We had a nice week or so in Port Vila before the hoopla for the ICA Rally to Ouvea got underway. With so many friends in the mooring field, life was rather social. We'd do lunches at Jill's American Café, were you can get a mighty fine cheeseburger, ice cream from Le Peche Mignon (also a fine bakery), happy hour at the Waterfront or at the Iriki Resort's fancy lounge, and gourmet dinners at a range of restaurants from Chinese to French. One lovely evening we spent with Tom and Bette Lee of Quantum Leap at the Waterfront Restaurant enjoying truly fine jazz by a local trio while rain drizzled off the thatch roof! It's no wonder cruisers spend so much time in Port Vila.

And that's not even talking about the shopping. Port Vila has four large supermarkets, the best of which is the Au Bonne Marche up the hill from the waterfront. Embedded in the store is a truly fine butcher selling Vanuatu's famous beef, descended from stock imported by finicky French colonizers. Not only is the selection of cuts quite varied, but the price is past reasonable to downright cheap. The market also has aisles of gourmet foodstuffs as well as products more appealing to Western tastes than we saw in Fiji: like a whole section of Old El Paso Mexican items, two or three sections of various sauce and flavoring packets, plus pasta, rice and couscous products, not to mention the canned and pickled choices. Plus, in the frozen section there are all sorts of goodies, including frozen vegetables that are not the ubiquitous peas and carrot mix that is ALL that is sold from Tonga to Fiji.

There is also quite a selection of duty free shopping. Not quite in the league of St. Thomas, but a few women found jewelry, men found cameras, and pretty much everyone stocked up on liquor.

We did have some boat work to attend to: the fuel issues mentioned in the previous update, theplugged galley water faucet, a new furling line for the genoa, some sewing repairs. Plus Don had a watermaker project on another boat, while, with decent internet, I was able to upload some photos to the website.

But mostly Port Vila was a consumptive interlude, which after the remoteness of the out islands and the narrow range of options in Fiji (Indian) was welcome to all.

Labels: Vanuatu

I was dismayed when getting ashore to an Internet cafe in Port Vila to see that, for some reason, the post of our visit to Ambrym for the Rom Dance Festival did not appear. I will try to get it placed where it belongs, but I don't think Blogs work that way. At least it is getting posted within the Vanuatu sequence!.........

Thanks to the ruggedness of Ambrym’s terrain and the actions of its volcano, the villages here are said to have clung tighter to the “kastom” lifestyle as well as their mystical beliefs. In particular Ambrym is famous for its ROM dances, mysterious cult dances performed to appease spirits by male dancers wearing elaborate headdresses…(and little else!) In August, the village of Olal at Ambrym’s northeastern-most corner hosts a “Back to Your Roots” ROM dance festival for outsiders as a means of raising money for secondary education and as a way of keeping “kastom’ traditions alive.

Also thanks to the ruggedness of Ambrym, winds gust down the mountainous slope in “wind bullets” that thrust the boats in the anchorage this way and that, while rain showers keep them perpetually misted and lit by rainbows. By the start of the festival on August 20, thirty plus boats had assembled in the anchorage off Nebul village (S16*06’.5; E168*.07’.7), an area protected from the trades by the tip of the island and a curve of reef. Olal, however is several miles further north on the unprotected tip, so at 0830 Wednesday morning the cruisers gathered on the beach, dragging their dinghies above the tide line with the help of muscular villagers, and set out to walk the track in the drizzle. Fortunately for us, we were approached by one of the chiefs who shook our hands and suggested we take a guide, who happened to be one of the men who helped beach the dinghy. Micah, who stuck with us the entire three days of the festival, showed us the sights as we walked, carried one of our collapsible chairs when its sling broke, and steered us to short cuts saving us ten minutes on an otherwise hour-long walk.

The festival took place in a cleared glade in the woods fairly far from Olal village. The dance area was much smaller and more intimate than what we’d seen in Lapo, as well as wilder and more mystical as sun and mist alternately filtered through the trees. Around the edge was bamboo pole seating, and behind the “stage” blending into the trees was an array of slit drums and “tiki-like heads” known here on Ambrym as “atingting.” Through the trees one could just make out a staging area where the dancers prepared themselves while to the right was the nassara, a sacred and decorated building where the ROM members gather and women are tabu. There were also three “concession stands” – booths of palm fronds – in the woods behind the seating where Don was able to indulge in drinking coconuts and fried dough in three or four different forms over the course of the next three days – and some “outhouses” I never did check out.

If there was one thing that made this festival stand out from the others it was the tall and solid person of Chief Norbert (pronounced Nor-bear in the French way), principal of the Olal Secondary School and master of ceremonies for the performances. At the start of things that first day, and before every major presentation, Norbert calmly walked out before the audience, utterly at ease in his Kastom attire of penis wrap and little else, and clearly explained what we were going to see and why it was important in both English and French that we could hear and understand without a megaphone. More than an emcee, Norbert participated in every dance presented, and he did so with more gusto than any of the others. In fact that would be the second thing that really distinguished this festival, the fact that most of the dancers seemed to be having a helluva good time.

The main dance of the first day was a grade-taking ceremony for a chief. What made it unusual was that the area’s high chief, Chief Sekor was repeating the first level grade – that of the sacred fire. Although Chief Sekor is actually a grade seven chief, he had lost respect by violating the tabu of grade one – sharing food. Apparently all these chiefs after grade one must prepare their own food on a separate fire and eat separately from anyone else, including their own families! So, Chief Sekor was repeating the ceremony to get his full status back.

How to describe for you the dances we saw, let alone any one dance?! Well this first dance was distinguished by only being danced by chiefs. There were probably a dozen of them of a wide range in age, all in kastom dress of namba (the penis wrap of woven leaves in perpetual erection) attached to a woven belt, with the rooster tail of leaves firmly attached to the backside above their buttocks. Some wore the coveted boar teeth necklaces and some carried impressive staffs and some had smears of red paint on their faces. The two main elements of all the dances were harmonic chanting by the men, usually in response to a solo lead, and vigorous stamping of bare feet, in various cadences, that vibrated through the ground. Some of the dances danced to the beat of the large slit drums, some to a smaller portable slit drum, and some to no drum at all. Most of the dances are danced with the men in a tight circle, almost a huddle, so that the audience is presented with an array of backsides. Odd at first, it is a powerful statement of communal strength (and bare butts are pretty fascinating given the time and opportunity to study them!). At one point in the doings,
Chief Sekor climbed to a platform some twenty feet up and the dancers took turns throwing coconuts to dislodge him, mostly symbolic, choreographed lobs, but one did catch him on the thigh. And in the end, he did have to kill a pig for the ritual sacrifice to seal the deal. This time it was a little porker…I guess because he was repeating first grade!

The second dance of the day was a woman’s dance. Here the ladies were in full grass skirts and naught else but perhaps a thin garland of leaves around their upper body. Sadly for the men in the audience, these were still not the young and shapely maidens of South Pacific fantasies, but at least they all seemed more at ease with their shift from western dress than the women in Lembinwen did. The women also dance to their own chants, but instead of stamping, their step is a skating slide of bare feet on the dirt that makes a sort of swishing sound, and most leaned on a slim staff, for an effect rather like dancing with a swaying broomstick.

The second day’s main dance was a dance from the yam harvest. A young man, who doesn’t sleep for two days and who gets a special hairdo, wears an awkward pyramid of a headdress symbolizing the yam. (Incidentally, the yam is a pretty major food crop in these parts, and according to Micah the name Ambrym comes from Capt. James Cook’s arrival when he was presented with the traditional welcoming gift of a yam, and the word “ambrym,” which in the local language means “for you.” Nice, don’t you think?) This dance was performed with the dancers facing the audience, and several dancers did solo turns impersonating various creatures like prawns or birds.



After the Yam Dance, one of the chiefs, a man who truly personifies dignity, performed for us on the bamboo flute. WE subsequently bought one of these, and I can barely get out one tone!

