Trip to Tanna Part 1

Two weeks ago (time has really flown by) I was fortunate enough to travel down to Tanna Island, one of the southernmost islands of the Vanuatu archipelago, to review plans for a program that is scheduled for delivery on the island in early 2011. Tanna along with Santo are the two most visited islands in Vanuatu after the Efate, the island with the capital Port Vila. Transport to Tanna at the moment is via a plane (17 seats and two propellers, one on each wing) and takes about an hour or boat (actually it's a barge) and I have no idea how that long that takes but the chap who captains it said he can't take passengers anyway due to the occupational health and safety risks. I wasn't sure if this was referring to the seaworthiness of the vessel itself or the lack of life saving aids on board.

Anyway I digress, as you can see below I am standing in front of the rear door - trusty Venetian Panama in hand and ready to embark on the trip to Tanna. I forgot to add that the check-in experience includes being weighed after you check in your luggage. Fortunately, there were no, how shall I put this, larger size passengers travelling down to Tanna that day.



Port Vila from seat 12A. You can't see my place but just imagine it is off to the right of the picture.



After years of flying and one particularly close scrape a couple of years ago (some of you will know what I referring to), I am a very calm and controlled passenger and I have learnt simply to accept whatever comes when flying, especially when you are in the air, as there is nothing you can do about it and it's probably better to leave it in the hands of the crew...but imagine my consternation when I looked down minutes after take off in the 17 seat, two propeller Air Vanuatu plane.

What did I see? No, it wasn't rubbish left on the floor from the previous flight or the remains of a previous passenger's lunch. See below - it was the arm of the aisle seat in front of me lying on the floor at my feet. Given no hostess was in sight, in fact there was no hostess, I thought it churlish to bother the pilots who I could through the open cockpit up front and chose to ignore the offending item. Fortunately, it was a smooth flight so there was no chance the object could fly through the cabin taking out the passengers.

Seat arm of 11A resting on the floor in front of 12A

There is less than 200 metres of sealed road on Tanna Island and the picture below was taken from inside the 4WD we were travelling in after being picked up at the Whitegrass International Airport at Lenakel (I am not sure what the international flights are in and out of Tanna but perhaps they are private charter flights from the US) by the tour guide (Sam) from Tanna Lodge. We drove straight away to Mount Yasur (more about the volcano later) along the roughest roads I have ever experienced. In fact I thought driving across the island that this trip was the most remote location I had visited, even more remote than places I visited in Australia and certainly the least developed, not that I minded that at all. In fact, the drive was fascinating, there were sections I thought we would not pass because of the state of the road).

We passed this tree (Banyan?) on the way to Mt Yasur - that's our truck underneath it and the people in the tray we picked up in Lenekal and delivered to their village at the base of the volcano. These trees are true wonders of nature, I have seen some that you can walk right through at the base, with all the twisted roots and gnarled branches. Next to the tree was a small village market. Well a trestle table really with a few locally-grown foods and produce for sale. In front of the table on the ground were these bundles of roots (see below) that one of the villagers told was kava root ready for processing.



I have been reliably informed the kava in Vanuatu is much stronger than the kava in Fiji and the kava in Tanna is the stongest in Vanuatu. That must have something to do with the unique method of preparation of kava in this part of the world - the root is chewed by uncircumsised boys and then the partly masticated root is blended with water and strained before drinking. Now I know one needs to be culturally sensitive but if aTannese offered me kava I would seriously have to think what was more important - avoiding an infection or committing a tabu.

Here we are (see below) half way between Lenakel and Mt Yasur. We had just driven down, or to be more accurate Sam the driver had just driven down, a stretch of almost unpassable road and the only way we made it was to lighten the truck by getting out of the truck and walking down the hill. I took this picture at the bottom of hill just as we were about to get back in the truck and continue our trek towards the volcano. We had four generations of the one family in the back and you can see great-grandmother (frizy hair at the back), grandmother (blue Island dress in the front), mother (yellow and red sarong standing on the tray) and sundry children.