[A color-accented view of the Pacific Ocean through some greenery.]Finally, I get a little bit of time to blog. Things have been quite busy for me since we got back. I am going to break this blog up into two parts, a la The Brady Bunch whenever the Bradys would go on vacation. Be it the Grand Canyon or Hawaii, they would always have multiple episodes.
So, if you’re reading this blog and you’re only vaguely familiar or perhaps not familiar at all with the existence of an island nation called Vanuatu, don’t feel bad about your lack of knowledge (well, feel a little bad). They’ve only been independent since 1980, so they are younger than I am. We ended up going there, because I have a wife who likes places slightly off the beaten path, and frequently prods me to agree to vacation at such places. Often these are places I would never want to go. Often these are places I don’t think anybody but she would want to go. It’s not uncommon for her to initiate a conversation, out of the blue, like the following.
Her: “Hey, can we go to Tora Bora someday?”
Me: “Um… isn’t that the mountain region in Afghanistan where they train Al-Qaeda fighters.”
Her: “Yeah, but I heard it’s beautiful.”
So, when she suggested we go to a tropical island, I was all in. It’s quite a nice place to vacation, actually. We were talking about how we wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes a huge tourist destination in the next few years or so. It seems like there is always a country that gets the reputation of being a chic tourist destination and then blows up overnight, Thailand for example. Who went to Thailand 15 years ago? Now, everybody goes. Vanuatu has the potential to be a place like that. And if it happens I’ll say, please, been there, done that.
[A view from our resort.]Anyway, we stayed at a nice resort called The Benjour. I liked it – very pretty, nice, and clean, but not too ritzy or expensive. The rooms were individual bungalows which was cool. When we arrived there they told us, “Things here are really laid back. People like to take it easy and not focus on their watches all time. Everything runs on island time,” which loosely translates to “Look, don’t get on our cases if service is a little slow.”
[A cool picture S took in Port Vila.]Our first night there we just sat by the water, had a few cocktails, and recovered from our 4:30 wake up that morning. It was a great night. The next day we went into to town on a bus (which is a bus in the same sense as a VW Bus is a bus) and saw a little bit of Port Vila. It seems like a pretty cool city. For somebody like myself who has never been to a developing country you see a few strange things (there are literally no stop lights in the entire city, the roadways are basically an anarchy), but it’s not too hard to adapted, and the city is quite safe, from what we’ve been told, and the people are mostly friendly and helpful.
[A bus jam on the streets of Port Vila]At night, we went to a cultural feast that was completely hokey, but fun nonetheless. (It seems in Vanuatu they eat meat and potatoes just like we do!) My “favorite” part about the feast is that the only thing they had to drink was that crappy McDonald’s-style orange drink. I’ve never known what that stuff is. It’s not juice and it’s not soda. It’s like orange flavored Kool Aid, but it’s not that sugary. I hadn’t had it in years, but I remember drinking that stuff at functions when I was a kid from a giant vat with a McDonald’s logo on it. Apparently, it’s the appropriate drink for a cultural feast with Vanuatu villagers.
Actually, I did have another drink there, kava, a mild sedative. Everybody got in a line and chugged some out of a stone cup as part of a ritual. It didn’t taste great, and it made my tongue numb.
[Some dancing.]The entertainment at the feast consisted of music making and dancing by the villagers. This part was pretty cool. We missed the first half of it though, because there was a mix up between our resort and the bus driver and by the time somebody actually came to pick us up the show had already started – island time.
[This is the part where the white people dance too.]Anyway, that’s all for this entry. Coming up next entry, dodging naked village kids in dune buggies.
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