The other main event of day two was a meal prepared by all the dancers. The women repaired to one side and lit a fire to cook cassava and make something with greens and coconut milk, while the men lit their own fire on the other side of the grounds and roasted breadfruits in the flames, which they then peeled and then, on great wooden boards, kneaded with a coconut rolling pin until the cooked breadfruit flesh transformed into a soft puffy dough the size of a double giant pizza.
Then they scored the dough into bite-sized diamonds and drizzled it with hot coconut cream, also, of course, produced by hand. The result was surprisingly light and tasty, and most of us went back for seconds and thirds. The women were still peeling the cassavas when Micah spirited us out for an early look at some carvings being offered for sale, so we didn’t get to sample whatever it was they were making.

The carvings were being set up for purview down in the Olal Yacht Club (yes, they have one too.!) The Olal Yacht Club is on a bluff overlooking Selwyn Straight, the channel between the north tip of Ambrym and Pentecost Island. There is tiny “anchorage” down below, but it’s not one you would ever want to put the hook of a cruising sailboat down in. The reinforced tradewinds had rolled in since our arrival two days before, and the straight and anchorage were a mass of whitecaps and spindrift. No wonder we were walking three miles each way!

The carvings on display were fascinating. Each day of the festival there were more and more as locals caught on there were buyers afoot. Note, it wasn’t just cruisers attending the festival. Some intrepid tourists (including a camera team from French television) had flown into the airport at Craig’s Cove, transferred here by fast boat, and were staying in the village. Unfortunately, other than knowing that Ambrym carvers are renowned in Vanuatu and that most every figure on display was a reproduction of some traditional artifact, we didn’t have a clue what we were looking at. Also, unfortunately, we didn’t have enough cash to buy much of anything. Too late, after the end of the festival, Chief Norbert passed out a museum quality booklet prepared for an exhibit of North Ambrym ritual art just finishing at a gallery in Sydney that pretty well explained everything (including what a ROM dance is!—Chiefs Norbert, Sekor and the whole dance troupe actually were brought to Sydney to perform for the opening last month! That must have been an eye-opener!). (The booklet shows that the gallery has a web address that might have an online version for those of you who are curious…it is www.annandalegalleries.com.au )

So what is a Rom dance? Although we were all there to see it, I suspect very few of us had a clue. According to the museum booklet, Rom is one of three “secret societies” that controls and manages Ambrym’s mystical kastom culture. Of the three – Mange, Temar and Rom – Rom is the most open, with some of its dances occasionally presented for outsiders like us. I quote from the Annandale Gallery booklet:

Adult Rom masks are always danced by men who are invisible beneath floor-length banana leaf costumes as they represent powerful spirits rather than living men. There are many different types of Rom mask and each man who wishes to dance one must pay for the privilege of making it and wearing it. … The typical Rom mask has a sharp, angular face with a prominent lower jaw that juts out of a cone-shaped fiber-covered head dress at an angle of 45 degrees. The complexities of different grade rankings are communicated by variations in the patterns and colors with which the faces are painted and by the design of the ridge running up the center of the mask.

Our Rom dance began “off stage” 100 meters down a path leading to the nasara. Chiefs Sekor and Norbert and the troupe of uncostumed dancers began the chant in a very tight pack surrounded by eight spirit figures.
It took them quite a while to reach the dance ground proper, and unfortunately this led to the audience filing from their seats with their cameras and blocking the view for everybody else, which, also unfortunately, let to temper flare-ups and a lot of pissed off people. Of course, the dancers did finally arrive, and we all saw plenty of them as the spirits swished back and forth in various patterns each carrying an unusual woven staff/rattle that leant them a two toned mystical sound, while the singers chanted and stamped indefatigably.

This obviously is not the dance of a professional ballet, Broadway or even folk-dancing troupe, but the chants and the stamps get in you head, hypnotically melding you into a scene you couldn’t even have imagined before you came. The bludgeoning of the pigs – yes, another one, sending several youngsters into tears – is no westerner’s favorite part, but we are here to see their traditions; it’s not that they are not putting a show on for us.

After the Rom dance came a short magic session. They only did three “tricks” because they have their own magic festival at a separate time. I was imagining something a little more witchcraft-y, but the three tricks were actually rather agricultural. For me, the best was the first, where two men planted the top of a taro root with its attached cluster of leaves, poured some spirit water on it from a coconut shell and unearthed a full grown tuber! Hmmm. The second trick was a similar one with a yam, starting with a vine, and the last one was a water trick where they poured water into one length of bamboo and poured it out of another!

Chief Norbert – aka headmaster Norbert – closed the festival by explaining that the monies earned from the (fairly stiff) festival entry fee goes into a fund for education of the area’s kids, mostly funding students to secondary school.

The show ended with a public dance, where everyone was invited to get up and join the dancers – stamping or swishing as our gender dictated. Don was exempt with a sore foot, but I did my best to swish with the ladies, although Don says I was seriously overdressed.

Afterwards, Chiefs Norbert and Sekor hosted the cruisers to a feast at the yacht club. We had roast pig (most likely the porker from the first day) and two table loads of chicken, yam, cassava, salad, green beans, rice, fruit salad and the like. We all lolled on the lawn overlooking Selwyn straight and gobbled to get out platefuls down between showers.

The furiously strong winds stirring up the waters out in the open finally began to subside yesterday in time for boats to raise anchor and sail away. We said “Fair Winds” to Procyon, who took off for a night passage back to Port Vila and onward to New Caledonia. On Tackless II, we took Saturday to unwind, to snorkel the surrounding reefs, and, of course, to catch up on this log. Tomorrow, we head further north.

Labels: Hiking, Traditional Festivals, Vanuatu

We left Banam Bay at 0630 in the benign glow of a gorgeous sunrise and empty blue sky. This bears mention because Malakula Island, downwind from volcanic Ambrym and all the particulate matter it dumps into the air, is inclined toward cloudiness. It seemed like an auspicious sign, and our first winds were decent, bringing a smooth ride, if close hauled.

But there was no getting away from the fact that our desired course line to Epi – southeast through the strait between Ambrym and Malakula – was dead into the wind, and all the wonders of the boatyard refit has not changed the fact that our beloved condo Tackless II is not a windward performer. So we were doomed to motorsail, but even motorsailing, thanks to tidal current, was problematic. During the hours the wind was with the tide, the ride was smooth, but headway was minimal. When the tide was with us, it was against the wind, so the short steep seas repeatedly knocked the snot out of momentum gained. We only had 25 miles to make to our planned staging anchorage on Epi Island, but for a while it was not looking good for getting there by dark. However, we eventually clawed our way far enough out of the straight that the boat began to sail more freely, and not only did we eventually tack our way over to Epi Island, but we did so with enough time to carry on past Lamen Bay (which was packed with boats) to a further anchorage.

Revolieu Bay is a pocket of water tucked behind a bracket of reef and fed by a dark river disgorging through black sand, and as we tacked in it was being misted by late afternoon showers and rainbows. Only two boats were there, and we knew both of them. No sooner was our hook down than Russ of Wandering Star, the boat we'd seen in Banam Bay, picked us up for a nice reunion cup of tea aboard La Boheme. With only an hour to sunset, it was a short reunion as all three boats planned to depart at or before first light for Efate.

Havana Harbor on the north side of Efate lay just sixty miles away on a bearing of 189 degrees, just west of due south. With easterlies, it would have been a grand sail, but full blown easterlies weren't in the forecast for four more days, by which time we'd be overdue for Vanuatu's 30-day immigration check-in. So we motorsailed again, but this time the wind, blowing 15-20, was thirty degrees off the bow instead of on the nose, so we had a lively ride albeit with plenty of water over the bows. As we neared our waypoint, the wind backed enough for us to shut down and sail the last hours in.

Havana Harbor is a huge bay framed by two small islands off Efate's north coast. It is reminiscent of Gorda Sound in the BVI, and during WWII it was a base for the US Navy. We anchored on its southern shore along with a clump of day charter boats and had a quiet night. In the morning, we raised sail and enjoyed an hour of idyllic sailing in twenty knots on Havana Harbor's protected waters, before popping out to bash around Efate's notorious Devil's Point.

