tropical lows, depressions, and cyclones, oh my!

So I survived my first hurricane the first week I was here in Vila. The weekend before I flew down, the weather was noticably cooler and more windy. The depression came from Fiji and turned into Cyclone Vania just as it hit Vanuatu. It tracked South of Vila, hammering Erromango and Tanna. Still, we felt it pretty hard here. I didn’t sleep at all the night it went through… I couldn’t figure out how to close the storm shutter on the window of my hotel room, so I spent all night watching things fly past my window over the roof of the dining room. The dining room isn’t entirely closed either (for example, it doesn’t have real windows, just wooden louvers) so I heard a lot of things being blown around down there and some glass shattering. The stairwells of the hotel are also not closed in, and became covered in puddles and leaves. Surprisingly, we never lost power at the hotel. It flickered around midnight and we lost cell service between 12 and 4am, but the ceiling fan was running the whole night through. I heard there were power outages elsewhere in town though.

The worst part of the storm went through overnight. In the morning I watched birds come out of their hiding places and attempt to fly against the wind with no luck. I set off toward the office around 7:30am, weaving around mango trees that had been knocked down across fences, palm fronds everywhere, and a few down wires. There were several damaged (but not destroyed) roofs in the neighborhood, and the small shed at the wharf for the ferry that goes to Ifira island had been knocked over and flipped upside down. Most billboards and restaurant/store signs that stuck out from the walls had been ripped down.

The second night the tail end whipped back around to hit us with more wind and a lot more rain. Not too much more damage was done (and I slept because another PCV showed me how to put down the storm shutter!) but in the morning I noticed some flooded shops downtown.

A lot of PCVs were on their way back to their islands from spending Christmas in the States and got stranded here in Vila because at first they weren’t allowed to travel, and then they wouldn’t have been able to anyway because the planes stopped flying for about five days. It was fun for me because I had people to hang out with, but now I understand how frustrating it must have been for them because…

I’m about to be stranded. The current “tropical low” appeared north of Fiji about 48 hours ago. It has slowly moved west toward Vanuatu, and we were notified this morning that Peace Corps has banned all boat travel, and if we were planning on flying Monday we had to call the country director.

Guess who was planning to fly on Monday?

So I called our country director and was tentatively given permission to travel Monday, because at that point it looked as if the storm was going to remain a “tropical low” and move over the north of Vanuatu.

Since then, the map has changed. As of this moment (3:30pm Sunday), the projected path of the storm cuts right through Torba province and will become a Category 1 Cyclone (the South Pacific’s name for hurricane) right before it slams Vanualava.

Who lives on Vanualava? Oh yeah, this kid.

Looks like I’m stuck in Vila for a few more days. Looking at the bright side, that means a few more days of ice cream!