on Friday to sunrise on Saturday morning. None of us really knew what to expect. We arrived and were escorted to what I would call a long house–a long thatched-roofed, open-sided structure. We sat along the edges and the “bands” sat in the middle. A John Frum band consists of about eight musicians and lots of women and children. Other men seem to stand around the sides of the long house and talk, dance, or smoke cigarettes.
Even after being there, I’m still not sure that I can explain what it was all about. I think this one is going to take more reading and inquiry of local people.
Now I have to digress even further. Earlier in the day, we went on a walkabout. Paul and Marie of Ranger went with us. We walked along the black sand beach and met some children playing in the water. Mark had great fun with them. One eight year-old was writing numbers in the sand with a long knife he was carrying. Mark asked to borrow it and he wrote his name in the sand. The little boy then wrote his name. We walked on and then turned inland when we saw some thatched structures just off
the beach. A young woman named Mary and her year-old son named Christiane walked over to greet us. I showed her the crude map I had made by printing a copy of photo of a map in the Irupow Cultural Center. She showed us her village and we followed her there. She explained that she went to school through grade six and that she married when she was 16 and is now 22 and has three children, Christiane being the youngest. She pointed out the different trees and their uses and seemed to have more information
about the environment than most anyone we have met. Her father, Philomon, the chief of Ianumel Nirsori village was gone when we arrived, but we met Mary’s sister-in-law, Neri. Neri has a two-week old baby named Mark, actually named after Mark on Diva, another yacht that was here when the baby was born. Neri wanted us to take a picture of the baby, but this meant that we had to go in the house. Babies here are not to be taken out of doors until they are one-month old. We took pictures and will
print copies and take them to her tomorrow. We continued our walk around a pond that Mary called a river, saw lots of beautiful banyon trees, walked through another village and out to the white sand beach on the east side of Tanna, and eventually back to Port Resolution.
It was quite a day and it is now midnight. It is definitely time to “shut down” for tonight. If I’ve left out any essential details, I’ll have to put those in tomorrow’s log.
by Judy Handley | Aug 9, 2007 | Sailing Logs Year 2, Vanuatu |
Day 107, Year 2: Too Many Cruisers and Only One Tusker’s
Date: Thursday, August 9, 2007
Weather: ESE Winds 20 Making Things A Little Bouncy in the Anchorage
Location: Port Resolution, Tanna Island, Vanuatu
At 4:00 this afternoon, more than 20 cruisers gathered in the Port Resolution Yacht Club. Stewart on Kathy II, being the good Aussie that he is, arranged with Stanley (Chief Ronnie’s son) to have the bar open this afternoon. There was a problem, however. There was only one Tusker’s beer. It was the quietest Happy Hour I have ever attended! So we still haven’t tasted the beer of Vanuatu–Tusker’s, but we had a nice time socializing and signing up for the activities planned for tomorrow. The
plan is to visit a kastom village in mid-afternoon (what Stanley refers to as the naked people), go on to the volcano for sundown fireworks, and end the evening with Friday night dancing at the John Frum Village. Too little beer today; too many people tomorrow. Stanley is not sure he can accommodate the numbers. Some of the truck owners are Seventh Day Adventists and they don’t drive on Friday, so he is not sure he can get three trucks to take us all. He is taking ten cruisers to Lenakel to check-in
tomorrow and he will see if he can find trucks there. We won’t know until 3 PM when they return and when it is time to leave. I have faith that he can pull it off, but if not, some of us might have to wait until Saturday to see the mighty Mt. Yasur volcano. We’ll just have to wait and see.
I did laundry this morning and then Mark and I spent some time looking at our cruising schedule for Vanuatu and doing a little more reading about some of the other islands and anchorages. It is going to be very hard to pack it all into six weeks, but that is our goal. By late September we need to move on to New Caledonia, and then from there on to Australia by the first of November. If weather cooperates with us, we will be fine, but that is a very big IF. It is looking like the weather gurus
are about to declare this as a La Nina season and if that runs true to form, it means more west winds which will not help our cause. Again, we just have to wait and see. There are no guarantees out here.
After lunch, Paul and Marie of Ranger came over to review the cruising schedule with us. If possible, we would like to stick together so we will have a buddy boat from here to Australia. At this point, we are in agreement as to the schedule, so it looks like it should work. After reviewing the schedule, we went to shore to see the village of Irupow. We entered the village where there is huge green common area. There were some young girls playing volley ball in the center of the green. It was
great to see young women being able to do this here. There were almost no men in village, as they were all having an afternoon kava session honoring the anniversary of the previous chief’s death on August 9, 2001. The only man we saw was the chief, Ronnie. We introduced ourselves and took pictures of him with two of his grandchildren. We then walked through the village which was much larger than we had suspected. There were many young children, more than we have seen in any village to date.
