A trip round the island

We have been planning for some time to hire a car and drive round the island (Efate) but kept getting thwarted by the England rugby team. We obviously had to stay in town to watch the games and that meant one very late Saturday night and two very early Sunday mornings which got in the way of our plans.

The late Saturday night was spent in a posh hotel bar with a load of very loud and abusive pissed aussies who got quieter and quieter as the game went on. The following Sunday we were up at 5am to watch the England v France game in the French Embassy. They were very friendly and gave us free coffee and croissants even while their team lost. And then the following Sunday we were up again at 5am to watch the final in an aussie bar with the only four South Africans in Vanuatu.

There was an air of despondency with defeat but we were pleased to finally be able to leave for our trip round the island. We went to Discount Rentals and hired ourselves a little hot hatch and motored off at a mighty 50km/h. This quickly dipped to a more sedate 20km/h as we came off the only tarmacced piece of road that runs for about 2 miles either side of Port Vila. We decided to go anticlockwise around the island purely on the basis that we weren’t sure our little car would get up Clem’s Peak – the very steep hill to the west of town.

The road around the island is about 130km, hugging the coast all the way. It was lovely to be out of Vila and to see the rest of Efate. The east coast in particular had some spectacular beaches and we stopped at a place called Eton for a swim and some lunch. It has a large natural swimming pool that is protected from the ocean by tall reefs across the front of the bay and a pure white beach. There were a number of villages all round the island but we were quite surprised by how few people we saw. A large majority of people live in and around Vila and there is an ongoing problem with urban drift. Outside of this one coast road, the centre of the island is largely uninhabited and made up of low lying mountainous jungle: large parts of which are covered in a rapid growing weed that the Americans brought over in the second world war to use as camouflage and kindly left to spread its way all over the island. The south and east parts of the island are pretty flat and full of coconut plantations and cattle grazing, a lot of it looks more like English parkland than a tropical island.

We have been thinking of planning a cycle trip round the island at some point and we were pretty happy about the idea until we were about 40km from home when suddenly the lovely level dirt track turned into an endless rollercoaster of steep hills with massive potholes – I think if it had been raining we almost certainly would not have made it round in our little car.

On Sunday we drove half an hour out of Vila to a beach which was spectacular, your perfect south pacific island beach, pretty much to ourselves, and with amazing coral to snorkel round. We had to pinch ourselves a bit, and hope none of the other outgoing VSOs we met back in the UK check our blog from their placements in Mongolia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda etc…

So it was a lovely weekend and a real treat to have a car for a couple of days. The trip around the island on bikes is currently under negotiation.