Lustin Versus the Volcano

It’s a little weird to still be writing about Vanuatu now — technically we’ve been to four different countries since we were on those lush tropical islands (though we probably shouldn’t count our brief overnight stays in Australia and Thailand). Such is the nature of travel blogging, I guess — we’re kind of always in a multi-dimensional temporal state: writing in the present from a new place about a place we’ve been to in the past, while also thinking about all of the plans we have to make for the next place we’re going. 

But I digress. We wanted to close out our Vanuatu entries with a few thoughts about our four-night stay on the fourth and final island we visited: Tanna. Tanna is famous for its volcano — Mt. Yasur — and after meeting this angry, spewing beast up close, it’s easy to see why. The only way to get to the volcano is to spend two brain-shaking hours driving over something that can only be called a road in the loosest sense of the word. A potholed river of dirt that could be swallowed by jungle at any moment is probably a more apt description. By the time we got close to the volcano, it had started to rain a little, and since Mt. Yasur was especially active that day, that meant that it was raining ash mud on us. Of course, the blackout conditions on our windshield didn’t stop our driver from driving at insanely high speeds over the black, ash-covered moonscape. He assured us that he had done this drive more than 700 times, but somehow that failed to comfort us as we plowed blindly into the dark abyss.

Boom goes the dynamite!Once parked, we got out of our Land Cruiser to discover that we were only 150 meters below the outer rim of the volcano… the same volcano, mind you, that was at that moment shooting ash and rocks into the air and rumbling its angry growl. Rather than jump back into the car and race to the safe side of the island like we probably should’ve done, we put on our raincoats and started walking up the steep, ashen cone to get a better view of the fireworks inside. What was already a pretty amazing show at dusk turned into a ridiculous spectacle after the sun went down. Peering into the crater below, we watched the earth erupt and shoot molten rock and lava more than 20 stories into the sky. A couple of the explosions were so big that we were actually hit by a shock wave of air from the blast. We watched all of this craziness with about 25 other tourists, including three American surfers we’d seen on and off again over the previous three weeks as we island hopped. They usually drove us crazy with their silly surfer slang, but as we watched the earth explode right before our eyes, their exclamations seemed to sum up perfectly how we were feeling at the moment: Duuuuuude, that was sewwwww awwwwwsssome!!!!! 

Dustin got some great shots of the action with our new camera — check them out in our Tanna album.