Most of them seemed to be about a year and half old, which seemed a little strange. But there were many more three to five year-olds as well. When we reached the edge of the village, we saw that the women had a little craft market with woven carrying baskets and mats, shells, and carved outrigger canoes for sale. The prices were unbelievably cheap and some of the woven carrying baskets were very fine weaving. We were going to walk down to the white sand beach, but we learned that women cannot
walk that road in the afternoon. The nakamal where men were drinking kava is on that road and women are absolutely not allowed to watch, participate in, or even walk by an area where men are drinking or preparing kava. Equal rights have not reached this corner of the world. At this point, we turned around and went back to a little cultural center that a Peace Corps volunteer helped establish. There were written descriptions of some of the customs here and some wonderful pictures of special celebrations
by Judy Handley | Aug 8, 2007 | Sailing Logs Year 2, Vanuatu |
Day 106, Year 2: Exploring Tanna Island
Date: Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Weather: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood; SE Winds 15
Location: Port Resolution, Tanna Island, Vanuatu
It was an early start this morning, and unfortunately an hour earlier than it needed to be. We were to meet at the Yacht Club at 7:30 AM to start our trip across the island to the administrative center of Lenakel. We should have gotten a clue when we left Windbird and saw that none of the other boats even had their dinghies in the water, but on we went. When we got to shore, there was no one there, and we then started to think that maybe we have entered a new time zone. When everyone else arrived
an hour later, it was confirmed. We have now set our clocks back another hour. Since sunrise has been almost 7 AM, at least now it will be daylight when we wake up. We actually really enjoyed our extra hour on shore this morning. We watched White Swan and Maggie Drum enter the anchorage and just enjoyed the early morning. We met the cutest little kitten in the Yacht Club and got great pictures of the kitten sleeping on Ranger’s backpack. The Yacht Club is just an open-air structure that serves
Vanuatu beer, Tusker’s, when pre-arrangements have been made. It is certainly unique.
Stanley, Chief Ronnie’s son, was our guide. He had arranged for a pick-up truck to take us the 41 kilometers to Lenakel. The soccer team was also waiting to be transported across the island for the Tanna Island finals–100,000 Vatu at stake (that’s $1,000 US). But we were told to get in the truck and the soccer team was left behind. We found out later in the day that the final game between the Port Resolution team and the Lenakel team will take place on Friday. We were assured this was not because
we were being transported instead of them. I sure hope that was really the case. There were nine yachties and few locals in the back of the truck. To say that we were packed like sardines would adequately describe the picture. Add to that the fact that the road is sometimes a beach, sometimes a narrow dirt road with lots of ruts, and sometimes an ash plain of a volcano, but always either going up or down a mountain, and you sort of get the picture. The ride was not nearly as rough as we expected,
but it was absolutely spectacular. There were two US yachts represented, Windbird and Ranger, in addition to one each from Australia, New Zealand, France, and Sweden. We had a great time getting to know one another while enjoying the scenery of this beautiful island. We passed by Mt. Yasur, the active volcano, climbed high in the mountains, stopped briefly in the village with the island soccer field, and then descended into Lenakel. It has one main dirt road going through. We went to Customs
for check-in with them, visited the market next door, went on to Immigration in yet another town, and then went even further to the Quarantine Office. It was one minute to eleven, but the Quarantine Officer had already gone to lunch. We went to lunch in a little thatched hut by the ocean (fish and rice the only thing on the menu), went to buy fresh bread, and then went back to the Quarantine Office to wait. It was almost 2 PM when someone came who could help us. It still wasn’t the official,
but it was his assistant. We did have to do a bit of waiting, but at least we are legally checked into Vanuatu. Now we can relax and enjoy.
This place is so very, very different from Fiji. There are not the huge smiles and shouts of “Bula” as a welcome here. People are shy and don’t make eye contact readily. Most on the road in Lenakel did not say hello. It appears that it just takes time to get them to warm up to you. The women here are very low on the totem pole. Where women in Fiji were often running the show, here they obviously do the work and take a back seat. They wear Mother Hubbard dresses and almost all have very short,
kinky hair. Most men wear knee-length shorts, although some had on sulas. Many of the young men look and dress like Rastafarians. We have a lot to learn about the people here. The land is greener and there are many more flowering plants than in Fiji. High on the mountain, the trees and plants look much the same as New Zealand. There are the trees with bright red “bottle brush” blossoms, Australian pines, Norfolk Island pines, giant tree ferns, lots of mango trees, and many huge banyan trees.
The volcanic soil here is obviously very rich.
With all of our waiting time for Quarantine in Lenakel, we didn’t get back here until after 5 PM. It was a great trip with much that still needs to be digested before I can even write about it. Let’s just say that this is a beautiful island with a bit of mystery about it. We will continue to unravel the mystery tomorrow.
