Sunday 29th April – our Second day at the
lslands
After the previous night’s raucous socialising, it’s fair
to say I was a bit slower rising this morning.
Four hours slower. In fact, by
the time I hauled myself out of bed and checked the time, it was nearly
1000hrs. Not too concerned was I – the
official Tour Guide delivered to my door the previous evening had assured me I
could walk around the entire island in no more than 45 minutes. It’s not like time was of the essence.
I wandered over to the window, and the first thing I saw were the tenders taking loads of people over to the island.
“Ha! Fools! How early they must have gotten up!”
Then something else caught my eye. Something large. Something so large it would take no less than 45 days to walk around.
“Holy crap, did I get my island wrong? Did they give me the wrong brochure? This island has fricken MOUNTAINS ON IT!!”
Sending Neil only into a slight panic, he came over to the window to ascertain the cause of my alarm.
“Shit babe. We’re gonna need a big breakfast if we’re going to walk around that in 45 mins.”
As I sat at the window in despair, he went off to shower and dress and I stifled my sobs. This island was so large with such dense vegetation that we were going to have to hire a tribe of local warriors to cut a swathe for us to hike through. I tried to recall my Survival Training to see if I could remember how to build a hut and make a raft from three leaves and some paracord. As I pondered this thought, something light caught my eye.
Like an oasis shimmering in the desert, just on the outer reaches of my sight, a beach appeared. I tried to push my head through the window to see more, and as luck would have it, our Floating Home chose that moment to shift slightly around the anchor. There, nestled beside the Amazon, was a tiny little island, shining like a pearl in the ocean. Like David facing off to Goliath, this little island would be the same ratio to the Amazon as the “.” is to the letter “i”. A long “i” with a very little dot.
With a light heart, I skipped around the room getting ready, once again happy about the upcoming day. Pffffffft-ing to myself at how naïve Neil was to have got the islands mixed up, we went up for a quick breakfast, although I still had time to have a shifty look around for more deformed people.
Once we were ready to go, we realised we didn’t have any beach towels, as we’d deposited them in the bins on return from Isle of Pines the day before. “Not to worry”, we thought. “How hard can it be to get two towels?”
Turns out it was harder than we ever thought.
Because we were so late in leaving, they were no longer utilising the ticket system for the ferry services to the islands. When we asked for some tickets the lady told us there weren’t any; and Hung Lo The Comedian (who was doing a great job of helping her) told us the ferry was cancelled and we had to stay on the boat and get drunk. I wasn’t altogether upset by his suggestion, however apparently he was kidding so we sat down and waited for the call to load the boat.
Remembering we didn’t have towels, I popped over to the reception desk and asked for a couple of replacements. I think she may have misheard me and perhaps thought I’d asked for “two unicorn testicles please” because she looked concerned and said she’d have to make some phone calls. After explaining that she couldn’t get hold of our room steward, we must have looked at her somewhat blankly, so she clarified further that she’d left a message for him to call her back.
20 minutes and one ferry call later, she apologised and said she was still waiting to hear from our room steward. Another couple sat down at the table beside us and looked round rather impatiently.
“Are you waiting for towels?” I took a gamble by asking.
When they said they were, I decided their day needed to be ruined much like ours, so I told them we’d already been waiting nearly ½ an hour for ours. Just then a little dude turned up wearing a room steward outfit, and the reception lady asked him to grab us some towels.
“What room you be in?” he asked us.
Wondering why the hell it mattered, we told him.
“But, I’m not your room steward” he says, glaring accusingly at the reception lady.
Beginning to think we were in an episode of Twilight Zone, we looked at each other, then at Other Towel Couple.
“Um, we’ve been waiting here for nearly half an hour, all we want is a couple of beach towels to take to the beach with us. “
“OK, I get your steward to put them in your room.”
“Um, we don’t want them in our room, we’re waiting to get on a ferry and go to the island. With our towels. “
After an odd look, he left and Neil had an epiphany. “Perhaps”, he said, “he thinks we wanted him
to go to our room and GET our towels and bring them out to us here…?”