On a better day, the huge bay that takes a bite out of Efate's southwest corner is probably a place for pleasant days sails, but for us it was a long hard motorsail to weather to get up to the smaller bay within the bay where perches Port Vila. We had heard so much about Port Vila as an oasis of civilization both before coming to Vanuatu and from all the boats that have already passed through that we pictured some sort of Shangri-la. As we passed through the outer buoys we passed a freighter at anchor on our left while off to the right was P&O cruise ship on the commercial wharf. Ahead to the left was the outer anchorage backed by the downtown area of Vila, while on the right, the small island of upscale Iriki Resort hid the inner mooring field. We followed the approach range almost to shore before turning right into the mooring basin. Along the shore was the sea wall with boats moored stern to, but, beyond, a field of some fifty or sixty densely-packed moorings wrapped around the backside of Iriki.

We had called for a mooring from Yachting World only to discover we'd arrived on election day and most everything was closed. Wandering Star, who'd been here several times before, opted to drop a hook in the outer anchorage, but our friends on Procyon hailed us and directed us to a mooring just vacated. There is nothing like entering a packed harbor area to make you realize how many boats you know. What was most peculiar is that it felt not just like Fiji transplanted, but Vuda Boatyard transplanted! There was Flight on the seawall and the big schooner Mundaca. The steel Kiwi boat Heartbeat, which had still been on the hard when we launched and left, was right there swinging at anchor, and Freedom Hunter, who shared bottom paint with us, was on mooring number one. Further on were several of our Musket Cove buds, including Procyon, Wind Pony, and Quantum Leap. And just to cap off the sense of déjà vu, a boat called Esprit, hearing us on the radio, called to ask if we were the same Tackless II that left Puerto Vallarta in 2004. The cruising world is a small one!

Port Vila has proved to be the sweet little oasis of civilization everyone says it is. It is a nice mix of islanders, ex-pats, tourists and cruisers. The downtown market is full of lovely vegetables with a French influence, and the supermarkets…well, La Bonne Marche is a cruising cook's wet dream. The main street is quite the mix of restaurants, cafes, souvenir shops, duty free stores, real estate agents and tour agents, and there's a steady stream of traffic, including mini-vans running as short stop busses…all driving on the right! France obviously won that battle!

And yet most of the people we have met are speaking English. Bislama, the official patois of the island chain, is more evident in posters and billboards, but it is close enough to English that you can slide by. The only French I've been called upon to speak was at the French consulate, and that was more because I wanted to practice.

Our main objective in getting back to Vila – besides cold beer and restaurant food – was to get our visas for Australia lined up. In the end, we did not go for the full bore one year visa because we might have been required us to get a lung x-ray for tuberculosis which was said to take weeks. Instead we went for the one year, multiple entry ETA (electronic travel authority) visa available on line. Since we anticipate flying out within three months (of a mid-November arrival), either to the States or to New Zealand, it answered all our needs. It also left us enough time us to apply for visas from the French consulate for New Caledonia. As US citizens we won't get the unlimited access to New Cal our EU and Kiwi buddies will get. Going into the Loyalties with the ICA rally will get us a full check-in, but we still would have been expected to get to the capital Noumea within one month. Having the visas will let us take up to three months to dawdle our way there, much as having the visas before arriving in the Marquesas gave us a full three months to dawdle our way to Papeete.

With the bureaucratic stuff out of the way, we now have to concentrate on the boat. We need to replace our main halyard and our furling line, for both of which we have spares, and Don is currently on the floor in the engine room replacing the fuel line from the tank to the engine, the culprit, we believe in the Perkins quitting a second time on us this morning. He is also being kept busy with watermaker calls, and we have sold off a lot of the Spectra parts we have been carrying. I also fear there are a few jobs for me with the sewing kit….

Events for the ICA Rally are scheduled to get going next Tuesday. There will be muster, and a briefing, a golf scramble and an excursion to a local watrfall. We'll have checkout and post check-out duty free topping up of liquids – diesel and alcohol! Departure for New Caledonia is targeted for Saturday the 13th.

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Labels: Vanuatu

As predicted, by turning back south, we have started paying the piper for all that grand beam-reach sailing we've been enjoying. That said, Tackless II continues to impress us with her performance even in these less than ideal conditions -- too much wind, choppy seas and close hauled...never our favorite point of sail.

However, our reward was pulling into Banan Bay anchorage on the east coast of Malekula (S16*20'.404; E167*45'.293). These places never look like what you picture from the sketch maps in the guide books, and I guess I never looked at the pictures in the Tusker electronic guide for this one, but it is a big round anchorage with wooded shoreline, great protection, and little sign of any villages except plumes of smoke. There was one boat in the anchorage when we pulled in, who turned out to be old friends from several years ago of whom we'd totally lost track. But bless their hearts, they pushed out of here at 5am this morning to bash further south leaving us to wake ALL BY OURSELVES! This is a first for us this year. And depending on the weather forecast I download, we may not mar it by launching the dinghy. The villages in Vanuatu have been wonderful experiences, but it's great to indulge in the feeling that we are all alone!

There is a record high pressure system (1049mb) crossing New Zealand to the south which is generating steady 20knots winds here, doggedly out of the southeast, when what we need are light winds or none from the northeast to enable us to get back easily to Port Vila. Not likely to happen, but, the wind is supposed to ease up a smidge tomorrow, so we will probably take what little we can get and bash onward.

In the meantime we are passing the day contentedly on Tackless II without launching the dinghy or exploring ashore. Every time we make this decision I feel guilty, because every place we stop has interesting stuff to see and people to meet, and we will not likely ever get back to any of them in this lifetime.

But there is only so much you can do right, especially when you have a schedule. If I haven't said it outright, you have surely deduced by reading between the lines, that we are not much liking having the ICA rally schedule over our heads. This is not really the rally's fault, but our own for being so late in the season. We owe the rally a lot for getting us out of Fiji relatively painlessly when our own motivation was about gone. And I believe we will be grateful for the same facilitating the rally will enable in the jump from Vanuatu to New Caledonia's out-of-the-way Loyalty Islands as the year fast counts down to cyclone season. We wouldn't want to miss New Cal in a late season rush to Australia, so it's either a little of each or all and none. The majority of the rally participants are New Zealanders doing their annual seasonal cycle – NZ to Tonga to Fiji to Vanuatu to New Cal and then back to NZ again– so they conceivably can do it over and over again. It's a cycle we could jump on if we had the gumption.

Since we probably don't have that gumption, I am sitting here in Banan Bay reflecting on the things I am not going to get to see in Vanuatu. We are not going to get to Espirito Santo, the island where the US Military was based during World War II. James Michener (along with John F. Kennedy) was based there during the war, and it served as the foundation of his famous Tales of the South Pacific, which, of course, led to the musical and film South Pacific. South Pacific was one of the first movies I ever remember seeing, even before Disney…although, in fact I may not actually have seen it, and just imprinted on the songs that my sister Cecily would have brought home. I remember her singing with me for hours, "Ditez-moi, pourquoi, la vie est belle; ditez-moi, pourquoi, la vie est gaie, ditez-moi, pourquoi, chere mademoiselle? Est-ce-que, parce-que, vous m'aimez?!" (With that kind of start, no wonder I've had a knack for French!)

Actually, the song that has been playing on instant replay in my mind since arriving in Tanna is the one about "coconut palms and banyan trees and coral sands and TONKinese." Between the two of them, I really did expect to see sweeping French plantations on the hillsides and Bali Hai on the horizon. There are certainly still sweeping stands of copra plantations, but I don't know if there are still some that are French-owned or how many of those owners continue to live here in colonial elegance. Maybe I'll find out in Port Vila. But we didn't get to Espirito Santo, and I probably would have been disappointed anyway as Dave and Chrissie report there is little left of the military base left at Luganville. And as for Bali Hai, Lonely Planet says Ambae, the island that was on our Asanvari horizon, is the one that inspired Michener. We didn't get to Ambae either.

And speaking of reflections, I have been reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs & Steel, very interesting material for a cruise through this land of dugout outriggers, subsistence gardening, chiefdoms and secretive custom religions all in a balancing act with cellular towers and DVDs, western religion, a bi-partisan colonial heritage (Vanuatu was ruled under a condominium government from 1906-1980 shared by the historically prickly governments of England and France!), and now thirty years of independence during which at least they have not been taken over by resort chains.

