The passage from Vuda Marina to Tanna was roughly 480 nautical miles, and we covered it in just under four days.
We also had one more mission on the way: Wilson.
The plan was to stop at Monuriki, the island where Cast Away was filmed, and leave Wilson there. But once we started looking into the approach and the logistics, it became more complicated than we expected. We were not sure where we could get close safely or anchor without trouble, so in the end we gave up on the whole operation.
Wilson stayed with us.
We approached Tanna from the west and anchored just off Lenakel. Lenakel is the largest settlement on the island and one of the main entry points to Tanna, although the word “town” should be used rather loosely here.
From the sea it looked more like a small fishing village with a concrete jetty where the occasional supply boat came in with people, fuel and provisions.
We dropped the dinghy and went ashore for a walk.
There was not much to see.
A small café, a petrol station, a few shops, some of them closed, a handful of houses along the road, and the jetty. It looked like some kind of holiday or day off, because there were plenty of people and children down by the beach. Kids were swimming, running around, and the whole place was full of their noise.
Two boys, maybe ten years old, immediately caught our attention.
They were wearing camouflage vests with large colourful patches on the back, and at first glance they looked like the youngest members of some Pacific motorcycle gang.
Exactly which gang they belonged to, and what kind of music they were into, we never managed to establish.
Their English did not help much.
Later we found out that the symbol on the vests had nothing to do with a motorcycle gang at all. It was the Kanak flag from New Caledonia. Whether the boys were visitors, schoolchildren who had come over by boat, or whether the vests had simply found their way to Tanna somehow, we had no idea.
On the beach I also found a small piece of red coral, branching out like a miniature tree.
I picked it up as a souvenir and packed it away on the boat.
The main reason we wanted to stay on Tanna in the first place was the volcano.
Mount Yasur.
One of those volcanoes you do not admire from ten kilometres away. You practically walk up to the rim and look straight into it.
Yasur is only about 361 metres high, but it is famous for its almost continuous activity. James Cook saw it in 1774, when he noticed fire and smoke over the island from the sea and realised he was looking at an active volcano.
Two and a half centuries later, not much seems to have changed.
Except now you have to buy a ticket.
I walked along the main road from Lenakel toward one of the resorts, asking around for someone who could take us to Yasur.
I asked here, asked there, and eventually someone in a shop gave me the contact of a local guy.
“He’ll come down to the jetty later.”
Fine.
Sure enough, after a while a man turned up.
He introduced himself as Mike. Whether that was his real name or just one of those names tourists find easier to remember, we did not know.
He was tall, lean, athletic-looking.
Barefoot.
Wearing shorts and an olive-green jacket that looked like an old Vietnam-era military jacket.
He arrived in a relatively new Isuzu D-Max 4×4.
And inside the car, it was a completely different story.
Pink fluffy decorations across the dashboard, pink flowers around the rear-view mirror, pink Hawaiian garlands everywhere.
Outside: barefoot guy in a military jacket and a pickup.
Inside: Hawaiian wedding.
He said he could take us to the volcano and back. The ride would cost around 200 dollars, and the entrance fee for the volcano was extra.
Fine.
We agreed on eight the next morning.
We spent the rest of the day around the beach, the jetty, and walking through Lenakel.
The more we looked around, the clearer it became how little infrastructure Tanna had outside a few tourist spots.
Along the main paved road there were mostly simple houses made of timber, planks and sheet metal. Only the occasional proper concrete building.
It felt as though civilisation had arrived here, but was in no particular hurry.
Tanna is also one of the islands in Vanuatu where traditional ways of life are still very strong. There are communities that continue to live according to old customs and social rules, with very little Western influence.
There is even a film about it, Tanna, made in 2015 on the island itself. It tells the story of two young people in a traditional community whose love conflicts with arranged marriage and customary law.
We had no real interaction with those communities ourselves.
We only saw some of them later, from the road, on the way to and from the volcano.
The next morning, while we were getting ready to go ashore, something happened that we were not expecting.
A whale.
Maybe two hundred metres from the boat, a large whale surfaced, blew, and then slipped back into the water, showing us its tail.
About ten minutes later, two smaller ones appeared as well.
Probably calves.
That made me laugh, because in Tonga, one of the most famous whale-watching places in the world, we had somehow managed to miss them almost completely.
And here, by pure chance, the whales came to us.
More luck than judgement.
We could not stay and watch for long because Mike was already supposed to be waiting at the jetty, so we jumped into the dinghy and headed ashore.
He was there.
Barefoot, of course.
After we had been driving for a while, I asked him:
“Mike, where are your shoes?”
He looked at me as if the question made no sense whatsoever.
“What do you mean, where are my shoes?”
“Well… do you have shoes?”
“No. I don’t wear them.”
Then he explained his philosophy.
“You keep buying shoes. Then they break. Then you have to buy new ones. But feet? Feet are always good. You don’t have to replace them.”
We had to admit the man had a point.