When the towels finally turned up, an announcement had just been made asking for ferry passengers, so we hightailed it out of there without even a backward glance at Other Towel Couple, pushed a couple of old ladies out of the way, clambered over some small children, and got in line for the ferry.
Mystery Island is uninhabited normally as it’s sacred, but the locals from the Amazon head over whenever there’s a ship in town to do some trade. We saw one such local jet-setting his way there while on our tender ride over.
Ten minutes later we stepped off our tender onto The-Island-That-Hid-Around-The-Corner-and-Made-Me-Cry, or as the locals call it, Mystery Island. I cried.
Beautiful white sand, beautiful palm trees, flax lined paths, and crystal clear water.
That and the Chanel Band. Which I would have missed had Neil not been so observant. We walked through the beautiful flower and flax arch, off the pier, and onto the sand. We could hear a beautiful melody coming from beyond so ventured forward (to be honest, it was the bar beside it that ventured me forward but the music was pretty cool too) and Neil said “look – he’s playing The Chanel”.
Thinking he’d recognised some classical piece of music which was entirely appropriate to our geographical surroundings, I peeked around the corner to see a native Vanuatu-er playing an oversized bamboo flute. With a jandal.
After quickly checking out the bar to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, we decided we would circumnavigate the island in an anticlockwise direction. Feeling like Captain Cook, off we headed on the little path that looked like it had been laid just for us. Within about 3 nanoseconds we were sweating and had to lose a few layers. From that point on we didn’t see anyone else wearing more than ½ a layer of clothing. Fortunately for us, most of them chose the bottom half.
First stop, of course, was the runway. Apparently built by the Americans as a fuel stop during the war, and now used by the locals. Every day, they told us.
I’m not so sure about that, unless the wind is always a westerly, and the aircraft using it only need 300 feet to take off. The western end of the runway was so overgrown there could have been lions hiding in it.
The airport, however, was a hive of activity. This local spent a good five minutes utilising all the facilities. Still, however, not one wee plane in sight.
We carried onward with our intrepid journey, and the scenery was beautiful. Lovely vegetation, lovely beaches, every now and then we got a glimpse of the ship through the palm trees, lovely path to follow, lovely toilet huts.
Which was a blessing, given that I’d had three coffees, two orange juices, a chocolate milk and an orange smoothie with breakfast.
Venturing into one of them, I commented how quaint it was that they’d built all these for the tourists, and lovely of them to even provide toilet paper. For some reason Neil chose that moment to think out loud about all the spiders that might be lurking in there and on the underside of the toilet seat.
Three coffees, two orange juices, a chocolate milk and an orange smoothie got to stay put for a while longer.
Making our way around to the western end of the island, we decided to venture down to the beach for a bit, and as we veered off the path, I noticed a few coconuts lying on the ground just begging to be eaten. The never said we couldn’t OPEN coconuts, we were only told not to pick them. They SHOULD have said we couldn’t open them… as a warning, literally. Neil offered to make a coconut for me and I excitedly took him up on that offer.
Four hours later, I was munching on the nicest, freshest, coconut I’ve ever laid my hands on. Turns out that without a machete or band saw it’s quite hard getting into a coconut. He tried several methods, including sawing it with a sharp rock, grinding it against a sharp rock, ripping it with his hands, throwing it against the sharp rock, and saying “shit, this is hard work babe”. I listed those in order of effectiveness.
A couple walked past in the middle of our coconut-making-session and the woman gave us some invaluable advice.
“It’s much easier doing that with a knife. Hang on…” *pat, pat, pat* “Oh I’m sorry… I don’t have anything on me that you could use”.
Respectful of the rules about littering on the beach, we gathered up the by-products of our coconut-making and took a photo in case we needed proof in a court of law that we were being responsible adults. Neil suggested that the photo should probably stay in the camera as untainted evidence but I thought our friends needed to see how we were saving the planet.
