Travel Blues

Lest you, our gentle readers, think that our Vanuatu travels were full of nothing but erupting volcanos, amazing shipwreck dives, rainforest cave spelunking, and crazy land-diving locals, we thought we should mention the other side of our time on the islands. This is the side of our travel adventures that rarely gets documented on our blog because, well, it’s kinda boring. It’s when the glamour of international travel gives way to monotony, routine, and the daily annoyances of being on the road. It’s when we start fantasizing about being back in our own home, eating a Mission burrito, and not having to worry about drinking out of the tap or where our passport currently is. It’s when we want to be anywhere but where we currently are.

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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.

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The Diving Boys and the Shutterflies

We were on Pentecost Island for less than 24 hours, but it was easily one of the most memorable parts of our entire stay in Vanuatu — and not just because we were lucky enough to witness the amazing land-diving ceremony there. But before we get to land-diving, a few other highlights from our whirlwind trip to Pentecost…

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The Spirit of Santo

We arrived in the little town of Luganville on the northern Vanuatu island of Espiritu Santo with only a vague idea of how we wanted to spend our time, but we knew there were some great scuba diving spots around the island (including the WWII-era shipwreck of the USS Calvin Coolidge), a few sandy beaches worth seeing (how could a place called Champagne Beach not be beautiful?), and one crazy cave that Lonely Planet highly recommended we check out.

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Island Time

We spent a lot of our first week in Vanuatu either watching cricket on TV (the spectator sport equivalent of waiting in line at the DMV), or sitting by the pool at our fancy-schmancy resort on Iririki Island. But we did try to get out and see something closer to the real Vanuatu while we were in Port Vila, mostly through hot and sticky walks around town that took us away from the main tourist strip, and by doing a full-island circumnavigation of Efate one day. Our Efate Island Tour photo album covers most of that ground, but we did want to mention a few facts and observations about Vanuatu that we’ve picked up since we arrived here.

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Vanu-where??

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…

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