After Erromango, we headed for Efate and Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu.
The contrast was almost ridiculous. After Tanna and especially Erromango, Port Vila felt like New York. Streets, shops, restaurants, cars, public transport, banks, a cinema, a museum, a proper harbour and hotels. After several days in places where a chainsaw could genuinely count as advanced technology, we were suddenly back somewhere you could walk into a supermarket and simply buy things.
Port Vila sits on Efate, one of the most populated islands in Vanuatu, and is the country’s political and economic centre. The city is built around a large natural harbour and is the main arrival point for flights, yachts and cruise ships.
We anchored in the public anchorage and went into town.
One of the first things I decided to visit was the National Museum of Vanuatu.
The entrance fee was almost ten dollars.
Nine-something, once you converted everything properly.
They robbed me.
I went inside expecting something impressive.
Instead, some of the exhibits looked as though nobody had dusted them since the 1980s. In places it was difficult even to read the labels through the dirt. Complete chaos.
Still, at least we had contributed to local culture and the economy.
After Erromango, where geography was taught from a world map painted directly onto the school wall, this was at least a real museum. No point being too demanding.
We walked along the waterfront, did a proper provisioning run and enjoyed having everything close by again.
One day, after a short walk, I sat down on a bench to rest. A local man came over and started talking to me.
The usual questions followed.
Where are you from?
What are you doing here?
How do you like Vanuatu?
“Serbia,” I said.
Blank look.
Nothing.
Never heard of it.
I tried Yugoslavia.
Suddenly his face lit up.
“Ahhh! Yes, yes! Yugoslavia!”
Progress.
At some point we got onto geography and I mentioned that Serbia borders Bulgaria.
That immediately excited him.
“Bulgaria! I know someone from Bulgaria! Do you know someone from Bulgaria?”
I laughed.
“Well… Bulgaria has several million people. We don’t all know each other.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that.”
And we carried on as if the matter had been settled.
He asked how I liked his country.
I told him it was beautiful, but expensive.
He looked genuinely confused.
“What do you mean, expensive?”
“Most things cost more than in Europe.”
He found that difficult to believe.
For him, of course, the prices were simply the prices. If you have lived there all your life, there is nothing strange about them.
The next day we had a more practical problem to solve.
Gas.
One bottle was completely empty and the other was almost finished.
We found a place that filled bottles and brought ours in.
That was when the entertainment started.
Their connector did not match our bottle.
But they refused to give up.
First attempt.
Hissssss.
Gas everywhere.
Second attempt.
Even more gas outside than inside.
Third attempt.
By that point I was fairly certain they had released more gas into the atmosphere than they had managed to put into our bottle.
Eventually they surrendered.
“Sorry, we can’t.”
And they apologised as if it were somehow their fault that we had arrived with a completely different fitting.
They did not even want to charge us.
We left them some money for coffee because they really had tried.
Around Port Vila there was also a campaign encouraging people to cook with gas instead of over open fires, mainly because of smoke and health issues.
That surprised me.
We came from a world where people argued about induction versus ceramic hobs, while here part of the population was still being encouraged not to cook over a fire outside the house.
Vanuatu also had something else I really liked.
The language.
Alongside English and French, people speak Bislama, an English-based creole with Melanesian influences.
What made it entertaining for us was that much of it looked almost phonetic.
On a box of bottled water, for example:
NAMBA WAN WOTA
Number one water.
And underneath:
GUD WOTA GUD LAEF
Good water, good life.
Once you understood the principle, you could start reading signs aloud and quite often work out what they meant immediately.
In a supermarket we also found one more important piece of local culture.
Superman energy drink.
A huge Superman logo across the can.
At that point the Superman cap worn by the chief on Erromango suddenly made a little more sense.
Apparently Superman could reach places where roads, internet and running water still had problems.
Globalisation has interesting priorities.
In the arm of the bay where we were anchored, there was also an old abandoned ship, something like a small cruise vessel, sitting there and adding to the strange scenery.
Port Vila itself was clearly a popular cruise-ship destination.
We saw that one morning when a ship arrived.
Within a few hours the whole city changed.
The streets, shops and market were suddenly full of passengers. Souvenir shops that had been almost empty the day before were packed.
For a few hours, Port Vila stopped being a small Pacific capital and became an extension of the cruise ship.
By evening, the ship left.
The city breathed again.
A few days in Port Vila were enough for us. We had restocked, walked around, sorted out what we could, and it was time to continue north.
Our next stop was Epi.