The Easter Fishing Bonanza

Easter brought a long weekend so in the classic kiwi tradition, Jess, Andrew, Ingrid and Marcos (friends of Jess' from Vila) and I decided to go for a break at Lonoc Beach. It was a weekend of fishing, cooking fish and eating fish, interspersed with swimming, snorkling, beach cricket and general merriment. The pic's above show the boy's heading out on the first evening. They came back with a big yellow fin tuna and a wahou. Sunday was spent cooking the fish using a variety of techniques (including smoking at Champagne Beach as depicted) and of course eating. Then it was out again on Monday morning to haul in a bucketload (literally) of blue fin and another yellow fin. A leisurely trip home taking in Reef Motel and the Matevulu Blue Hole ended a perfect easter weekend.

St Paddies Day

Vanuatu: it seems to be a never-ending stream of parties, if you're that way inclined (and open with your definition of party). Saint Paddies day was the next big event on the social calender. With this in mind, I had procured various Guinness paraphernalia whil back in NZ and with Jess returning from a week in Vila, we decided to hold the party at her place.

So in the finest traditions of anyone with a lil'bit of Irish in them, we brough a slice of the emerald isles to the islands of paradise (that being Vanuatu bien sur!). All the major players in the 20-30 something expats were present:
- Bearded Peace Corps, straight from the bush (which showed by the exploits of one in particular, who obviously hadn't had a drink or contact with women for a while!)
- The aquamarine boys, one of whom happened to be Irish: fancy that!
- The Baby Docs
- The Aussie Vol
- The Kiwi Vol
- Andrew: the newbie kiwi realestate fulla

I'll leave it to your discretion as to which category of the 3M's (ie Missionary, Mercenary or Misfit) we all fit into.

So with a bit of U2 pumping (I had also brought back an Irish cd, unfortunately it was not the rousing jigs I'd anticipated but the kind of celtic music your nana would knit to) we had a jolly old time of it into the wee(ish) hours of the morning.

Post party musigs at a local hotel and a swim at Beachfront and Matevulu Blue Hole rounded off the weekend!

Tsunami, Cyclones... where's the volcanic eruption!!

It's definitely been a week of dramatic natural events... The middle of last week saw our second cyclone: Cyclone Becky. The name was a suprisingly fitting description- a little bit of wind and rain, a few banana trees blown over and that was about it. More of a tropical storm than a cyclone really but another opportunity to batten down the hatches.

The more interesting of the two came with the magnitude 8 earthquake in the Solomon Islands yesterday.

In the morning I headed down town to do banking, post office etc. There seemed to be a buzz in town and it was impossible to get a taxi so I started walking back to work. On the way back I bumped into a women from aquamarine who told me a tsunami was on the way, so it was off to Aquamarine to have a yarn with the dive boys and suss out exactly what was happening. The shop is situated in a little bay overlooking the main wharf so a good vantage point to observe, maybe not so great if the tsunami was big. The boys checked the internet and apparently it was to hit Vanuatu around noon... so we kept an eye on the water levels.

Anywho, over a period of about half an hour, the tide went completely out, came back in to full tide, ebbed and was full again. the second time the tide went out, Brian, one of the dive boys, was sitting in a boat tied up to the jetty. One minute the boat is bobbing in the water, the next, its sitting on the sand. Once this happened and after the mild case of panic passed, we jumped in the van and headed to my house, which is safely on a hill overlooking the harbour.

All the boats headed for the channel, including a large container ship docked at the port... An ominous sign.

However, after an hour or so, the boats go back and it looks like Santo is saved from certain disaster! Very interesting to have seen a tsunami, even if just a small one here...