As we found our way back to the path, we found some tog bottoms. Fortunately we didn’t see the space they had vacated, but rather footprints in the sand and evidence that others had gone before us. I recognised them as belonging to the lady that shared the tender over with us, so hanging them off my finger with my arm outstretched, we went off on a lady-hunt.
On our travels we came across several different varieties of plants we’d never seen before, some of them amazing and very pretty.
On our travels we also came across several different varieties of spiders we’d never seen before, some of them big and hairy with teeth.
Had it just been the former, I probably would have been happy to come across several more little toilet huts; but because of the latter, my three coffees, two orange juices, a chocolate milk and an orange smoothie with breakfast got to have a tour of the entire island.
Three quarters of the way around the island we found the lady missing her tog bottoms. Luckily we recognised this by seeing her face and not the absence of said tog bottoms; which was a pretty impressive feat given that she was face-down having an island massage at the time. After reuniting the two of them we took some more of the mandatory Us-Standing-On-A-Beach photos then got back on the trial. This 45 minute walk had so far taken about 150 minutes so it was lucky I had found us the right island or we’d have been walking for a lot longer.
We chanced across more quirks of nature we’d never seen before; little holes in the ground everywhere that had something living in them but seeing as the spiders we’d encountered weren’t really that delightful, we didn’t want to stick around and meet the occupants. Which would have been especially difficult for them to do after Neil filled all their little holes in with sand.
We passed a huge set-up of stalls; again only temporary outlets that are set up on days when the ships come in. I have never ever in my life seen such a large and colourful collection of sarongs; and boy did those dudes know how to wear them properly. In hindsight I probably should have asked for some tips.
Finally arrived at the eastern-most point of the island, we took more photos, thinking for ages about what cool stuff we could write in the sand until we saw someone else’s artwork and took a photo of that, then we decided to go for a swim.
Trying to swap undies for togs underneath a towel on a remote island inhabited with 4,000 cruise-ship customers – 2,762 of them of asian descent with cameras - and 27 local village children singing “twinkle twinkle” without getting sand trapped everywhere is no mean feat. Unfortunately I only half-succeeded in my task.
We stayed close to the shore; even though the water was crystal clear, we were in a fairly protected harbour, and there were around 4,000 of us, I couldn’t possibly chance getting caught in a rip and floating out to sea or getting eaten by a great white. Not before we visited the next three islands anyway. After Lifou, the ocean could do what it wanted with me.
I don’t think Neil shared my sensible and well-considered concerns and I’m also PRETTY sure he might have been looking for a mermaid, cos he ventured way further out into the unknown; I can only assume that’s why the local five-year-olds behind us were pointing and sniggering in our direction. Everyone knows that mermaids live on reefs.
I threw sand at them while their parents weren’t looking.
Finally it was time to head back to the tenders and back to the mother-ship. Another visit to the barside-pool was necessary to dislodge some sand, and it was a pleasant surprise to find that the man at the barside-pool BBQ was just waiting there to cook us some burgers. The very least we could do was lounge around in the sun afterwards feeding our faces. After all, it was another 90 minutes before the buffet opened, and he really did need to earn his wage.
Getting ready for dinner in our room, I got way more adventurous with my new sarong. I used all sorts of swearwords that I’d never normally use before 6pm without several wines under my belt.
We ate at the buffet that night, our intrepid hike through the wilderness had left us famished; and because we’d been apart all day I couldn’t leave my BFIAB behind in the cabin and we were duly reunited over dinner.
Entertainment that night was the juggler-slash-comedian from the first night and I laughed 27 times more than I did on the first night. Neil alternated between laughing and being frozen with fear every time the entertainer looked anywhere near our direction for audience participation. My BFIAB tried to convince me to nominate him, but I’d heard there were no spare rooms on board so I politely but regretfully refrained.
We had an early night that night in anticipation of our next port of call – Port Villa in Vanuatu. The place I’d read about in brochures; drooled over on the internet; and quickly tried to find on maps.google.com when I’d found out we were going there.
Little did I know what was actually awaiting me the next morning. I was about to get violated and have my very first Near-Death-Experience-By-A-Kurb.
