When we started planning our big trip last year, we had a rough idea of most of the countries we wanted to visit, but there were a few holes in our itinerary that we figured we’d fill in along the way. One of those holes was the South Pacific. We knew we wanted to visit some islands in the South Pacific after our time in Australia, but we weren’t sure which ones. I’d already been to Fiji six years ago, and while it was lovely, I was eager to visit a new country. We’d heard good things about the Cook Islands, but they were farther east than even Fiji, and we were hoping to find some place closer to Australia if possible.
After doing more research, we narrowed the list down to Samoa, American Samoa, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Tonga. In the end, we decided that Vanuatu had everything we were looking for: beautiful beaches and crystal clear water; healthy coral reefs; amazing dive sites, including what many say is the best wreck dive in the world; great cuisine, reportedly the best in the South Pacific thanks to years of French colonial rule; friendly people (Vanuatu was named the “happiest nation on earth” in 2006); active volcanoes and inland tropical rainforests to explore; and most importantly, it was the site of a season of Survivor. :)
So we bought a one-way ticket from Brisbane to Vanuatu’s main city, Port Vila, on the island of Efate, and with little more than a Lonely Planet in hand and one night’s lodging booked, we arrived on this 79-island archipelago in the middle of the big, blue ocean, thrilled at the prospect of spending the next three weeks exploring this sunny, tropical paradise.
And then it started raining. And it kept raining. Our first four days in Port Vila, in fact, were spent under cloudy skies that occasionally unleashed torrential downpours. When we asked the locals (called ni-Vans) if the weather forecast was going to improve, they’d usually give us a blank look that essentially said, “Why are you asking me to predict the future? The weather will be whatever the weather wants to be.” Or they’d remind us that it is the rainy season, and generally you get rain in the rainy season. Duh.
;)
This was about as exciting as our first few days in Vila gotSo we took it pretty easy those first few rainy days. We spent a lot of time trying to get caught up writing blog entries and emails back home while dealing with internet that was, to use one of my grandmother’s favorite expressions, slower than molasses in January. We watched seemingly endless matches of cricket, rugby, soccer, and Australian rules football on TV (Dustin is now a near-expert on all of them). We tried to figure out what was wrong with my ears, which were STILL plugged more than two weeks after our last dive in Australia. And we drank a lot of Tusker, the locally brewed Vanuatu ale.
After three days staying at a hotel on the outskirts of Port Vila, we decided we needed a change. Thanks again to another last-minute, off-season hotel deal, we managed to get a pretty affordable room at the Iririki Island Resort, a fancy, Aussie-filled resort on a beautiful little island just offshore from Port Vila. For whatever reason, almost as soon as we arrived on Iririki, our luck seemed to change. The sun came out and revealed the many incredible shades of blue in the waters around Vila, which up until then, had been dull gray. We had free internet, still slow, but after spending $5/hour for it at our last hotel, we counted ourselves lucky. My ears finally started to clear up. And good lord, the infinity pool at the resort was about as perfect a place for reading, relaxing, and drinking silly tropical drinks as we could have hoped for.
;)
Not a bad way to spend a ThursdayWe ended up staying at Iririki for five nights. It’s not the kind of place where we’d want to stay often or for very long — you definitely feel like you’re living in a G-rated, tourist-friendly bubble that is almost totally devoid of Vanuatu’s real culture or its developing world challenges. But we’d be lying if we said we didn’t enjoy the luxury of poolside lounging and killer breakfast buffets after two months of less-than-glamourous budget backpacker travel. It was a nice break from reality that provided a much-needed respite, but by the end of it, we were eager to get to know the real Vanuatu and the smiling, laughing people who live here. More on all of that to come in our next post, but in the meantime, you can see some of our photos from our first week in Vanuatu in our Port Vila album.