After a wonderful 4 days at Tanna Island, we decided to leave on Monday May 7th and head to the island of Erromango for a short stop as we head to Port Vila to officially check in. It was a beautiful day sail and only about 50 miles. We left early in the morning and arrived just before dusk.
Leaving Port Resolution in the early morning with fresh bananas : )Buddy boat SV Another Adventure looking good out there.Generally we don’t fly our spinnaker…we are too lazy to be honest… but the conditions were perfect for it and we needed it to keep moving without the engine on. It was one of the best sailing we have done…moving at 6 knots and super comfortable!Hence the name of our boat…Slow Flight…we would never win a race (2 boats moving in the same direction is race…right?) here is SV Another Adventure anchor down at Erromango island, Dillion’s Bay.
The drama begins- As we set anchor, David, a local villager canoed over to both vessels and informed us he has a yacht club and he could show us around the town and to the skull caves. He told us to just beach our dinghy over to his place, the yacht club, past the river mouth the next morning. We thought that sounded great and asked him if he needed anything. He said coffee and milk and a tin of meat (canned meat). We exchanged goodbyes with anticipation that we would see him tomorrow around 9-10am.
Early the next morning we had another visitor in a canoe named Dick who also offered us to tour the village with him and presented us with a piece of paper asking for us to fill it out and return it to him. It looked very “official” with stamps on it and the information it asked for was close to information a form that we would fill out for customs in each country we cleared into. We weren’t sure about this as there was no mention of this type of formality in our guide books nor had Frank on SV Another Adventure who has been to Vanuatu many times before had seen or heard of. Fortunately, another canoe had stopped by SV Another Adventure and told/warned Frank and Ivonne “don’t listen to Dick or take note of his paper…just go and see the chief, Jason”. Humm..this is getting interesting….
Long story short….Dick and David have an long going family feud…literally we were in New Caledonia and met Cam, an Australian who has lived in Vanuatu for over 12 years, and even he mentioned to us the “David and Dick” saga. Dick and David are brothers and are both cousins of the Chief. In hindsight, we liked David better and should of went to his Yacht club first and then to had him take us to the Chief…instead we took our dinghy up the river where Dick was waiting for us. He ultimately was the one who gave us the tour of the village. Here is just a highlight…
We visited the kindergarden in the village. This “class room” is still being built after cyclone Pam.Homework….this other classroom was more established. I wish I could of attended the class myself learning the local language and drawing pictures : )As we left the school area, the kids came out to look at us one more time….I have learned to connect with the kids to either play Hi-Five or to play “copycat”. Here I was pretending to “show off my muscles” and this little boy played right along…..I wish you could see his face….it’s like the “Hulk” (lol).The river is a huge part of the community…it brings fresh water to the village and thus very fertile lands. Here are some women and girls doing laundry. There was another sailing vessel (small catamaran) who also was doing laundry right along side them.Happy cows! The beef here we were told is fantastic… Unfortunately they were upstream form the women doing laundry…I might of headed up stream from the cows just in case.Here we are crossing the river to see the “pools”. We walked for hours through the village then followed the river through little gardens and larger plots of farms. Dick told us that land is distributed by their Malaysian names and passed down to their families. Dick has land somewhere up the mountain. I didn’t get the feeling that women could own land. Further, we learned the chieftain title passes down by choice of the chief. If not by son than to brother or uncle of the same family.Dick and the pools….it was beautiful green/blue color calm as can be. If we weren’t so hungry at this point we may have gone for a swim.On our way back these girls were ahead of us after harvesting. I love her Angry Bird shirt! As you would assume, everyone seems to have a role and a job. One day you work on the house, the next you harvest, the next it’s tending the garden, next it’s something else. Everyone is a part of the success…I like this idea.Dick’s house and his office. The piece of paper Dick gave us to fill out with boat and captain information is stashed here. He charged 1000 vatu ($10 usd) for the village tour. We were happy to pay for his time and energy. However….he asked for “anchorage” fees (only about $2 usd) per night. We felt very uncomfortable with this as we never heard of paying anchorage fees to a village. In fact we heard one village up in the north islands did this and yachties stopped going there. Anyways…we refused to pay him for the fee even though he had them listed on his piece of paper. He did try pretty hard to get the funds from us by explaining he was “licensed” to do so. We told him none of the officials we had corresponded with ever told us we needed to pay a fee. DIck finally let it go and said we could “verify” at Port Vila. Well we did exactly that when we arrived in Port Vila..but that’s in the next post : )After the tour we stopped off at the Yacht club, David’s place. Trevor and I brought him coffee and milk and a can of meat. In exchange he gave us some fruits and veggies. David was really hurt that we didn’t come to his house first and that he was waiting for us that morning. We explained that we wanted to go see the chief first out of respect and that Dick was waiting for us when we arrived. David seemed to understand a bit but we could tell he was unhappy about the situation. We wanted to put a little money into his hands as he has taken much pride in his yacht club and he and his family has worked really hard to establish. So we asked if he could arrange for us to see the skull caves.Ivonne by here country’s flag at the yacht club. Everyone knows about the World cup around here and when she is asked where she is from…the world cup always comes up : )
The Skull caves- It had already been an eventful day but we were only here for a short time and decided to jam pack it with stuff to do. We all went back to our boats for lunch after the village tour and arranged to meet back at the Yacht club to meet Nicholas, nephew of David, to take us to the skull caves.