By this point in the Pacific, cruisers are frequently pondering about what it is we have learned from our travels, debating over whether places like Vanuatu should get outside help to get up to speed with the rest of the world or whether they should be entirely left alone. No easy answer as they are struggling with the question themselves. It's not so hard to foresee a time when the world will be without this diversity, where we will be largely homogenized into one global state. I'm glad that time is not quite yet here.

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Labels: Vanuatu

Not all the villages in Vanuatu may be as friendly as the ones we have been lucky to visit, but for sure Ansanvari, which may have been in the "Friendly to Yachties" business longer than most, has it down pat. The yacht club is by far the nicest we have seen (Port Resolution's on Tanna comes a close second.) Built with foreign aid from Australia and (I think) New Zealand, it is a spacious building, (maybe 30'x50', Don guesses) with cement floors, open air above a hip-high balustrade, and the beautiful local "thatch' roof. There is an attached office and a western-style kitchen space, plus tables and a stack of green plastic chairs. (What did the world do before plastic chairs!) The rafters are hung with cruiser banners and flags memorializing those who have passed through before, and we added our names to this year's ICA banner.

Among those flags was an SSCA burgee documenting the multiple visits by sv Cormorant. We met Harry and Jane of Cormorant way back in Trinidad, where we discovered Jane and I had Dana Hall School in common – me as a student and she (subsequently) as an administrator. After their first visit to Asanvari, Harry and Jane had returned from New Zealand with the equipment to build a miniature hydroelectric plant to provide the village with electricity. It sounds like such a simple thing on paper, a generator to provide electricity where there is none, but Asanvari is a long, long, long way from the "grid." It is a long way even from any easy source of fuel to run a standard generator. To devise a way to provide electricity from natural sources is quite simply, way cool! (For more information on the story of building this generator, SSCA members can search through back issues of the SSCA Bulletin online at www.ssca.org.) It was because of Harry and Jane's efforts here that Asanvari was high on our list of places not to miss.

The yacht club is presided over by Chief Nelson and his son Nixon. Nixon, particularly, speaks great English, having worked as a dive guide out of Luganville. They go out of their way to make yachties feel welcome at Asanavari, and obviously this has worked well for the village.

First thing in the morning, Nixon is liable to come paddling up to your boat with freshly-baked bread. Later in the morning, they may pass the word over the radio about activities that could happen, and in the afternoon they may organize the local ladies to bring in popular items of fruit and veg from village gardens, which we may then purchase by leaving the requested sale price in a pile of coins wherever the item had been sitting!

Although kastom dance is usually a popular thing, Nelson and Nixon picked up quickly on the fact that most of us had been to one or the other kastom dance festival recently if not both. However there was a local wedding planned for our first day that many of the cruisers decided to go to. Local, of course, is a relative term. Asanvari is on the beach, and the wedding turned out to be in a village up on the ridge about a half hour's walk away. In the company of Dave and Chrissie of Runaway Bay, who'd come sailing in from the north the night before, we went along for the "walk", which took a bit longer than advertised and included at stiff climb up a narrow path, something the ladies who'd dressed nicely for the wedding surely hadn't anticipated.
Many of the Vanutau footpaths are the width of bare feet making for challenging footing for gringo walker shod in Tevas or Crocs (the most popular cruiser footwear).

It is amazing these villages that exist sprinkled away in the forests of the mountainside. It makes you realize how little of the country we see, sticking, as we do, to communities right on the coast. On Malekula, and probably on most islands, there are still really, really traditional clans living largely out of touch with the modern world back in the deep folds of the mountains. But an amusing sidelight of our walk was crossing paths with one of Maewo's candidates for parliament hoofing it by footpath the length of his district trying to drum up votes for the upcoming September elections. Later, we asked Nelson and Nixon about the political side of Ni-Vanuatu (Ni-Vanuatu is what the people call themselves) life. It appears to be a completely separate power structure than the chief systems that rule the villages themselves (they say even the prime minister is subject to his chief when in his home village!). Pentecost, we were told has four representatives while Maewo, with a smaller population currently only has one, although due soon to be entitled to a second as their population crests 5,000. (Maewo Island, by the way, is a slightly smaller twin sister to string-bean, mountainous Pentecost to the south.) There are at least four parties fielding candidates, and the fellow we met was not the incumbent, whom Chief Nelson anticipated regaining his seat. A parliament in Port Vila sure seems a long, long way from village life, so I asked how they keep track of what is going on, and he said, "By radio."

At our turnaround point – the village hosting the wedding – we also met the bride-to-be, a nice-looking young woman with a pudgy one-year-old on her hip. Her story is also an interesting vignette of Ni-Vanuatu life. While at school to become a nurse in Port Vila, she hooked up with a fellow student and went home with him to live in Tanna. According to Chief Nelson, her parents back in Maewo had no idea what had become of her! Marriage is a big step here. A groom may have to pay a bride price of up to $100,000 vatu (about $1,000…or the equivalent value in pigs!) He may also have to compensate his future mother-in-law for the loss of a worker as usually the groom takes his bride back to his village. In the old days, and perhaps still, there were elaborate understandings of obligation between the joining families, including that a groom's younger sister might be pledged to the bride's brother and so forth, and sometime this connection might span several generations. On the other hand, most people I asked about this did say that most relationships nowadays start with a mutual attraction at school or church. Evidently, this couple was making things official by coming home to Maewo for the wedding. Another curious tidbit Chrissie picked up is that the couple recently moved to a village in the hills to get away from the dangerous ocean "where children are frequently lost." Perhaps that is just her view, having grown up on the mountain herself!

We did not stay for the wedding itself, which turned out to be the first of a couple of good non-decisions we made while in Asanvari. The second was not going on a trip to "The Bat Cave." I know it's hard to imagine that an American would want to miss out on this, but Don had a sore on his foot that he was nursing, and another hike – advertised at two hours – did not sound like a smart move for it. Right decision. The Bat Cave turned out to take about six hours round trip with much bushwacking by machete and plenty of mosquitoes, and Nick and Bonnie of Rise 'N Shine reported back that there were times, scaling cliffs by means of vines and roots, when they "feared for their lives"! Bonnie did confess that at one point where she was in mortal dread, she looked over the precipice to find an aged grandmother "commuting" to her regular garden. So I guess it is a matter of perspective!

Better, more active decisions we made were the swim in the waterfall (after checking out the generator set-up), the snorkel on Asanvari's recommended reef, and the big group dinner at the yacht club.
The waterfall comes right down to the shore, so it was an easy scramble to get a fresh water plunge after our hot "walk." David and Chrissie were even smart enough to bring soap. Good thing I was last, because ---ooops ----who remembers that soap doesn't float!?! Hey, I'm a child of the Ivory generation, and besides, when is the last time I had a bath!

For the salt water plunge, Don and I dinghied over to the "huge coral head" – really more of a butte that rises from the deep at the south corner of the anchorage. The visibility was impressive, and although the only corals were small ones on the butte's flat top, there were lots of fish in a variety of sizes. Even though Don no longer has his speargun (and I don't think it would have been permitted anyway), he still prefers to snorkel with fish worth shooting if he did have one. Here, we saw at least five huge groupers, as well as the even bigger Napoleon wrasse as well as sizeable parrotfish and a whole slew of various schooling fish. We circled the butte twice and then swam across to the fringing reef and made our way in toward the village where to our surprise there was actually quite a bit of coral and still plenty of fish. Don went back for the dinghy and I continued on in a snorkel swim all the way back to the boat. As you might guess, the side of the anchorage where the waterfall comes down is pretty much devoid of coral or fish. But I could still see our anchor perfectly set in the sand 60 feet down!

We had read (and heard) that Asanvari was a good place for a group dinner ashore. By our third day there the anchorage had collected over a dozen boats, but thanks to the intestinal bug that had troubled at least half the fleet, momentum for a dinner was slow to grow. It took a NZ boat coming up from Vila with guests to get the ball rolling, but when it turned into a 75th birthday party for Rod of Sah-le-ah, everybody joined in. Nixon and his family put on a fabulous feast of roast pig, fresh-water prawns in noodles, green papaya curry, kumala (a white sweet potato), rice, stir-fried green vegetable (green peppers, I think). Don was very worried that when the number jumped by about ten at the last minute, that we were going to get short-changed (although for the equivalent of $9.50, how much could you complain?), but in fact Nixon had planned ahead and there was plenty for all 35 cruisers. After dinner there was kava and birthday desserts brought in by cruisers, plus there were not one but two string bands that alternated through dinner, and after dinner pretty much everybody – local ladies included – took to the dance floor. We may have scandalized the place by touch dancing (a little swing stuff), but soon most of the cruisers were doing the whirl and twirl thing and in the end there was the inevitable conga line. The band kept announcing a last song, as they had to walk home to their village in the dark, but they just couldn't help themselves and kept playing and singing until well after cruisers' bedtime. It's truly amazing what energy electric light can bring out.

