Escape Logistics

* I will learn Bislama

Feb 3rd, 2020 – Luganville

So today, the kids in Vanuatu went back to school after a long summer holiday. It was good timing, as I too went back to school – my Bislama lessons started today.

Before I enthuse about the language, allow me to appreciate what a privilege it is to be in a position to learn it – lessons are laid on by the VSA, which is a smart move on their part. And what a setting I’m being taught in! There’s a plush resort across the road from us, and the plan was to meet in their beachfront café. Nobody has actually asked the resort if it would be ok for us to monopolise a table for the week, so I better thank them by plugging their name in this blog – they’re called the Beachfront, and so far they are the nicest resort I’ve seen on Santo. Words can’t do the beauty of this place justice, so fortunately I had my phone with me to snap some photos:

The only shame is it was brutally hot today. Temperatures were I think up to about 33 degrees, but with the humidity the apparent temperature was 41 degrees or so. Even our beachfront classroom with its sea breeze felt too hot to think straight.

As to the Bislama language, it must be one of the easiest languages to learn. The vocab is pretty much just English, but spelled as if you were phonetically trying to write with a Jamaican accent (go figure – maybe it’s just the island way). E.g. flower = flaoa, culture = kalja, coconut = kokonat, butter = bata, man = fala. They do away with any of the silent letters in English, and any consonant pairs (th, ch, sh) are simplified to a single letter. Then verb conjugation is mostly contextual, so doesn’t really change from the infinitive (mi go, yu go, hem go), and there are no verb tenses with future being indicated with “Bae” (from the English “by and by”) at the start of the sentence and “Bifo” for the past. Possession is indicated by the seemingly interchangeable words “blong/long/blo/lo”, which is also pretty much the universal preposition replacing “from” and “to”. All this simplification does seem to mean that things can get pretty vague, though, with a lot being left to context rather than precise details. This sort of fits in with the Ni-Vanuatu way of life, where precise details don’t really matter. All in all, by the end of my first day, I was speaking some slow and basic conversational Bislama, albeit with plenty of errors. Compared to when I learnt French and it took me about six months full immersion to get to the same point, it feels like an absolute win.

After my lessons, I caught the bus into town to buy a snorkel (Bislama: “windpaep”) and mask (“diving glas”) and a blender (“blenda”), as I want to make smoothies from the delicious market fruit when I get to Malekula.

Found a cheap Chinese mask and snorkel, and a cheap Chinese blender in town. Figured I should go all in at this point, so went to a Chinese restaurant for supper, but not before getting a good picture of the sunset from the small park in the centre of Luganville:

More Bislama lessons scheduled for the rest of the week, but I’ll spare you the details unless something particularly amusing crops up. Which reminds me, to finish on a good bit of trivia, the word “Bislama” comes from the French “bêche-de-mer”, meaning “sea-cucumber”. Love it.

Feb 2nd, 2020 – Luganville

Today started off very well indeed with a mighty fine coffee from one of the nearby resorts.

And shortly afterwards, Trevor came to pick me up in the VSA truck. I still love this truck, and so while Trevor was taking some cash out of an ATM, I snapped a photo:

The plan was to pick up Michelle, Wendy, and Wendy’s daughter and proceed for a drive across the island to Port-Olry, 60km away, where apparently a postcard-perfect tropical beach awaits visitors.

The drive was very pretty indeed, passing through jungle, coconut plantations, noni plantations and grassland pastures with grazing cattle. I tired taking some photos from the moving car, but with the occasional rain shower the windows were streaky and none of my photos looked very good. Towards the end of the journey, the Blue Beast’s air-con conked out, but as we were nearly at our destination, we didn’t worry about it too much.

On arrival into Port-Olry, we drove past the lunch spot so as to get to the end of the village and see the coast. Port-Olry is a french catholic settlement, and right at the end of the village is a peninsula with a school on it with an incredible playground giving right onto the beach. Cattle were grazing in the playground, keeping the grass down ahead of the new term which begins next week (I’m not sure whether they leave the cows there when term starts).

And then, disaster struck. We all piled back in to the Blue Beast, Trevor turned the ignition and… nothing. Not even the beginnings of an engine turning over. It just wasn’t starting at all.

After some hum-ing and ho-ing, we walked to a nearby house to ask if they had any jump leads. They didn’t, but they had a truck with a pretty thin rope, and offered to tow us back to the place we had earmarked for lunch, where they thought the owner might have some jump leads.

