round the island last weekend, we were back up on the north of the island again this weekend – this time without the aid of a little hire car. We had decided to go up to Pele and Nguna, two islands just north of Efate, in order to go and see a couple of Peace Corps guys we have met who work up there and also to show Peter, a (relatively) new VSO something of life outside Vila. Pele is the island where we went to stay in our first month so it was an opportunity to say hello to our host family in the village of Pilliura.The women from the market in Vila tend to head back to their islands on Saturday mornings and we were able to hitch a lift in the back of the truck with the Pele mamas heading up to the north of Efate and from there get a boat across to Pele. We stopped for a few hours on Pele and had some lunch, but the main reason for the trip was to go across to the island of Nguna which is only a short boat-ride away. It is a much bigger island than Pele and rises steeply from the beach up into “highlands” with an extinct volcano.
We stayed at
a very sweet little guest house near the beach and just after the sun had gone down we hacked around a couple of the villages looking for somewhere to drink kava. This is always made slightly more difficult as the default setting for a Nakamal is very quiet and dark, so they are not the easiest places to find after dark. But, we found one just as they were making a new bucket and we had a couple of shells before going back to the guest house. Over the past couple of weeks the weather has started to get really hot and by the time we went to bed any breeze there had been had completely disappeared so it was a bit like sleeping in warm tea.Sunday morning was hot and absolutely stunning and we headed off to hike up “on- top” (of the island) to visit the other Peace Corps who is living up there: Dominique. She and Seth are working on a marine conservation project around these two islands. Despite the fact that most of the forty minute climb was in the shade of the bush I think we were all about 3 stone lighter by the time we got to the top. But the compensation was seeing Dom’s very sweet village and the stunning views from the top of the island.
There are two expressions you hear over and over again in Vanuatu and they are “spel” which means find somewhere shady and rest , and “storian” which means find somewhere shady and sit and talk, or very often, just sit. A very large amount of time is spent doing one or both of these and so, after our arduous climb up and then back down to Dom's village we decided to spel on the beach for a couple of hours and then take the boat back across to Pele where we had time for a nice snorkel and storian just as the sun was setting.
After a night listening to torrential rain and cockerels we were up at 5.30am to hitch a ride on the boat back across to Efate and then a truck back into Vila just about in time to go to work on Monday morning.
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