Perhaps it was one of our less wise decisions to plan an early morning departure after a late party night, but groggy and heavy-bellied as we were, by first light we none-the-less tucked a few reefs in the sail, put our heads down and started the required bash back south.

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(Please note that the update on the Rom Dance Festival on Ambrym Island which should appear here for some reason did not get posted. Please look for it out of sequence above in early September.)

Had a grand sail nineteen miles north to Waterfall Bay, Pentecost, (S15*47'.57; E168*09'.14) although we arrived too late to launch the dinghy and go into the waterfall like the other yachties. That's because the old Perkins shut down as we were lifting the dinghy aboard at Abmrym. Just stopped! Don and and two other guys from boats still there kibbitzed over it for about four hours. Evidently, the problem was air getting in through some connection or other as Don tightened a few from the tank onward, but it takes so long to bleed and restart a Perkins so it was hard to know wht actually fixed things. Finally got it, and the wx was so fine, that after letting the engine prove itself for 40 minutes, we upped anchor and and sailed off anyway.

Penetecost is a long string bean of an island with steep mountains thrusting up into clouds. The lower flanks of the island are heavily clad in coconut plantations, and there are a whole bunch of anchorages along the western coast, most with villages but some without. Waterfall Bay is really not a bay, just a dimple in the coastline situated between two villages. We could see the cascade from the waterfall as we turned in, but by the time we got to anchoring depth it was lost behind some trees. Although the cruising guides recommend this as a day anchorage only, we had a very settled night with just a little bounce. The oddest thing about it was the bright electric flood lights with which the village of Melsisi to the north was lit up and the trucks headlights (at least two) that traveled back and forth along a coastal road. We haven't see electricity in a long time!

The boat may have have a fairly settled night, but I didn't. Around about midnight I woke abruptly with a miserable intestinal bug. I mention this only because I am relieved, after stressing over what of my own cooking might have caused it, to find that David on Runaway Bay had it on the otherside of the island chain. So there is something going around. So I didn't enjoy the 25-mile sail north to Asanvari as much as I would have otherwise, being sleep deprived and having to....commute below... shall we say.

Asanvari (S15*22'.874; E168*07'.42) is a much touted anchorage as one of the most beautiful and friendly in Vanuatu. It was the destination of the other, larger group of ICA Rally boats that left with us from Fiji. Friends of ours from Trinidad had stopped here several years ago and constructed a hydroelectic generator in the waterfall that tumbles into the bay, so it was high on our list of places to visit. Turning in, it didn't look all that enticing, but once in, it is actually a rather well protected bay with steep forested hills wrapping around. The fat semi-volcanic island of Ambae, that straddles the V of sea between Vanuatu's two strands of islands, fills up a good bit of the horizon westward, and we can hear, although not see, Asanvari's waterfall. (Turns out we could have seen it if we'd anchored closer to the village.) Since I was lying low yesterday, we haven't been ashore yet, but rumors are that Chief Nelson is already planning something to celebrate the new big group of boats arriving. Good thing I am feeling better today!

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Festival at Southwest Bay

If there was ever a place to see the effect that physical geography can have on the development of culture, Vanuatu is the place. Because of steep terrain, villages here have evolved independently of one another, developing different languages and different customs. Even today, with airstrips and cell towers and public education, geography still has its influence. Southwest Bay on the island of Malakula has an airstrip at the village of Wintua, but no roads and no vehicles. It just happens to lie on the "wrong" side of Malakula, off the beaten path of cruising sailboats trying to fit as many "name" anchorages in as possible so few cruisers find their way in. And yet it is about as idyllic an anchorage as any cruiser could hope for – spacious yet well protected from the majority of winds (N-E-S-SW!), no swell, great holding, some decent snorkeling and diving and several friendly villages. There's even a modern Kiwi farm offering fresh eggs for sale, as well as occasionally local meat, fresh fish, chickens (!!live!!) plus the have a burn bit for trash!

It seems that several weeks ago, Luc and Jackie of the yacht Sloepmouche (cruisers who have paused here in Vanuatu the past two years) sailed into Southwest Bay. Over chats with local chiefs it transpired that the villagers would do just about anything to increase visitor traffic to the bay. Indeed last year one of the villages undertook to put on a program for a small cruise ship that made several visits. The villagers went away for some training and put together a relatively polished presentation. Then the cruise ship didn't come anymore. So Luc, who is an active contributor to the SSCA Bulletins, undertook to coordinate a cruiser festival here in conjunction with the chiefs. The three villages planned a three-day event, and Luc got the word out over the coconut telegraph, with the result that some thirty-four boats assembled for the event!

I'm sure others may have been put off by the idea of such a crowd, but in fact, the anchorage could easily hold three times as many boats. We are all swinging free with plenty of room between neighbors. And while the critical mass of cruising boats and their crews has been a revelation for the locals, it's also been quite a social occasion for the yachties themelves, many of whom haven't crossed paths in years.

The three villages involved in the event are Lembinwen, Lapo, and Tenstick. The festival began at Lembinwen, a large village on the bank where a salt water river flowing briskly from a huge tidal lagoon meets the bay. Central to the day was the dedication and opening of the Southwest Bay Yacht Club. The "yacht club" phenomenon is found all though Vanuatu. In traditional places where areas, buildings and pathways hold all sorts of traditional restrictions and taboos (particularly with respect to outsiders and women), having a building where yachties can gather to mingle with the locals without inadvertently treading on those traditions has been a successful compromise. Lembinwen was keen to have one and built the thatch hut in a matter of weeks.

But it could not happen without a lot of pomp and ceremony. The yachties were greeted on the beach with drinking coconuts and hibiscus flowers for each lady. There was a receiving line and a string band (evidently every village has their own) and an emcee with a megaphone. We learned later that the megaphone is a regular part of village life, a way for the chief to "send out" messages to the village, a tropical town crier, if you will. In the hands of Charlie, Lembinwen's emcee for the day, it was a non-stop white noise as he shifted back and forth between languages and panned his voice this way or that to target various groups of yachties or villagers in a relatively vain effort to herd us all along …vain of course because he was completely incomprehensible! There was a flag-raising on the beach, a banner held up by adorable children we needed to walk under, and speeches from a thatch dais by several chiefs, who were terrified at addressing a crowd of white foreigners in English if the trembling paper holding the composed speech was any indication! There was even a white ribbon on the door of the new yacht club that had to be cut with scissors at yet another flag raising.

Considering that this was Lembinwen's first such event, they did a very fine job. They had a whole series of demonstrations of village life planned; climbing coconut trees for nuts, cutting said nuts open for drink or meat, cooking a pudding of coconut and plantain in tubes of bamboo of a fire, starting that fire without matches, and of course weaving useful carryalls out of pond fronds. They also gave a cursory demonstration of how their outrigger canoes are constructed, and a shy fellow showed the traditional sand-drawing, where images are created without ever lifting the finger. We had a nice lunch of beef stirfry, taro, and a fancy bread and banana concoction, which surely used every plate in the village's possession, and then we all climbed up a hill (where hand-rails had been lashed helpfully to the path-side trees) to watch a ladies' grade-taking dance.

Unfortunately, what explanation of the dance Charlie and the megaphone provided was not clear enough that many of us appreciated what we were seeing. It is only after coming back to the boat and reviewing my Lonely Planet did I start to get a clue. Grade-taking, usually associated with men only, is a process whereby individuals increase status within the community. According to the Lonely Planet, the men "earn respect by publicly disposing of their wealth in a series of elaborate ceremonies"…"accompanied by the ritual killing of pigs." What they are after from the pigs are the boar's tusks, which take six to seven years to grow, so one has to own a lot of pigs that reach maturity to collect the required number of tusks to reach "high levels of society." It seems that the southern Malekula women are the only Vanuatu women to take grades.

