The shift from spending a few weeks traveling in Vanuatu to spending a few weeks traveling in Bali made for a curious transition. Not just experientially, but also visually, in terms of choosing what to post on places like Instagram. In Vanuatu, our travel was difficult, frequently uncomfortable, rarely tourist-friendly, and mostly unique to itself.…
If there’s one twist to our taking a 16-hour industrial ferry from Port Vila to the South Pacific island of Malekula when Air Vanuatu went out of business, it’s that — if we wanted to leave the country as scheduled — we had to find a way to get back to Port Vila. For us,…
From the moment I left home for the South Pacific, my intention was to give my gray One4Us cap away to a local person who I felt embodied the inclusive vision of the brand. My interest in One4Us flows out of my four-decade friendship with its CEO and founder, Tony Johnson. The stated ideals of…
Vanuatu’s national dish, laplap (a kind of stone-cooked yam-paste pudding) is so unphotogenic that I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to eating it on my trip to the South Pacific. It probably didn’t help that travel writer J. Maarten Troost, at one point in his humorous 2007 Vanuatu memoir Getting Stoned with Savages, declared: “I hate…
Read any number of travel memoirs about Vanuatu, and you will find repeated use of such hard-K words as kava, kastom, cargo cults, and cannibalism (as well as such non hard-K words as volcanoes and land-diving). Oddly, these same travel memoirs only mention Christianity in passing — or, when they do mention it, they take…
Reaching the village of Tenmaru in the Melanesian South Pacific was quite the task. First, it took Kiki and me nearly 20 hours of trans-Pacific flights to reach Vanuatu by way of Fiji. Then, because Air Vanuatu had just gone out of business, it took us 16 hours on an industrial ferry to reach the…
The video below doesn’t contain a narrative arc — it’s just a series of slice-of-life moments from a half-day cage-truck trip around the northern rim of Malekula Island, en route to the isolated Big Nambas village of Tenmaru. Rough as dirt track looks, it was the only through-road on that part of the island. Buying…
This photo of “kastom” dancers was taken our second full day of traveling through Malekula Island (and its surrounding islets) in the Vanuatu archipelago. Kastom is a pidgin word (a play on the English word “custom”) that refers to traditional art, ceremonies, religion, and magic in Melanesia. This troupe of men and boys from the…
I’d heard of the ritual of drinking kava before I traveled to Vanuatu, but I didn’t realize how pervasive the practice was (particularly among men) until I traveled to the outer reaches of the archipelago. Made from the emulsified bush-roots of Piper methysticum (roughly, “intoxicating pepper”) and mixed with water before being filtered with a…
Although the word “locavore” has something of an upscale-foodie connotation in the US, to “eat foods grown locally whenever possible” (as Merriam-Webster defines it) is pretty much the only option for people who live in the outer islands of Vanuatu. After the 16-hour ferry ride from Efate to Malekula, Kiki and I boarded one more…
Our arrival in the South Pacific island-nation of Vanuatu just so happened to coincide with Air Vanuatu, the nation’s flagship airline, going out of business. This meant that we had no easy way to travel domestically from island to island, apart from taking industrial ferries that require passengers share the boat with cargo. Years ago,…