Trevor, with his background in mountaineering, volunteered to tie the knots, and the rest of us looked on with suitable concern.

Given the thickness of the rope, we figured we may as well walk to the lunch place along the beach rather than weigh the soon-to-be-towed truck down. Turns out that wasn’t a bad decision, as one strand of the rope snapped during the tow. It took us exactly the same amount of time to walk as it took them to tow the truck, and we saw that as Trevor arrived into the restaurant car park, he got a bit of momentum on a small ridge, turned the key and hey presto the Blue Beast started! Trevor parked it at the top of a small hill, and with some trepidation turned off the ignition so that we could have lunch.

The lunch place was idyllic. Turquoise blue waters contrasted with fine white sand, with a backdrop of green jungle rising from islands all about. The lunch was served in palm shacks a few metres from the water’s edge. After drinking from a fresh coconut, the top chopped off and a straw inserted, I put on my bathers and jumped in. The water temperature was bath-like. School in NZ and Australia went back last week, so although typically quite touristed, we were pretty much the only people there today.

After lunch, we were all excited to see whether the Blue Beast would start again. Trevor tried rolling her down the small hill he pad parked on, and starting her then. She burst into life, and after some celebrations all round, we gathered our belongings and started loading her up. As we were doing so, however, she coughed, spluttered, and died. We then found someone who did indeed have jump leads. No joy. We had gathered a crowd of locals all willing to help by this point, so we asked them to help us push her this way and that, to the top of the hill and down again, but nothing worked. At this point, we gave up and decided to call our emergency support back in Luganville, a.k.a. Brigitte. Brigitte was unfazed, and said she would find someone with a truck to come and give us a tow. It meant we had a couple more hours to wait, but I’ve known worse places to be stranded.

When Brigitte arrived with her friend and her friend’s truck (and Max, a very cute puppy), it was decided that to tow us all the way back to Luganville would be a massive hassle, and instead we should all hop into the friend’s truck, leaving the car at the restaurant to be serviced at some point this week by a mechanic. This was a great plan, as it meant a couple of us had to ride in the back of the truck, which in this heat is infinitely preferable to sitting in the cabin even if it is frowned upon by the VSA safety policy. It had the added bonus of getting to ride with Max at our feet.

I start my Bislama lessons tomorrow, but at least I now know the Bislama word for breakdown: “Bugarup”!

Feb 1st, 2020 – Luganville

Today was an orientation day to help us new arrivals get our bearings on the island of Santo. Trevor, Michelle (Trevor’s wife) and Brigitte came to pick up Wayne (other Volunteer) and I in the bright blue VSA pickup truck. Trevor’s saying that as VSA Programme Manager, he wants to sell the truck and get something else, but I have yet to hear him give a good explanation as to why. The truck, a Toyota Hilux, is great – big and beasty, with enough ground clearance to be able to negotiate Santo’s dirt roads. I’m championing it, and have a week or so to try to change Trevor’s mind.

Brigitte took us round the different kinds of shops on Santo to give us a feel for the place – a French bakery, a cheap import food mart, a couple of local supermarkets and the fresh produce market.

I was pretty disappointed to see that the cheap import market was selling coconut cream made in Thailand and coconut oil made in Fiji. At the LCM, Santo’s most upmarket store, they had a section specifically for “made in Vanuatu” products, but it was prohibitively expensive. Seems such a shame that it is cheaper for them to import products. At least the fresh produce market was all local. The fresh market didn’t have nearly as much variety of produce as the one we had seen in Port-Vila, and I’m told the one in Lakatoro, where I’m going next week, is much better too. Having seen the beautiful avocados in Port-Vila, I was disappointed not to see any for sale here – I really hope there are avos in Lakatoro when I get there, as I was planning to eat them in abundance.

Then we went and visited the VSA HQ in Santo. It’s in a nice compound, along with a few provincial government buildings and the red cross HQ, but the office is in a pretty tiny room – it has served Brigitte well, but now Trevor’s arrived they’re looking for more space.

Then, at the end of the day, we met at a Thai restaurant with other volunteers on Santo: Tom, who’s doing work for the Vanuatu department of tourism, and Wendy, who I think was working on something education-related. They’d both been here a while, and had mastered speaking Bislama. I start my Bislama lessons on Monday – really looking forward to it!