What was perhaps slightly uncomfortable was that the ladies danced topless. It is an odd jump to make from women in Mother Hubbards (the smock-like dress introduced by missionaries) to the same women in grass skirts and vines. These are not the nubile virgins most of the men were hoping to see, but matronly figures, to put it kindly, and the dance was a fairly monotonous chant and tread around a "house" made of saplings, which the ladies eventually entered and then pushed down for the finale, a symbolism lost on us.

After the dance, about half the cruisers opted for the lagoon tour – a fast trip in a line of dinghies through the huge estuary up the river.

The next day was pretty much a rerun, except that presented by the villagers of Lapo, the ones who had trained for the cruise ship, every phase was more coordinated and more polished. Instead of flowers for our ears we had leis (which work better for white people!),
there were straws for our drinking coconuts, the benches at the beautifully landscaped dance ground had backs to them (!!!!), the lunch was somewhat more elaborate, and the guy on the megaphone was much easier to understand. As we landed our dinghies on their beautiful beach, we were parceled into groups of ten and given a guide for the day. The guides were more effective than Charlie's amplified directions had been, but even so I am quite sure the guides found cruisers much more challenging to "herd" than the cruise ship passengers had been!

The two big differences in the day were the village tour and the dancing. Lapo (pronounced LaBO) is the Swiss village of southwest Bay. The thatch huts climb the steep hillside along a path that switches back and forth up through dense jungly forest. The houses, though still stick and thatch, seemed larger and more westernized in style, with porches and windows, some with screens and others even with glass, motivated, I presume, by the gorgeous vistas and the cool breezes. One little cluster had three tombs in the front, (rather Samoan style), there was a nice little Presbyterian church, and deliberate effort at landscaping with flowers and shrubs along the paths was evident everywhere. Near the top of the villages was a waterfall with a Jacuzzi like pool for kava drinking.

As for the dancing, this time it was men's dances and the men were in Kastom-dress.
Unlike the "participatory' dances we saw in Tanna (and here I consult Lonely Planet again), the two dances we saw in Lapo were "impersonation" dances where the men "pretend to be an ancestor or legendary figure" which allows the use of elaborate masks or headdresses.
Below they wear little more than penis sheaths and decorations of leaves, including colorful tufts from their backsides like rooster tails. Unlike the women, the men were easier on the eye, revealing fitter more muscular flesh. (We were told that one reason the men don't run to fat like the ladies is that kava – in these villages restricted to men's consumption – is an appetite suppressant!). Also the men's dance was accompanied by the drumming of a set of three elaborate tamtam (carved wooden slit-drums), which was very stirring.
The costumes and headdresses were truly memorable (different in each dance), but the dance steps themselves were the same for both dances, a handful of slow deliberate steps, then a flurry of fast double-timers when the drum beat sped up.
The art, of course, is doing it while keeping the headdresses upright.

Of course, just as we were all sitting there thinking the dance steps were rather unexciting, we were invited to come out and join the dancers. It wasn't so easy…and that's without headdresses!

All in all another nice day.

The third day of the festival was a more relaxed opportunity to visit the small hamlet of Tenstick, located on the westernmost point of the bay and named for the haystack islet just offshore. It seems in WWII the pilots based at Espirito Santo paid the villagers "ten sticks" – or ten cigarettes – to use the islet for target practice. Here the main attraction was to be snorkeling and diving, but the good weather that had blessed the first two days of the festival failed, and the morning was beset with a chilly drizzle. As you might guess, most of the cruisers, overdosed on village visits from the previous two days, opted to stay home. On Tackless II this captain was feeling a bit under the weather as we had celebrated Don's big SIX-OH the night before (more on that later). But when someone announced on the radio that perhaps these villagers had gone to more preparation than we'd been led to expect, we, like several others, clambered into our dinghies to pay our respects.

The Tenstickers had their own string band, their own hibiscus flowers and drinking coconuts to offer (these with straws of "cabbage stems"!), a table of snacks to try, and some crafts and shells to sell. Both men and women were on the beach to greet us, and sat around to chat. Don and David (the Runaway Bay crew had caught up with us in time for the BiG SIX-OH dinner) had a tour with the chief, and David invited the chief to visit our boats in the morning (Damn, gotta cleanup AGAIN!) Afterwards we took our snorkel gear to check out the reefs around Tenstick Islet, and were sufficiently impressed with the clear water and reef landscape to plan a scuba dive tomorrow.

If you are wondering what the villagers got for their efforts, it is common to ask a fee. After all, these traditions, reefs and National Geographic opportunities are all these people have to market. On the first day, Lembinwen asked only for gifts of our discretion (and they collected quit a heap!); at Lapo they asked the equivalent of $30 a head (a bit dear), and at Tenstick $3 bought us access to the reef.

Don's BIG six-OH!

August 13th came around again this year, and it was mighty nice of the folks of Southwest Bay to throw this big party for Don, cause i'd been wondering waht special thing I could to celebrate. It was our friends Randy and Sherri of Procyon that alerted us to it as a perfect place to meet up for the occasion, and very fine that our "newest best friends" David and Chrissie of Runaway Bay put the push on to get here in time. Other than the events of the festival, Don's big day started with sat phone calls home as well as well-wishing by email, and ended with a big dinner for six in Tacky Two's cockpit. Randy and Sherri contributed a sinful chocolate cake and a split of champagne, Dave and Chrissie a lovely fruit compote and yam fritters, while I strove to provide cheeseburgers in paradise…which, believe me, in Paradise is no easy feat. My homemade buns, such a success in Tonga two years ago, were a bit of a flop, and the burgers, down-sized twice before grilling to fit the buns ended up more like White Castles' infamous sliders. Damn, I shoulda thought to grill onions!!!! My potato salad, however, was more successful, thanks to Chrissie's bringing us provisions from Port Vila.

Although we miss being close enough to home that the family could make a big fuss over us for milestones like these, the cruising way has its virtues: celebration by like-minded souls in like situations with similar thoughts of where we are in life and what we want from what remains us.

15-18 August 2008 – ‘Tween Time

Southwest Bay was the kind of place one could hang on the hook indefinitely, especially with the ability to restock beef, fish, eggs as well as lemons and limes from the Kiwi Farm. On the Friday after the hoopla of the festival died down and as the fleet started to disperse, we did manage to fit a scuba dive in on the reef on the west side of the pass between Tenstick’s islet and village. Don and David actually opted to sit on the surface and schmooze about boat systems while Chrissie, a newly certified diver, and I went for a very nice dive through a system of caverns and pinnacles, my favorite kind of landscape. Hard to believe Chrissie was a newbie!

In the afternoon, Don and I went ashore to collect a sarong I had purchased from a woman named Marklynn at the Tenstick do the day before. We found her house as she’d described, the last compound on Lembinwen village’s west end. She and her husband Silon made us welcome in the family’s main building, a structure of cement and stone up two feet, topped by the traditional vertical stick walls, and an absolutely beautiful thatch roof. The building housed an open space probably 25’x40’, and inside was almost nothing! Against one wall in the corner was a bench with some cooking pans, and the sarong I was picking up was pinned to the wall above it. Their son Anthony, a handsome young man as yet unmarried, is one of the musicians in the village string band, so of course we had to buy a copy of their just-released CD (produced very professionally by a Peace Corp worker.) Later when Marklynn went to get a gift for me (my very own, very pink Mother Hubbard dress…so I “could have a proper dress!), she went into a smaller hut nearby, so we deduce each member of the family as their own sleeping hut.

Aside from the new and spacious compound, Silon and Marklyn are distinguished by keeping pets. In a stone and cement pool built into the sand, Silon keeps five turtles – four hawksbill and one green turtle – that he says he has raised from babies. Keeping turtles for four years takes a lot of work. They feed the turtles rice and change the water every day, and Silon claims they take the turtles out in the sea for swims. He says he keeps them to teach the community children that turtles are protected now and not to be caught or shot for food. He also has a flying fox in a cage, which he acquired when one of the boys shot the mother with a slingshot and the baby was found tucked under her wing. All the animals seemed happy and clean and friendly with the family.

