n@alia....: South Pacific: Vanuatu

Vanuatu was the first island that I visited on this crazy Australian/South Pacific adventure. If it sounds familiar to you it's probably because it was the first island to host the Survivor series. It's a relatively small nation north east of Australia with a population of just over 280 000.

Vila, Vanuatu

The first port of call I managed to see was the island of Vila. It took me a while to wrap my mind around everything, it was just so different then the Caribbean and Latin America I was used to. I spent the last ten years speaking Spanish and using American dollars as my primary currency. Now I found myself struggling in French, using Aussie dollars and the local currency Vatu and neither one of those was making any sense to me. The culture was different, the language, history, the food, the music, landscapes and people. I was cautioned about former cannibalism practices and the prevalence of snakes in Oceania, both sent shivers down my spine but the latter evokes a deep fear and phobia that I have had all my life. As someone who is rather sensitive to energy and vibrations of the land, I can't say that being there was always comfortable for me. There were times that the energy was too much.

Nevertheless my first visit there I just took a stroll through town and went to the colourful market. I managed to buy some flowers that I killed almost immediately but I did enjoy them for the couple of days I managed to keep them alive.

I went back another time and visited The Secret Garden , that was a rather interesting experience. Its a good half an hour drive from the port. My friend and I caught a beat up unofficial van taxi to the area. In the middle of nowhere and far from civilization, the cultural center provides some insight to the rather dark past of the nation. Deep in the overgrown jungle is the welcome center followed by a restaurant, a tribal show, traditional huts and examples of the vegetation and animals of the island. One of the colourfully clad performers took us around and showed us down the narrow, overgrown and winding paths. We got a quick glimpse of everything and decided to come explore further later.

Our guide

He took us back for the performance which was educational but unnerving at the same time. The performers were dressed in traditional garb and for some of them that included a penis sheath. If you're not sure what that is, I'll explain. It's basically a covering for the penis which is then tucked into a makeshift belt. Everything else and I mean EVERYTHING else is kind of left to it's own and not covered in any way. They explained cannibalism and it's history. Cannibalism was used as a form of warfare between the tribes. So your tribe does something nasty to us, we will kidnap one of yours and eat them later. Only men were eaten and not women and apparently white people are too salty. Of course being the geek that I am I had to spend some time researching this phenomenon. The last recorded cannibal killing in Vanuatu was in 1969 but as I did more research it looks like there

Do you see the penis sheath on the right?

were some not so broadly broadcasted incidents of people breaking into graveyards and eating bone narrow in the early 80s. Knowing all this made my visit to the Secret Garden a bit eerie. Knowing what took place on the very land that I was stepping on made me nervous and any time a blade of grass brushed me on my leg, I jumped. It didn't come as a surprise then when one of the performers pretended to throw a spear at my head, I screamed like a little girl and jumped three feet in the air. Pam and I watched the show and escaped as soon as we could before we were volunteered to go in the cooking pot for the show. We spent some time walking around and learning more about the nation. The more we learned, the darker I felt. There were lots of articles on cannibalism. Many of the missionaries that first came over were captured and eaten.

When a husband died then his wife would be buried alive with him. This was to encourage the women to take good care of their husbands. In certain parts of the nation it was bad to give birth to baby girls, in other parts it was the opposite. Either way when a child of undesirable gender was born, the baby was buried alive. There were photos of these graves and you could tell that the bodies were buried in distress. The energy of these photos was chilling. We spent about an hour reading and learning and it got to be a bit too much and we left. We didn't return to the port after this experience. I get chills down my spine even now when I recall the experience to write about it.

We also visited Santo and Mystery Island in Vanuatu. Santo is the largest island of Vanuatu. We had a one time visit there and decided to go for a stroll. The port smelled like blue cheese but it turns out that there was a warehouse full of coconut shells that provided us with the fragrance. As we made our way outside of the port, we were greeted by Vanuatu tribes men with spears. Scarred by our previous experience I wasn't sure if I was going to be ushered to the road or impaled and eaten for dinner later. We went to a crafts market and a food market. The crafts market sold a lot of home made goods and vintage coca cola bottles. The bottles puzzled me and eventually I managed to find out from one of the locals that there were the coke bottles left behind by the American soldiers after World War II. Now when people go to dig to build homes they come across these deserted bottles and resell them to Americans as souvenirs. The market also featured some tribes women in traditional

garb (sans any tops for the more authentic look) and some men walking around with snakes around their necks. This of course didn't help my phobia and I was on edge for the rest of my time there. We ended up having some juice and coffee at the local coffee shop. Trying to convert the bill from Vatu to Aussie and American dollars took all four of us HR bunnies to sort out.

Mystery Island is a small island that is completely uninhabited. Locals come to the island to run the food, drink and massage stands and to provide entertainment. I thought there would be some interesting name behind the island but it turns out some Queen was going by the island in a boat and simply said 'That island looks like a mystery' and the name stuck. It's a crew favorite for snorkeling and kicking back and relaxing. We would bring our snorkel gear, snacks, books and blankets and just chll out and enjoy life and express gratitude for this island's beauty. You be the judge of this island's beauty with these gorgeous photos.