Wendy has an adopted daughter here who was also at dinner. She was really polite and well-behaved, and made me miss my darling sausage back home, so after dinner I snuck outside and took advantage of the good phone reception in the centre of town to videocall home, only to find H had gone and made himself popcorn for breakfast while mummy was in the shower!

Jan 31st, 2020 – Luganville

Today was a hot and busy day. In the morning, I sat down with Trevor and Brigitte (the in-country programme managers) by the motel pool for further briefing instructions in addition to all the briefings I’d listened to in Wellington. There’s only so many times I can be told not to offend locals.

There was, however, a good bit of briefing focused on natural disaster and emergency planning. Vanuatu is at high risk for all of the following: Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, landslides and cyclones. Given we’re right in the middle of cyclone season, odds are I’ll likely experience one during my assignment. The advice and procedures to follow in case of natural disaster are largely common sense, but gratefully received as I had experienced an earthquake for the first time last week in Wellington (5.4 magnitude), which had made me feel very much like a whingeing Pom.

So determined to shake my whingeing Pom label, we taxied across town to the NZ high commission, for a meeting with the high commissioner and his deputy.

I was tempted to wear my linen suit, but having tried on the jacket it was just too hot – my smartest shirt would have to do. The high commissioner and his deputy gave me more of a grilling than I was expecting. I had understood it was just going to be a casual chat, welcoming me to the country, smiles all round, jolly good show. But while that was still a part of it, it also turned out to be more of an interview-style meeting. What was my role here? Why me? What was my expertise? What did I hope to achieve? Etc… It was difficult to think straight because of the heat, but the air-con in the high commission was on full blast, and once I realised that some professionalism was required, I slipped back into “work mode” Cameron, thinking on my feet and firing back. I was pleased with my participation, and I’d like to think his Excellency was impressed by my excellency (sorry, couldn’t resist) – I think the VSA was pleased with me too.

Given the high comms and embassies are mostly in the same place, I thought I might stop off at the UK and French ones and tell them I’m here too, but the UK high commissioner is still unpacking her things having only just arrived a few months ago (the UK has been without diplomatic representation here since 2005) and isn’t yet open to receive visitors, and I had exchanged emails with the deputy French ambassador and had been told that with regret the embassy wouldn’t be able to host me this afternoon but that he looked forward to meeting me next time I passed through Port-Vila.

En-route back to the motel, I couldn’t resist taking these photos reminding me of past homes:

Then Brigitte, Trevor and I packed up for a trip to the airport, with a plane due to take us to Santo (the local nickname for Espiritu Santo, the island carrying Luganville, Vanuatu’s second largest town). The domestic terminal was sweltering.

During the 50min flight to Santo, we flew over the island of Malekula, my ultimate destination. I’ll be spending a week in Santo before heading there, but it was nice to see it from above. Not much there, that’s for sure!

We were pretty tired on arrival, but I had an opportunity to meet Wayne and Nini, a volunteer couple who have been based on Malekula for the past few months, but who are taking some time away, so I’m going to be staying in their house when I eventually get there. I was getting sleepy, however, so forgot to take any photos over dinner, which is a shame as Nini is leaving early in the morning and I don’t think I’ll get another opportunity to see her during my time here. Wayne is staying on Santo for a bit, though, so I’ll hopefully get to know him during my week here. He is a forestry expert of my parent’s generation he did some volunteering with the VSA in Papua New Guinea as a young man, where he met Nini and then they lived in New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, and now he has volunteered to assist with forestry on Malekula, but I think his assignment has run into a problem (he was supposed to be mentoring someone, but no-one knows who).

I’m now in temporary digs for the week. It’s pretty basic accommodation, but it’ll do. There’s a toilet, but no toilet seat, which is a shame. Both bedside fans are on in the bedroom, but I’m still pretty warm. It’ll take some adjusting, I guess.

January 30th, 2020 – Port-Vila

Made it to Port-Vila! Left Auckland after an all-too-brief catch-up with a friend at Villa Maria wine estate, hopped aboard the Air Vanuatu plane (which was labelled Air Nauru to confuse muggins like me) and made my way through a beautiful sunset to Vanuatu.

I didn’t get a chance to take a photo of the beautiful sunset, but I did make sure I got a shot of the beer I drank on-board.