On our way out, Silon led us on a tour through Lembinwen village. Even though we had spent a day there for the festival, we actually had not seen much of it. Wandering around unattended is not encouraged. It turned out to be quite densely built up (no wonder Silon moved to the suburbs!). We saw two of the three churches (Presbyterian, SDA and CDC…I know what SDA is, but not CDC!), an actual open air stage for the band and other village events, a volleyball court, the primary school, the chief in his undershorts and well, you know….village life.

The next morning we took advantage of the light winds and motored back around the south end of Malekula to the Maskelyne islands at Malekula’s SE corner. This was a change of plan. Originally, I’d thought we’d sail with Runaway Bay north up to Luganville on Espirito Santo, where the US military base was during WWII and where there are several spectacular wreck dives (the USS President Coolidge, a 654-foot former luxury liner that was serving as a troop ship when she struck a friendly mine and sank, and the infamous Million Dollar Point, where the US navy dumped thousands of tons of equipment after the war.) However the Coolidge is a deep dive which I am avoiding these days, and Don was lukewarm about diving on his own, and with the weather report predicting strong easterlies coming in within the week, we were concerned about getting pinned in up there when we would need to get back southeast to Efate. So, instead we decided to proceed with Procyon and other friends over to Ambrym Island for a famous Rom dance festival

The Maskelyne Islands are a pretty little group of seven islets and extensive reef areas. We tucked in to a super protected anchorage behind the coral-fringed islet of Awea (S16*31’.9; E169*41.’2) with a bunch of friends, and quite honestly, never put the dinghy down. With two festivals behind us and another to go, we were perfectly happy just to sit on our boat and do as little as possible. Of course, that didn’t stop people from visiting us. Marjetka, the Slovenian single-hander, and her wonder dog Cherie were there and came and spent an afternoon visiting, as did Randy and Sherri of Procyon. Also we had a few visitors that came by canoe, most memorably Martin and his five-year-old son Thatcher! We enjoyed chatting with Martin, and although he had nothing to trade, we ended up making him a gift of some reading glasses which he sorely desired.

On Monday morning, the wind picked up to a respectable 15 knots and the entire anchorage emptied out in a steady stream and set sail for the NW tip of Ambrym Island about 46 miles away. As the fleet sailed out, we had to give way to the local canoes, now alll equipped with sails!

Since Ambrym is Vanuatu’s other big active volcano, we were concerned about picking up ash and fumes as we sailed by its leeward side, but fortunately for us the main impact was some locally-generated wind patterns switching the southeasterlies abruptly to northwesterlies! Still we had another great sail and settled into the relatively open roadstead off Nebul village known as Rodd’s anchorage (S16*06’.5; E168*.07’.7).

Labels: Diving, Hiking, Rally Experiences, Traditional Festivals, Vanuatu

We set sail northward from Tanna in the company of David and Chrissie of the Kiwi yacht Runaway Bay. We first met them when the pulled into the slip next to us in Vuda shortly after our launch, and in the afternoon after the Tanna festival had found ourselves compatible enough to proceed from tea and banana bread to checking out our new case of Tusker Beer, thence to comparing rums and then right on into a spontaneous stir fry dinner.

It was a bit sloppy just outside Port Resolution where the next morning we bashed our way far enough offshore to avoid any fallout from Mt. Yasur. But almost from the moment we turned north, the mist lifted, the clouds cleared and the wind settled once again conveniently on the beam allowing us to keep pace with the speedy Kiwis and generally have a fine 68-mile day sail to Dillon' Bay, Erromango.

As we approached Erromango, we heard this really unfamiliar sound…the sound of the fishing reel whizzing out at a rapid pace! By the time Don could get to the rod, the mahi mahi had jumped four or five times, but I guess at the blistering pace of seven knots, he was unable to shake the hook. I worked at slowing the boat down by furling the genoa while Don held on to the rod for dear life. (You may remember our last big mahi got away!) This one did not, and after we managed to wrestle it aboard (bloodying the bejeezus out of the back deck in the process), it proved to be a record setter for Tackless II – five feet! (Ooops sorry for the sidewise pix, will fix another time!!) The new paint job has been christened.

Dillon's Bay is a wide V centered on the mouth of a river disgorging from a cleft in Erromango's step mountain range. The village of Unpongkor is strung out along the north bank of the river. Interestingly, the river is called the Williams River after the first missionary that was killed there in 1839. The body was bartered with an inland tribe for food, protein in exchange for some veggies perhaps?

The boys went in within hours of our arrival to take in the barracuda that David caught, and the remains of the mahi after Don had filleted it. Islanders are always aghast at what cruisers consider waste – the huge head in this case. The carcass was spirited away in no time. Very quickly they were solicited to examine a young man with an eye infection after getting a stick in it, followed by an ailing generator. The two mechanically-minded guys were a lot more optimistic about helping the latter than the former, but by chance the rally leader, David of Diomedea, is an eye surgeon and Runaway Bay David was able to contact him on the radio for some guidance. Both projects ran over into the morning, and I'm pleased to say both patients were left in better shape for their efforts. While the guys were ashore I took advantage of the sunshine and stayed aboard to do several loads of laundry. While I was at it I had two young visitors come to call. These boys, aged eight and ten, made this canoe themselves!

In the afternoon, Chief William undertook to guide us to some burial caves. It took about a half hour by slow dinghies (we'd been joined in the anchorage by then by Reg and Lois of Force Six from Tasmania and a group of four French vacationers on a borrowed boat from New Caledonia), and we all got thoroughly soaked. Chief William, a man of some age, nimbly led us up a path (that was poorly suited to the Crocs I had worn…I thought we were going to caves on the water!). There were two caves: one a five-foot wide mouth descending into the dark, the other an open alcove reached by scaling the roots of a Banyan tree woven into the side of the cliff. Chief William did a little "tok tok" in the native language to advise the spirits we were just here for a respectful visit, before removing the "barricade" (a grid of sticks) placed there to keep the spirits in. Chief William does this because his father told him to, even though he himself doesn't "believe in all that."

In the end, all of us but the French went to both caves, and sure enough, in each, were neat piles of human bones.
Chief William said that the ones in the upper cave were his grandfather, and that the bodies were brought there during a battle when they didn't have time for the one week mourning. David and Chrissie were incredulous that this was all allowed so casually. They said the Maori of New Zealand would never permit outsiders anywhere near!

After the dingy ride back to the village, we ladies ventured inland along the river road to find the swimming hole in the river for a fresh water wash. Everyone greeted us as we walked through the tidy village, children giggling from the branches of huge spreading banyan trees. Unfortunately, as we neared the spot, we were advised that run-off from the previous night's rain the in the mountains had muddied the water, and indeed it did not look inviting, although several young girls proceeded to swim. Instead we made our way out into the boulder strewn stretch where ladies were sitting to do their laundry surrounded by kids our grandson Kai's age and sat and chatted with them.

Meanwhile, while Reg and Dave worked on yet another generator, Don went off with a villager he'd met earlier (another David!) who wanted Don's wise western input on some "development plans" he had for a little back-packer resort with bures and rental kayaks and the like. You may wonder how visitors might get there without yachts, but in fact there is an airstrip on the other side of the island via which these villagers ship lobsters and fish to Port Vila. Don said it was a beautiful piece of land with great views with a fair amount of landscaping work already in process…things, Don says, you can do without a lot of money!

That evening we had another potluck supper on Tackless II. As we had already shared out half the mahi, the potluck put a major dent in our remaining supply. But the others provided four or five side dishes, including from the galley of Force Six a huge plum pudding for dessert, complete with brandy sauce . As a slight drizzle rolled down out of the mountains, we were able to drop all the windows and have a cozy social evening.

The next morning we took off on our own for a 168-mile run up to the island of Malakula to meet up with our friends Randy and Sherri of Procyon for a special festival being organized there just for cruisers.

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Labels: Vanuatu

I cannot tell a lie. The officials were late. But considering is was they that had to come the hour and a half across the island in the back of a pickup truck and not us, we could hardly complain. It gave us the time ashore to explore the little village at Port Resolution.

