thursday august 13^th–31^st 2009 (vanuatu)

 Raise your hands if you have been immunized by a Samoan doctor in Vanuatu. We ran out of time to get our Hep booster shots before we left home and finally got around to this long overdue chore this week. Here they use a syringe fashioned out of a sewing needle and a bic pen filled with a mixture of bat shit and kava. We were a little uneasy about the whole thing but beggars can’t be choosers right? Actually the experience was every bit as modern, sanitary and as a result expensive as it would have been at home. Jaime loves needles (more sarcasm) so I took a picture of the event. She didn’t faint so we considered the procedure a success. Unless you consider the financial perspective in which case it was a dismal failure. We aren’t big fans of insurance of any kind and paying $400 for protection from a “what if” scenario (the only tangible result for our money spent being a little round Band-Aid and a sore arm) left us feeling a bit hollow and wondering if we would have been better off with bat shit and kava.

 I decided to test out my new immunity (we are sort of like Hepatitis-proof super heroes now) by eating a bat without washing my hands. Yes the furry winged animal. You probably can’t get hepatitis from a bat but Flying fox is apparently a local delicacy so I’ll try it anyway. The cute name is just a useless attempt at prettying up something that should remain uneaten. Although I have to admit Flying Fox does sound a tiny little bit better than Enormous Fruit Bat even though the latter would be considered by most to be a much more accurate description.

 The fruit bat that eventually made its way onto my plate was about the size of a small chicken, had been baked and served up with a rich sauce which I later discovered had been prepared from the bats own innards. Giant Bat with an extra side of bat gut sauce please? No wonder there wasn’t a line-up for this place. Apart from being slowed down by a couple involuntary gag reflexes, I managed to get most of it down. A liter of red wine even provided enough courage for me to try a tiny bite of the miniature bat heart and pick its little bat ribs clean. Not a culinary experience I’m likely to repeat, but I’m happy to try anything once.

The nice thing about this part of Vanuatu is that we can pretty much day trip our way up to Santo. Our next island of call was Epi, but on the way we stopped for a lunchtime snorkeling expedition at Cooks Reef. This is a cool reef in the middle of the ocean. Minus a rock or two sticking up out of the water there’s no land anywhere, but you can get your boat inside the protection of a barrier reef and anchor in 20 feet. The coral was incredible and we saw a few species of fish and critters previously unknown to us. Ni-Van lobsters continually prove to be worthy adversaries though; sadly none were harmed during our stop.

 We may have stopped at a couple of places along the western coast of Epi, but there are three things that stand out from that island and they all took place in Lamen Bay. Our Dugong buddy, a brilliant evening spent obliterating ourselves on kava, and one of the top 5 vistas of our whole trip. The village in Laman bay is incredibly picturesque and of course the people were as warm and welcoming as we’ve come to expect in Vanuatu. A Dugong is related to the Manate, it’s kind of a Hippopotamus with no legs and a whale’s tail. Two minutes after we dropped our anchor we spotted him (her?) and over the next few days spent time swimming and diving with the Dugong and it’s posse of Remora sharks, fish and huge sea turtles that congregated around our boat. The Dugong behaved a lot like a cow, far more interested in sucking grass out of the seabed than it was in us so we were able to capture some great video and pictures with our little waterproof Olympus (thanks again for the camera Charles!).

On shore we were befriended by Atise. He toured us around the village introducing us to his family, invited us to dinner and had his daughters chop up loads of kava for us. They take a far more sensible approach to kava preparation and consumption here than they do in Tanna. Once the root had been chopped up into little pieces by his machete-wielding daughters, it was fed through a hand operated meat grinder bolted to a bench into a big bowl. It was a lot easier to prepare mass quantities this way and since there were no tabus associated with women here it became a more inclusive and thereby enjoyable experience. Being much less labor intensive than the “chew and spit” process favored in Tanna, the kava session in Epi wasn’t overly complicated by scarcity and ritual which enabled participants to focus on the more practical aspects of the custom; like getting completely shit-housed. If they could do something about the horrid taste I’m convinced that this product would hold it’s own on the world stage of consumable intoxicants. Until then beer really has nothing to worry about.

