Port Vila

So I’ve been a bit quite after my last blog post, mostly cos we have been busy doing stuff here in Port Vila. We have had a few drives on the insane road in here, and are more used to it now.
On the day after we arrived, we did nothing… we wandered down the road to the next door accommodation and had dinner there, since our place has no restaurant (un be knownst to me when we booked…. Oh well)  When we walked back, in the dark, we saw heaps of cool creatures.  (land crab, coconut crab, massive snail and dragon fly)

creatures

The next day we headed into town in the mad bus.  It has a couple of massive cracks in the windscreen, no back windscreen and one of the side windows is tape.  Surprisingly, it is the worst bus we have seen.  Most of them are actually in quite good nick and the owners seem to take a fair bit of pride in them.  There is only one cache in Port Vila and we picked that up today.  Eventually, about 30 minutes late, the bus turned up, and it had magically morphed into another bus.  No, it was getting repaired and the man had sorted us out a lift.  We had dinner down the road again, as there really aren’t a heap of options.  At dinner we discovered that a set of fellow guests is a family from Thornbury.  They live about a km from us, they know the nephews and go to the same school.  Bloody small world.

The road

Thursday, we had booked in a round island tour, however we were never picked up, largely because of the shitty road is my suspicion, so the host here offered to take up on one instead.  This turned out to be pretty good as it was just the two of us.  We saw some cool things, including a heap of the north of the island where the really bad cyclone damage happened.  There were some cool swimming spots, but it was a pretty shitty day and way too cold for me to swim.  On the way home I got dropped off at the restaurant down the road, to save me the walk and Neil came back with the torch.  Dinner was a bit shit, cold!!! The other nights had been great so that as disappointing.

heading north

over the top and south

Yesterday, the plan was to do nothing, then do a tour of Lelepa Island the next day, but these had to be swapped when we found we couldn’t go on Saturday.  So instead we headed into town to stock up on a few supplies, mostly cash.  The trip home was a totally mess with organising to meet the bus.  After sitting around for an hour, we found a normal bus and took that out to Tanna Coffee, which is nearish our place, but on the right side of the mud.  We had a look around there, then started the walk back to our accommodation.  We were picked up by a nice lady who lives down the road and she dropped us off, which was nice as the walk would have killed me.  She didn’t have a lot of nice stuff to say about the owner of the place we are staying and how he runs the place.

Later that night we took the bus of doom (mentioned above) to local bar, that I can only assume is fairly ‘bali-like’  We thought it was pretty awful.  We were meant to have been booked for, but that didn’t work out.  The food was ok, they had nice cocktails (which I forgot to photograph)  However they have a local group of fire twirling dude come in and put on a show.  We were expecting the worst, but it turned out to be pretty dam impressive and we got some excellent photos.  Back on the bus of doom, we got eventually, the road in the dark was even more fun, really.

fire show!!!

Today, we did nothing!!  It’s after 6 and my step count is just over 3500 and might hit 4k, but I doubt it.  The only thing I did today was ring the Lelepa Island tour dudes myself, as I am not missing out on that, we have made our own arrangements for getting picked up.  They involve me walking a little further, but I am not going to be mucked around and miss-out, particularly as we haven’t had a lot of luck with booking though our accommodation.

Tomorrow is our last full day here and we are having an all day tour of Lelepa Island, it should be pretty good, I just hope it’s warm enough to have a swim.  It has been pretty overcast today, with one a few small sunny breaks.  The weather forecasts here are a bit shit, so it’s sort of wake up and see how it is.

Monday, we are up bright and early, into the bus of doom and off to the airport for out flight to Tanna.  I had another look at the cache page today for the volcano cache (http://coord.info/GC1HW2K) and looking at all the photos I am soooooooo excited about that!!!