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, this meant taking the same 16-hour industrial ferry back to Vanuatu’s capital from Malekula.
To prepare for the return trip, Kiki and I learned from the hardship of our incoming journey and visited Malekula’s Lakatoro market to invest in a blanket, a sleeping mat, and snacks (note Kiki wearing her new red “island dress” — a gift from our hosts).
One idiosyncrasy of these Vanuatu ferries is that cargo gets boarding priority over passengers, which is why (in the video below) you see Kiki lingering with a crowd of ni-Vanuatu as a forklift laden with Malekulan kava root (prized by the nakamals of Port Vila for its potency) rumbles onto the ferry.
Because it was raining that night, we didn’t claim a scenic spot over the ferry’s bow, as we did on the inward journey. Instead, we camped under a dining shelter on the open-air top level, and fell asleep on the deck alongside a group of fellow passengers.
Somewhere in the night, as we slept on the deck of that crowded Vanuatu ferry, Kiki turned 45 years old.
I suspect this wasn’t the kind of birthday she dreamt about as a kid — but sometimes being married to a travel writer doesn’t necessarily involve beach walks and bottles of bubbly. (I swear I made it up to her later.)
Note: “Dispatches” are short vignettes, profiles, and mini-essays written and posted from the road, often in tandem with my Instagram account. I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page.
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