We spent another day soaking up our surroundings which included a small hike to the top of a hill. Atise opened a couple of coconuts for us, loaded us up with fruit, showed us a bunch of local plants, trees and shrubs and explained their various medicinal uses; a tree for headaches, a root to suppress your appetite, bark to guarantee you a son, that type of thing. This carried on until late afternoon when we came to a clearing and were rendered speechless. It was the right view at the right time on the right day. We just stood there and gaped while the setting sun changed the view completely every 5 minutes or so. Top 5 for sure, the kind of view that makes you want to spend $1500 on a digital SLR and photography courses because you just can’t describe it adequately. Epi will be tough to beat.

Malekula is home to the Big Namba and Small Namba tribes. The names refer to the size of their Namba. What’s a Namba you ask? It’s a penis sheath. There’s also a group here called the ManBush, but since the Namba material is enough to fill a book I don’t even need to go there. The Small Nambas will be the first to tell you that the size of the sheath has no relation to the size of what’s under the sheath, and that the Big Nambas are obviously compensating. I’m not sure about that, but I guess it takes confidence to call yourself a Small Namba, maybe the Ni-Van equivalent of wearing a pink shirt to the office?

 Big Nambas tie the loose ends of their sheaths to a belt around their waists which has the disturbing effect of leaving their testicles completely open to the elements. If Big Namba wives were well behaved and pleased their husbands, he might bestow upon her the grand privilege of having her two front teeth knocked out with a rock. Questionable dental practices and chasing people around with their nut sacks exposed earned these people a fierce reputation. No outsider dared enter their region and even police forces were routinely attacked and dispersed.

 On the bottom SE corner of Malekula are the little Maskelyne Islands. We spent a couple of nights there and learned about magic and legend from the locals. One guy who called himself Chief Jimmy was kind of over enthusiastic and wanted to show us some sacred area favored by his ancestors for all kinds of big magic and human sacrifice. Apparently known for their sorcery, Chief Jimmy made some interesting claims like being able to fly, take his head off, read my thoughts, make any wish come true, and our favorite; get solid cherries every time he plunked a vatu into a slot machine. He was willing to show us some of these secrets with one small catch – we needed to be naked. Chief Jimmy was an interesting character if, by saying interesting, I mean old perverted scammer. Needless to say we chose not to unlock the secrets of human-powered flight, self mutilation and cheating casinos. Instead we snorkeled around looking for giant clams. Apparently there is a sanctuary for them here. We found what might qualify as a large clam, certainly dwarfing your average supermarket clam but definitely not one of the meter wide clams we’ve heard about. That night we ate some fish and were entertained by a local string band using home made instruments. Kind of the Ni-Van equivalent of a southern redneck Jug Band, only instead of washboard and a banjo they had ukuleles, bongos, and a stand up bass made out of a wooden crate, broomstick handle and a piece of string. Not what we expected to see in an isolated corner of this untamed country. The night wasn’t finished with us yet and got progressively weirder when a chance encounter with a crazy Scottish guy turned out to be the uncle of a guy I used to work with at the Vancouver Airport. He was there teaching locals to make soap out of coconuts and after a little encouragement and a lot of wine, produced a set of bagpipes and started freaking out the Ni-Vans, who I’m pretty sure have never heard the melodic cat-strangling sounds of a set of bag pipes in the hands of a drunken Scotsman. It was just going to be one of those “where are we again?” kind of nights.

Words like “prolific” and “teeming” are used to describe the shark population along the east coast of Malekula. It was something I remembered reading as I rolled off the side of a dinghy on an isolated reef to do a little spear fishing…at dusk. Fortunately John was there too, not only would this reduce my chances of being eaten by a shark by 50%, but I wouldn’t have to worry about the sharks at all as long as I could out swim him. I’m pretty sure that he was thinking the same thing. We were at an unpopulated area called Crab Bay, the fish were “prolific”, the beautiful reef was literally “teeming” with them. There were a couple of sharks too, a white tip and a black tip but nothing to get excited about. This was an overnight stop on our way up to Wala Island off the Notheast tip of Melakula.

 We spent a couple of days anchored beside Wala Island. The white sand and turquoise water would have looked right at home on a postcard from the Bahamas. We had been island hopping for two weeks by this point though and were anxious to get to our next destination; Espiritu Santo. It was only 30 miles so we knocked the passage off in a half day and found a nice little mooring ball beside a resort on Aore Island just across from the mainland. It was a great two weeks and we love the village, jungle and remote anchorage portions of our trip but by the time we arrived we were all ready for menus and beers. We spent the afternoon with Pat, John and Linda on a waterfront patio satiating our cravings.