On Epi, we anchored in Lamen Bay on the western side of the island.
And once again, it felt as though we had closed the door on the city and stepped back a few decades.
Simple houses.
Open fires in front of homes.
People sitting outside.
Children playing.
A few pickup trucks.
And a bay so calm that the boat barely moved.
Epi felt completely different from Efate. Port Vila had banks, shops and cruise ships. Epi was much more rural, with small communities spread along the coast and a green interior with very little development.
Lamen Bay is one of the better-known anchorages on the island, partly because dugongs are often seen in the area.
Along the shore there had been an attempt to build a more serious jetty.
The emphasis is on attempt.
As we understood it, something had gone wrong with the construction and part of it had collapsed.
So now they had neither a proper jetty nor a particularly clear solution for the remains.
How did larger supplies get in?
Probably the same way things often happen in the Pacific when infrastructure fails:
somehow.
We walked through the village, bought some fruit from local people and continued exploring.
At one point we found ourselves crossing a huge grassy field.
There were a few strange markers.
Some poles.
Something about the place did not make sense.
Then we realised:
we were standing in the middle of the airport runway.
We moved aside.
About ten minutes later we heard an engine.
A small propeller plane came in and landed directly on the grass.
It stopped.
Maybe six people got out.
A few others got in.
The plane turned around and left.
That was the airport.
No control tower.
No terminal.
No duty-free shop.
No escalators.
Just a runway that looked like a field and a small hut off to one side.
It worked.
What more did it need?
What I remember most clearly from Epi, though, was the sea.
Lamen Bay was almost completely calm while we were there, and the water was exceptionally clear.
We used the opportunity to do a few dives.
Visibility of ten or fifteen metres is nothing unusual in good tropical conditions and can easily be much better, but the exact number was not what stayed with me.
What I remember is the feeling that this was some of the clearest water I had ever dived in.
You went underwater and there was none of that milky haze in the distance.
Everything looked clean.
The bottom.
The fish.
Shapes far ahead.
Sunlight passed through the water almost like glass.
After everything we had been through, a few days in that kind of sea were exactly what we needed.
We also met an Australian man there.
He had been dealing with a persistent skin condition.
According to him, he had tried doctors, creams and treatments back in Australia without much success.
Eventually he packed his things and came to Epi.
He arranged to stay with a local family and paid around two hundred Australian dollars to live in a simple hut for a period of time. Food was included, and the family prepared meals for him every day.
He said his skin problems had almost completely disappeared.
Whether it was the food, the climate, the sea, the lack of stress, or all of it together, I had no idea.
But he was happy.
And he had absolutely no intention of going back.
Sometimes it is hard to tell whether someone has travelled somewhere to recover from an illness, or whether they have simply found a good excuse to escape from the city.
After a few quiet days in Lamen Bay, we raised the anchor and continued north toward our final stop in Vanuatu.
Espiritu Santo.