We picked up Nicholas…he’s 24 years old..no girlfriend and he doesn’t drink kava. He was the silent type…until he got use to us and then he started to make jokes. Trevor ended up giving him a kool-aid t-shirt….which we saw him later wearing with pride : ) We rode for about 10-15 minutes up the coast and through a pass of coral to land on a beach and walk to the caves.What trail?!We didn’t expect the uphill climb silly us…don’t wear flip flops.Frank going down into the caveWhere did Frank go?Inside the cave…it was quite big. there were little bats too!Nicholas told us this was where the “common” people were…the chief’s cave was further up. The bones were a bit creepy, even though we were told they don’t bury anyone here anymore. I am not sure if these remains are from their village as we had to go a bit down the coast, or if there use to be another village here. There are many tales about cannibalism and violent conflicts between villages back in the day here in Vanuatu…maybe not so long ago…one has to question.Up to the chiefs cave….literally hanging on to the roots of trees.The bones of the cheif and his family….these bones were very white…we are not archeologists by any stretch of the imagination…but they looked different from the other bones on the lower cave and these looked almost too “neat”….but whatever.
The Kava Bar – After the skull cave tour, we planned to head to the Kava bar we saw on the village tour with Dick. Since women can’t partake in the nakamal… women can drink kava at a kava bar. Though each village has it’s own rules regarding women drinking kava, we learned, this village in Dillion’s bay allows women to drink kava but only at the kava bar. I had heard the kava here in Vanuatu is a much stronger than in Tonga and Fiji so to find a place to drink kava amongst the locals was a big treat for me! We headed in at 4pm right when the kava bar opened. Mind you the “bar” was literally a shack on the river and not sure if they are “open” every night, but Dick arranged it for it to be open for us tonight…a great way to wind down a very eventful day.
Kava bar parking…Thomas our bartenderDavid in the red shirt (another David other than the one mentioned previously in the family saga) “owns” the Kava Bar. He told us they don’t get many tourist at the kava bar because they are afraid of sanitation….hummm…He was pretty lit even before we arrived at the Kava bar : )The brew…If you can see Thomas is holding a little cut out plastic “scoops” made out of old plastic bottles that they serve the kava with. We think they made a weaker brew for us made out of leftover brew. That’s ok..at least I was able to try it…being a woman and all : )You can buy kava in 100 vatu increments…this was a 100 vatu pour. Trevor and I each had three 200 vatu servings…it was WAY different from the kava we had in Tonga (it still tasted like dirt though). Definitely much stronger. I felt a little body high, tingly and relaxed. There is no music playing like in a bar (that serves alcohol) you and I know. We were told that in a kava bar there is little talking because you are relaxed and music disrupts this feeling with too much energy. Opps…we probably talked too much as we were wanting to chat with the locals…We had to go behind the kava bar with our bowls of kava to drink them…sorry not drink but DOWN it…. “Bottoms up!” they would say every time someone would drink. The reason you have to go in the back was out of respect of the others. We were confused…as usual….and asked why. David told us in case it “comes up” after you drink it…you don’t do it in front of everyone…I thought this was very considerate.For 20 vatu you could have 1 of these delicious treats to ‘wash down’ the taste of kava. It is made out of Cavasa (spelling unsure of-a root of sort that when cooked turns into a creamy paste like substance) wrapped in what they call cabbage. Not sure what the sauce is…but it was good..especially after the “dirt” taste of the kava.
Family politics…. you can’t get away from them…they are everywhere : ) All in all we had a great time here at Dillion’s Bay on Erromango Island. It would seem to us after being in the villager for only 7 hours straight that the competition for tourist funds thus creating the strain between the villagers could be alleviated with stronger leadership as we found and experienced at Port Resolution on Tanna Island. But who are we to judge…. we don’t or can’t even begin to understand the culture here…we can only project our own ideas of how it should/could be because that is what we do as visitors in these countries. We still enjoyed our visit here despite all of this. We spent the next day relaxing and getting ready to head to Port Vila.
We invited Paul (middle) and Jule (right) to stop by the boat that night after the Kava bar as they asked if they could come aboard and see the boat. We shared cheese and crackers and chips…a few cokes and just talked about their life here. Paul really wanted to go sailing. Jules literally didn’t say a word, we think he couldn’t speak english but he seemed to understand us. I guess they are brothers and Paul looks after him and includes him in his ongoings. It was sweet to witness Paul translate and ask him questions for us. Jule would respond in their local tongue and Paul would translate his response to us.
