We arrived near Luganville.
Espiritu Santo is the largest island in Vanuatu, and Luganville is the country’s second-largest town. Today Santo is known for beaches, blue holes, jungle and especially diving, but a huge part of its story is tied to the Second World War.
During the war, the Americans turned the island into a major military base.
Airfields.
Hospitals.
Warehouses.
Roads.
Harbours.
Tens of thousands of troops passed through Santo during Pacific operations.
And when the war ended, a new problem appeared.
What do you do with all the equipment?
Vehicles, construction machinery, trucks, cranes, spare parts, military material, stockpiles — enormous quantities of equipment that no longer made sense to ship halfway around the world.
The Americans tried to sell much of it to the French colonial authorities.
According to the story most often told locally, the equipment was offered for a fraction of its original value.
The French refused, assuming the Americans would leave it behind anyway.
The Americans had another idea.
They built a ramp down toward the sea.
And started pushing everything over the edge.
Trucks.
Bulldozers.
Forklifts.
Machine parts.
Metal structures.
Huge quantities of military equipment ended up underwater.
The place became known as Million Dollar Point.
Today, much of that material is still visible in shallow water and below the surface, making it one of the strangest diving and snorkelling sites in the region.
Naturally, we wanted to dive there.
How do you arrive at a place where an army dumped millions of dollars’ worth of equipment into the sea and not go down to have a look?
The weather had other ideas.
The day was bad.
Rain.
Low cloud.
Nothing suggested conditions would improve quickly.
We still had to finish our final provisioning and sort out the paperwork for leaving the country, and there was more sailing ahead of us.
We were not interested in sitting there for several extra days just to wait for one dive.
Million Dollar Point would have to wait for another time.
Even without diving, traces of the war were visible around Luganville.
There was even a project for the South Pacific WWII Museum, dedicated to the enormous role Santo played during the war.
The contrast was strange.
Only a few days earlier, we had been sitting on Erromango with people who called the village together by blowing into a shell, shared a single freezer, and collectively debated what to do with a few thousand dollars.
Now we were standing on an island where, only a few generations earlier, enormous military bases had operated and where the Americans had ultimately thrown more equipment into the sea than some neighbouring islands could probably buy in several lifetimes.
That was Vanuatu.
Within only a few days of sailing, you could move through completely different worlds.
An active volcano throwing glowing rock into the air.
A village where a canoe was built with a chainsaw.
A capital city that could be flooded by cruise-ship passengers within hours.
An airport that looked like a meadow.
Water so clear you did not want to leave it.
And finally, an island where an entire fragment of the Second World War still lay on the seabed.
We finished the paperwork, did the last supply run and checked the weather.
It did not look especially promising.
But we had already spent enough time waiting.
It was time to move on.
We raised the anchor and left Vanuatu behind.
The next major stop was Papua New Guinea.
And with that, we were slowly entering the final part of our Pacific journey.