Feb 4th, 2020 – Luganville

Today, in the early hours of the morning, the rain started to come down. This was a relief, as it lowered temperatures significantly down to a reasonable 25 degrees. Annoyingly though, I discovered I’d forgotten my travel poncho in France. I went across the road in the morning for a Bislama lesson, and the rain was spitting down every so often during the lesson.

Our lesson was interrupted by the arrival at the resort of a big tour group – apparently the Radiance of the Seas (one of those giant cruise liners) had docked, and the resort was a coffee stop for one of their excursions.

As I bid my teacher Gaelle goodbye, she confirmed that we would have the afternoon lesson at one o’clock in my bungalow, to avoid getting interrupted by the cruise ship tourists. Possibly my Bislama comprehension was at fault, because at one o’clock she wasn’t anywhere to be seen, although in fairness the rain had started coming down really hard. I waited half an hour, then went across to the resort to check she wasn’t there. I waited 20 minutes to see if she would show up, and then gave up waiting and decided to try to get into town to open a bank account with the National Bank of Vanuatu. The rain was still bucketing down, so I put my phone, wallet and passport into a drybag (good tip from Brendan to buy one in NZ) and went and waited for a bus/taxi (the distinction between the two is vague here). Got to the bank pretty wet, and after a few minutes of waiting, at about 2:05pm, I managed to ask a cashier about opening an account. He was apologetic, but said there was a cut-off for opening new accounts at 2pm. No idea why, the bank was open for another three hours, but he said the bank’s smaller branch 500m up the road had no such cutoff.

So I walked the 500m up the road, although the rain had intensified at this point, and in the three minutes it took me to walk, I was soaked down to my underpants. Filled out half a dozen application forms, but he wasn’t able to accept my application as I’d left my visa letter at home, so I’ll have to swing by again tomorrow.

A subsequent trip to the medical clinic confirmed that there is no HepB vaccine on the island of Santo, so for my third dose due in a couple of weeks I’m going to have to figure out a way to get it from Port-Vila to Malekula. The street the clinic was on seemed quite a posh part of town with some nice houses on it.

Finally, still with wet underpants, I got a bus home only to find the following note from Gaelle:

And so I did my homework whilst eating a supper I made of chilli beans on toast. All in all, the rain, the waiting and the missed timings has lowered my spirits a bit, so I might now go to the next door nakamal (thatched kava bar) to see if they’ll sell me a beer or some kava to cheer me up.