Unlike most villages we have seen from the Marquesas to Fiji, in this one the houses are all traditionally constructed of woven sticks and thatch roofs. I can't tell you how right this feels, compared to raw rectangles of wood, tin or concrete. The houses appeared to be clustered in family groups, and everything was neat and tidy, albeit with pigs running hither and thither. The only western style construction appeared to be around the primary school, but we didn't get a chance to look in.

We did spend quite a bit of time in their 'cultural center", a separate bure with "exhibits" and laminated placards pertaining to specific traditions, customs and ceremonies. There even was a reproduction of an oil painting of "the only first hand witness of a cannibal ceremony". I suspect a Peace Corps contribution to the effort. We were told there is an American lady living in the village, but we did not cross paths.

When they did arrive, the officials were fairly organized. There was even a representative from the bank to change our "hard currencies" (US and Aussie $) into vatu. Vatu are one of those currencies where $1000 vatu equals a dollar. Hard to get your head around.

We had a relaxed afternoon in preparation for muster at 4pm to climb into three pickup trucks for the trip to Mt. Yasur. Although there were only six ICA Rally boats (note the one with steering problems achieved a fix and caught up with us all), there were another eight or so boats in the anchorage who joined the tour, so the trucks were pretty well packed with about ten people sitting on benches around each of the truck beds. The "roads" are mountain tracks with some very large holes. These trucks are the only transportation these villages have!

What can I say about Mt. Yasur. It was pretty incredible. It rises from the mountainside in a neat ash cone from a burned area of lava rock. The trucks drive as close as 150 meters, and the brave-of-heart climb the rest of the way up a soft black-sand path to the rim. Let me hasten to say this is the upper rim. They used to let people descend to the lower inner rim until a Japanese lady was incinerated in an instant by a molten blast!
Believe us, the upper rim was spectacular enough. With the wind from the southeast, most of the smoke was blown away from us and the experience was curiously devoid of sulphur smell. There were evidently two main vents. The left hand one put on most of the fireworks, blasting red hot molten boulders from its glowing core 200+ feet skyward at regular explosive intervals. The vent to the right, however, specialized in freight train sound effects and towering columns of roiling black smoke.

We stayed until after dark and captured a great deal of the show on camera and video. It is powerful and mesmerizing, and that's at activity level two. (No one's allowed up if the level rises to four or higher.) One can readily understand how the mountain figures as a powerful deity in the "kastom" beliefs.

Speaking of "kastom", (Vanuatu has hundred of languages that developed in the isolated villages. Bislama, a sort of pigeon English, in the national shared vernacular. Many islanders do, however, speaker either English or French as well.) …the very next morning we were ashore at 7:30 am to climb back into our trucks for a ride to a 'nearby" village to attend a "circumcision festival." Stanley, our yachtie liaison at Port Resolution, was very excited for us, because this was not a tourist show, but a real event – indeed one of the traditional events we'd read about in the cultural center.

The nearby village, said to be in walking distance, was a 45 minute ride by truck. Presumably, there is a shorter footpath, because Stanleys wife Mariam did appear under her own footpower! The yachties and a few tourists from a hotel were seated on a rise looking over the ceremonial ground, packed dirt, where there were five piles of what most of us took to be umus or earthen ovens. We were right as it turned out later, but the first stage of the ceremony was for the five families of the boys to start laying on piles of gifts: first perhaps a dozen woven pandanus mats, then dozens of sulu-length strips of colorful fabric (spread one at a time!), then blankets, then more mats and a bundle of pandanus baskets, all this for EACH pile. Each clan group congregated in a separate corner of the ceremony area.



The men wore sulus, often matching within the clan, motley T-shirts, occasional crocs (Chinese rip-offs) and the odd feather in their hair. The women were far more decorated. They wore layers of grass skirts, a sarong around their tops, garlands of plastic flowers and Christmas tinsel around their necks and multiple feathers and other decorations in their hair. Obviously, even "kastom" attire has been influenced by the modern world.

After all the last baskets were balanced on the piles, in came the livestock. This was pretty hard for most of the Westerners to take. Each family provided pigs, goats or cows. The pigs were brought in squealing, hung by their feet from poles, and then stunned by a blow with a club. (This brought vividly to our minds the reproduction we'd seen in the cultural center!) The cows and goats were, mercifully, slaughtered dispatched out of our view, and then dragged on to the 'stage" by teams of men. The young Welsh girl next to me wept silently through the whole process.

Only now was the stage set for the boys to come out of the bush. Traditionally, the circumcisions were done by bamboo scalpel without anesthetics. Nowadays, we were told, they do it in the hospital "so the boys don't have to have the pain." No mention was made of the more hygienic conditions! Then the boys are sent away from their mothers "out into the bush" where they are in the care of men who supervise the healing and provide manly instructions. The ceremony we were attending was for their return from the bush.

The boys when they finally appeared were dressed up fancy like their mothers. They were paraded through the piles with their male relatives shrouding and protecting them. The boys looked very young and small and overwhelmed by all the hoopla. There followed much kastom dance, chanting harmony by the men to a rhythm stamped by their bare feet in the dirt. (Crocs were kicked aside for this!) The women circled the men bouncing like kangaroos and contributing their high harmonies. Clearly their legs are in better shape than ours!

When the dancing was over, the boys had disappeared again, and now began the dismantling of the piles they had worked so hard to build, each pile given to the mother's family who had come from distant villages. (When women are married off, they move to their husband's village. For this ceremony, the wives families traveled to be on hand.) At the bottom, under the piles of leaves did, in the end, appear umu earth ovens from which were extracted packets of cooked pork and laplap, a traditional dish easiest described at a flat, starchy pudding baked in leaves. One of these packets was delivered to the cruisers, who despite their aversion to the slaughter techniques, weren't too hesitant about chowing down! (Even the Welsh girl had some pork!)

At this point the ceremony broke so that all the food stuff could be prepped and put to cook for the big feast and dance that night…actually the main event. As the cruisers dispersed to the trucks, we were told we'd be welcome back that night, that the doings would mostly likely last from sunset to sunup. I think a German and Dutch family did go back, but most of us returned to our boats, anxious about a forecast wind shift and plans to move on in the morning.

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Labels: Hiking, Mt. Yasur, Rally Experiences, Tanna, Traditional Festivals, Vanuatu, volcano

We are safely anchor down in Port Resolution, a picturesque notch in the windward side of Tanna Island. With the exception of a slight roll, it is a nice place to be, as long as the winds don't back any farther north than east. Fortunately, the weather report calls for a week of so'easterlies.

We have not been ashore yet, but shore has come out to us by way of dugout canoes with floating outriggers made from tree branches. Tawa, our first visitor, traded us a cooked lobster for 4 D cell batteries. Tom, coming later in the afternoon, sought a few litres of diesel for his father's generator for which he gaves us papaya, christophene, and a huge bunch of spring onions straight from the garden! This is the way of Vanuatu, a long strand of mountainous islands where villages developed in isolation from one another and villagers today still live very simply. Visting yachts come prepared to trade useful items for fresh produce because it is one of the few ways the locals can acquire these things.

In the evening our rally leaders, Dave and Andrea of the yacht Diomedea (Wonder what it means? I asked. It's the species name for albatross!) had the whole rally group over for sundowners to celebrate our arrival. I think the original plan was to assemble at the "yacht club," picturesquely situated on a bluff overlooking the anchorage, but it was discovered that the five cases of beer, delivered by Tusker Beer, one of the rally sponsers, had been consumed by the villagers! So the evening was potluck with the remains of stores from Fiji, and it was a nice group of people -- mostly all accented folk from NZ, Australia and Great Britain! As darkness feel, the volcano inlnd from the anchorage belched fire and turned the skyline red.

We have a busy day ahead today. The customs and immigration officials from Lenakel, the main town on Tanna (but with an untenable anchorage) are due at the Yacht Club at 9am (possibly with another five cases of beer!), and then at 4pm we assemble for the truck ride up to the volcano. this is the BIG ATTRACTION of Tanna, the world's most accessible, active volcano. One can drive to within 150 meters of the rim and walk the last bit. This is said to be an exciting and thrilling experience.

Labels: Rally Experiences, Vanuatu