Arrived pretty late in the evening, but the VSA Programme Managers, Trevor and Brigitte, were there to greet me with big smiles. I had bought gifts of chocolate for Brigitte and Mrs Balls for Trevor (he’s from South Africa), which were well received. They took me to the motel, and after a brief chat we retired for the evening.

The following morning, I was able to see the motel in all its luxury.

After a decent breakfast, Trevor came and outlined the plan for the day. I’d heard so much about his “playing in the field of the Lord” talk in Wellington, and managed to get it out of him over coffee.

Then Trevor, Brigitte and I walked down the road to get me a booster Hep B vaccination. Both my doctor in Cotignac and the doctor here in Vanuatu thought my chances of contracting Hep B in Vanuatu weren’t high enough to warrant vaccination, but the VSA medical officer disagreed and given she’s the one who has to answer to the insurers, I’m happy to go along with it!

Brigitte (born and bred in Port-Vila) then took us on a tour of the town. Nice spot, especially the waterfront overlooking some sensationally blue sea. I was most interested in the food market, which had tropical fruit and veg in abundance. Biggest avocados I’ve ever seen, selling for 50 vatu each. Bad news for H is it’s the tail end of the mango season, though, so there won’t be any left when he comes to visit in April.

Then after lunch we walked up the hill to the Vanuatu museum. As museums go, it needs a guide to make sense of it, and fortunately we were shown round by Edgar, who also showed off the Vanuatu custom of “Sandroing”, which involves storytelling while drawing a geometric design in the sand. The story and the designs are bound by tradition, though, and shouldn’t be changed. It’s a special experience to witness, as it is clearly ancient, practiced and passed down from one generation to the next, although a bit difficult for an outsider like me to make head-or-tail of.

Now I’m back at the motel resting before a dinner with some other volunteers, followed by a fire show, whatever that may be. Internet access is patchy, so I hope I’m able to publish this today. If not, I’ll publish when access improves.

Jan 29th, 2020 – Auckland Airport

I left home 12 days ago. It feels shorter, as a large part of that involved flying a tortuous route:

MRS -> LHR -> LAX -> NAN -> WLG

I chose that somewhat odd route, as I had enough airmiles with BA to be able to fly the LHR-LAX leg in first class, a final treat to myself before roughing it for the next three months.

Arriving in LAX, the luxury promptly ceased with a bang. Given I had redeemed my airmiles for one leg of the trip, but not the totality, I had to collect my bags at the airport and check them in for the next part of the flight. In what I discovered must be one of the worst airports in the world. The queue for immigration on the way out took a good three hours to clear, at which point I was on US soil for all of 5 minutes prior to having to queue for check in and security, which took another 2 hours. I had a 6 and a half hour layover, and spent the large majority of that queueing. I had hoped to maybe leave the airport to catch up with Barrett, but unfortunately, the WiFi at LAX was broken, meaning that I had no way of contacting him to arrange to meet up. I had also hoped as a backup plan that my first class ticket might get me access to the lounge once I was through security, but due to obscure lounge access rules it was not to be. Ah well, can’t complain, I made it through in one piece, and even got to set foot in America for five minutes! Next stop was Fiji:

Before landing in Fiji, I was able to check something off my bucket list: crossing the international date line! It does mean that I left LAX on the evening of 17th Jan, but arrived in Fiji in the morning of the 19th Jan, having travelled forward in time and completely lost the 18th January. I know how timezones work, but it is still a bit puzzling to experience the missing day. I’m due to fly back in the other direction, so I’m never going to get that day back!

I then flew onward to Wellington. Landed in Wellington at around lunchtime, which gave me enough time to figure out how to get the bus into town, the cable car up the hill, and walk to the university digs I had booked to stay in for my first few nights. It had been 30 years since I was last in New Zealand.

I was due in Wellington for a briefing event the VSA (Voluntary Services Abroad) had organised that week, but I hadn’t realised the Monday was a public holiday, so had a while to catch up on lost sleep and explore the town. As it turns out, the VSA people were still working hard to secure my onward flights and visa for Vanuatu, so I ended up staying over a week there. It gave me ample time to explore what is quite a cool town.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I left Wellington by plane earlier today. It’s been a quick hop to Auckland, and then after a 7-hour layover here, I’m off to Port-Vila, Vanuatu this evening, expecting to arrive there around 8:30pm local time. The adventure is starting!