He was simply lucky to live on Tanna rather than in Siberia.
After about fifteen minutes, we stopped in the middle of nowhere.
A few simple huts stood by the road.
Next to one of them, a small child was sitting in the dirt playing with an enormous kitchen knife as though it were a plastic toy.
We looked at the child.
The child looked at the knife.
Apparently, nobody except us thought there was anything unusual about the scene.
A woman came over.
Mike exchanged a few words with her, she brought out a five-litre jerrycan and poured fuel into the tank.
Mike paid her.
We drove on.
I asked:
“Why didn’t you fill up at the petrol station? We passed one.”
He waved the idea away.
“No, no. You have to support the local tribe.”
Fine.
Where exactly the local tribe sourced its fuel, and how that whole distribution system worked, we decided not to investigate.
Support local.
Move on.
As we climbed toward Yasur, the landscape began to change.
At first, slowly.
The greenery became thinner.
The ground lighter.
Brown faded into grey.
And then, almost instantly, the tropical island disappeared.
Cars would come out of dense green forest and drive straight into a huge plain covered in volcanic ash.
Mordor.
There really was no better description.
Grey earth.
Black rock.
Dust.
Smoke.
Ash.
And in front of all of it, the enormous volcanic cone.
The closer we got, the more ash there was. It was not just around the crater. It was on the road, the huts, the vehicles, our shoes.
Everything had the same fine grey coating.
As if someone had dusted the whole landscape with cement powder.
We reached the visitor centre and bought our tickets.
If I remember correctly, once we worked it all out, the ticket was close to 90 dollars.
Ninety dollars to watch a mountain explode.
Still.
The important thing was that the volcano was working.
And it was.
Even from there, we could clearly see smoke rising from the crater, and the smell of sulphur was already becoming strong.
While we were waiting to continue, a truck came flying into the visitor centre at full speed.
The open back was packed with children.
They were screaming, laughing, holding onto the sides while the truck took the corner like a rally car.
Apparently this was a school trip.
Bus unavailable.
I watched it come in and could only think: how the hell has this thing not rolled over?
The children, however, seemed completely happy with the arrangement.
“Kids, do you like driving fast?”
The kids here clearly did.
From the visitor centre we continued on foot.
It was not a serious mountain climb, but we still had to gain another fifty metres or so to reach the rim.
The closer we got to the top, the heavier the air became.
Sulphur.
Gas.
Ash.
Every now and then you would breathe in enough of it to start coughing immediately.
Then you reach the edge.
And look down.
Yasur was working as if it were being paid per explosion.
BAM.
Pause.
BAM.
Again.
Explosions roughly every fifteen or twenty seconds.
Glowing rocks would shoot out from vents inside the crater and fall back down.
With the smaller blasts, the material stayed several metres below the level where we were standing.
Then there would be a slightly longer pause.
Everyone waits.
Nothing.
Still nothing.
And then:
BAM!
Much bigger.
At those moments, the rocks would shoot so high that from where we stood it looked as if some of them were going above our heads.
Whenever the wind briefly pushed the smoke aside, you could see the red glow and incandescent material deep inside the crater.
It is one of those sights that photographs can never really capture.
Because it is not only what you see.
You hear the explosion.
You feel it.
You smell the sulphur.
Ash gets onto your clothes.
And you are standing close enough for every stronger blast to remind you very clearly that this thing has absolutely no obligation to be safe just because you bought a ticket.
We spent maybe fifteen or twenty minutes on the rim.
Enough.
On the way back, we passed areas where communities still live according to traditional customs.
We did not stop or speak with them. We only saw them from the road.
At one point, some children had gathered to watch a group of tourists flying a drone.
For them, it was clearly a major event.
A little machine hovering in the air, spinning around, going up and down, while they stood in volcanic ash watching it as though it had just arrived from another galaxy.
In a single scene, you could see several centuries side by side.
Traditional huts.
Barefoot children standing in ash.
And a drone overhead.
Mike eventually dropped us back where he had picked us up.
We paid him, thanked him and said goodbye.
It had been a great day.
But Tanna was not finished with us yet.
While we had been ashore, the weather had changed.
The wind had picked up.
The sea was rougher.
By the time we got into the dinghy and headed back toward the boat, the waves were already big enough to soak us completely.
We reached the catamaran wet through.
We did not like the look of the weather, but the anchor was holding and for the moment everything seemed fine.
We went to sleep.
At around two in the morning, Damir woke me.
“Get up. There’s serious weather coming.”
The wind was already strong enough that the boat had started dragging the anchor.
And behind us was the reef.
We had already paid for that lesson once in Fiji.
We did not need a repeat.
Within a few minutes, we had grabbed the things left outside, started the engines and begun hauling up the anchor.
In the middle of the night.
In strong wind.
In rough water.
But this time there was no debate.
We had experience now.
If the wind wants to push you onto a reef, you leave before it gets the chance.
We raised the anchor, turned the bow away from Tanna and headed for Erromango.