Day 112, Year 2: Skin Blong Ba
Date: Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Weather: Partly Sunny Day; Periods of Rain
Location: Port Vila, Efate Island, Vanuatu

So I was in The Drug Store today and I saw these very colorful drink cuddlies for beer bottles. Something was written on them in Bislama (Vanuatu pidgin English). I thought they might make nice Christmas stocking stuffers, so I went to investigate. The writing on them said, “Skin Blong Ba.” I couldn’t figure out what this meant, so I asked the clerk. She responded, “Skin Blong Bottle.” Now I understood. This is the ‘second skin’ for a bottle to keep it cool. It made sense once I got it, and
that is my constant state here. People either speak French or they speak Bislama. I can read Bislama, but I can’t understand it, so conversations take a bit of time. The French I will never understand, but maybe I’ll catch on to the Bislama after a bit.

We spent the entire morning at the internet cafe today. I was sitting naming photos as fast as I could and Mark was posting the photo folders on the website. We just couldn’t get this to happen when we were in Savusavu in Fiji, so were were a bit surprised when it worked today. We sent our pictures from the first month and a half in Fiji to our son on CD and asked him to get them posted for us. He handed that job to our daughter-in-law, Jo, and she was successful in getting those on the website.
Thank you, Jo! And today, slow as it was, we were able to get the photos posted from when we arrived in Vanuatu. We will continue the process in the AM, but it is a holiday here, Assumption Day, so we can only work until 11:00. What we don’t get posted, we will send to Justin and Jo and once again ask them to post for us. I wish there was a faster way to get pictures on the site, but this is as good as it gets from out here. We won’t be anywhere with internet for the next six weeks, so it could
be a very long time before pictures from here on will be posted. We will do the best we can.

We found out on our way here from Tanna that our logs have not been posting. I didn’t find out until today that “Day 107: Too Many Cruisers and Only Tuskers” was posted seven times. We had a comment from Cheryl in Maine saying that we must really like that Tuskers beer! When we got to the internet cafe this morning, the website was magically fixed. Maybe our son read yesterday’s log and went in and corrected things, or maybe the stars were aligned just right today. Anyway, thanks for your patience
when these technical glitches happen. And thanks to those of you who let us know about the problems.

We switched gears in the afternoon and went looking for connectors to connect the hose from the dinghy fuel tank to the dinghy engine. We thought our dinghy engine was dead when we reach Tanna and couldn’t get it started, but it ended up to be the fuel connector. We really had no hope of finding one here, but we found Vila Marine and they had just what we needed. Next we went to the Georges Pompidou building to see if we could buy a permethrin impregnated mosquito netting for our bed. The Ministry
of Health that is currently located in a motel used to be located in the Georges Pompidou building, but it is now mostly empty except for the guy selling mosquito nets for 300 Vatu or ~$3 US. These nets have been credited for seriously reducing the malaria rate here and are provided by the Global Foundation. The nets are made in Japan by the Sumitomo Chemical Company. We have a net with us that we bought in the US to cover the entire cockpit area, but when in mosquito land, I guess you can’t have
enough nets. And even though we have decided not to take a malarial prevention drug, we bought yet another one of those today. The locals are given Chloroquine to take as a prophylaxis, so we now have every anti-malarial drug available on Windbird. I’m starting to feel like a pharmacist. We also bought Pinetarsol soap. If you use it, it is supposed to help repel mosquitoes. I can see why. It smells so bad that it will also repel people. We also have “Bug Off”, a DEET spray to repel the mozzies.
So we are armed with all the paraphernalia. Mosquitoes, here we come.

Because of the holiday tomorrow, our plans for the day are somewhat changed. We had hoped to visit the Vanuatu Cultural Center Museum, but we doubt that it will be open. We are required to check-out of Port Vila 24 hours prior to leaving, so if Customs is closed tomorrow, that could also change our planned Thursday morning departure date. But as I have said many, many times, flexibility is the name of the game.

070814 Day 112 Efate, Vanuatu–Port Vila Snapshots