South Pacific Adventure Part II (Blu Ray version)

We'll post another couple of Vanuatu blogs to give you a bit more of an idea of the fun things we got up to, and how amazing Vanuatu is.

You remember on the previous post how we mentioned that Vanuatu's history as a massive base for US troops during WWII? Of course you do - you were paying attention.

Anyway - a legacy of this is that there are absolutely LOADS of things that that the americans left behind when they left (intentional and unintentional). These range from the world's best dive site (USS President Coolridge) to crash-landed Corsair planes, to dumps full of 1940's bottles of Coke and hand grenades. It's really fascinating. Many of the villages have collected a lot of the items and have created their own 'museums' of the artifacts they've found. They're really proud of them (understandably so) and WWII means a lot to them as it really changed their lives, and allowed them to meet outsiders for the first time in lots of cases.

Anyway - we decided that it would be fun to visit one of these sites to look at a museum and more excitingly snorkel at a crash site of a WWII era corsair plane which crash landed in a lagoon. The guidebook said that a fella named Erik would row you out there. Easy. Or so we thought....

This was Erik's museum at the end of a track which made us glad we'd hired a 4WD Jeep.

But the fun was only just beginning......out we went with Erik on his boat. First of all he paddled us out through the amazing mangrove

Anna was getting a bit worried by this stage as we'd be going for a while and it wasn't apparent how we'd get back in the boat...

And then out into the lagoon. There was a bit of a wind getting up, and Ben being not the thinnest of men, the paddling was a bit of a struggle for Erik as we were getting further out to sea

At last we stopped in the middle of the lagoon and right below us in about 2 meters of water was an amazing Corsair plane which had crashed on it's approach to the local air strip. It was incredible to snorkel all alone, up close to such an amazing wreck. We'd bought a waterproof case for our camera so used it to take this video...

After a while we had to head back - Ben elegantly doing a passable impression of a beached whale trying to get back in the small boat. Thankfully the wind was with us on the way back so Erik could avoid a heart attack. All in all - what an afternoon!

A South Pacific Adventure - part one

5 months and one day after getting married we finally made it to our honeymoon. We were a little bit busy in between on a few little things - painting the fence...that kind of thing.

Anyway - we made it to our honeymoon at last! And wowzers - it was worth the wait. We ended up choosing to go to the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides). I'm very tempted to launch into a very lengthy, but informative history of Vanuatu right here on this blog. However, I feel this may alienate our limited but loyal readership so don't want to take that risk. Check out wikipedia instead - but I'll summarise things in two sentences.

Officially the 'happiest place in the world', this melanesian island nation, with volcanoes, waterfalls, pristine white beaches and WWII wrecks abound. Pigs are very important and Kava even more so (the local root-based intoxicant) - oh, and they think the Duke of Edinburgh is the living manifestation of their god on one of the islands.

How could you not want to go there?

We'll split the 'honeymoon blog' into a few separate areas, just to spread the enjoyment for you all that little bit further. And there's quite a lot to cram in.

We'll start with where we stayed - Tamanu. Six lovely little luxury cottages right on a white beach, about 30mins outside of Port Vila (pronounced Villa), the capital city of Vanuatu (population 30,000) on its main island. This was good as it felt we were properly out of the way, but near enough to the 'action' if required. What a lovely spot it was too with the sound of the waves crashing onto the reef to lull you to sleep. Check out these pics:

Our little cottage with the ocean right outside

The view of the Pacific Ocean from our verandah 

And look at these sunsets taken from the beach in front of our cottage, they were pretty breathtaking...

Our little cottage was made out of coral washed up on the beach.

And had a half outside bathroom!

Fortunately the wall was just high enough to make it not too weird.