Christmas on Ambae

So my vacation started with some panic (as all good vacations do, right?). My inept Air Vanuatu agent had written 12:30pm on my ticket, so my check-in time was 11:30am. Jimmy Jones, our good old semi-senile truck driver came to my house to get me at 11 to take me to the airport. The first plane had gone overhead ten minutes previously, but I wasn’t worried because usually when they’re that early there are two. We got to the airport at 11:18 and the plane was still on the ground, but they were shutting the doors. I decided that to be safe, I’d ask people in the building if there were two flights. No one seemed to know, but they said I should go check with the agent just in case. I ran out to the landing strip and asked him, and he said, “No, there’s only one flight,” and started rolling the stairs away from the now closed-up plane. Let the fight begin.

I told him I had a ticket to be on the flight. He demanded to see my ticket. The pilot re-opened his door to see what the issue was. The agent was cursing the ticket saying it was fake because I wasn’t on his original list of people that should have been flying. The pilot asked what the problem was, “He gave you the wrong time?” Oh, you mean this happens often? The two pilots checked their paperwork and decided that even though we would be picking people up on Gaua, there was still room for me. The agent tried to fight it (control freak?) but ultimately he got fed up with my show of fit-throwing (drama actually works for you here, not against you) so he finally told me to go grab my bags. I also had passenger support – the mama who cooked our food at Kamp GLOW was rooting for me the whole time from inside the plane, and pulled her toddler onto her lap so I could sit beside her when I got on to the plane. First hurtle cleared.

I arrived in Santo and met Gene at Natangura Cafe for my cheeseburger, which was amazing (see picture on facebook). I ran into a Banks friend in town, who is now living in Santo, and she invited us for kava that evening, so that was fun. Also Gene’s house is really nice. The next day I flew to Ambae.

Impressions of East Ambae:

• Lolowai and Saratamata were both very impressive. Many less people than Sola (because the villages are all actually nearby) but higher-quality stores.
• There is a store that sells MEAT. All the time. In a refrigerator. Like, instead of killing a whole cow for $400 and feeding it to 100+ people over the course of 3 days, you can buy a kilo of mince. AWESOME.
• Other impressive food notes: they sell tuna canned in brine instead of only oil, eggs are only 50 cents each and they almost always have them, and they have tomatoes.
• The kava is strong.
• Maewo is much closer than I expected it to be. Melissa thought it just looked like it because it’s so big, but after some investigation I found out that it takes the same amount of time to get there as it does to get to Motalava… but with half as much horsepower.
• The area is very jungle-y. Everything seems very inland, even though it’s not. I’m not sure why that is… I just feel like there’s enough growth between you and the saltwater at all times that you can almost forget it’s there.

Melissa’s site is really nice. The school is huge! Also she has running water and a shower, which was amazing. (So did Gene… during my two week vacation I shampooed my hair like five times!!) We had plans to go to her host family’s village for Christmas, and we found out on the 23rd that our community’s contribution would be cakes. Melissa has an oven! So on Christmas Eve we baked SIX cakes. It was ridiculous. The house was so hot we couldn’t even go inside! That afternoon we went to the village to decorate the church, then came back in the evening. Christmas morning we got up at 4:30 to ice them, then the truck came for us at 6 to head to the village. There was a church service, then breakfast (bread), then volleyball/football, then lunch (beef), then fun games and Christmas presents and such. Good time. We were supposed to spend the night in the village, but a really old man died (in his house) during the afternoon, so the village had to start the custom funeral preparations (i.e. sit up all night with the dead body) so we went back to Melissa’s site.

The 26th is Family Day in Vanuatu, and we were invited to a lunch at the school with the teachers and their kids. Then everyone went swimming in the ocean all afternoon. At that point we were feeling the waves from ex-cyclone Fina, so we basically body-surfed the whole time.

That was Christmas week. New Years week will be a separate blog.