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.
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| 070810 Day 108 Tanna, Vanuatu–Mt. Yasur Volcano and Jon Frum Village |
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| 070810 Day 108 Tanna, Vanuatu–Island Walkabout |
