New Years in Santo

(continued from Christmas blog)

I headed back to Gene’s on Santo on the 28th to find our Pentecost friends already here for New Years. The 29th was Champagne Beach, a perfect white-sand beach on the northern end of the East coast of Santo. It was AMAZING. But of course I got really sunburned. Then I started getting sick… but the party goes on! New Years Eve was Tex-Mex night at a new volunteer’s house with 13(?) other PCVs. (Yes I finally got to meet some of Group 24!!)

New Years Day was interesting. I was still feeling kind of sick, but also I knew I had to go visit my Banks friend before heading back north, so I headed over to her house around 4. Unfortunately, my timing could not have been worse. I arrived approximately 30 seconds after she drunkenly bashed her husband on the forehead with a beer bottle.

…

Yeah. I’m going to let you all turn that over in your heads for a couple minutes. What do you even do?

At first I felt like I should turn around and leave. BUT. This is Vanuatu, not America. If I turn around and leave, she’ll be extremely offended, will probably not forgive me, and I’ll have lost one of my closest Ni-Van relationships. So I stayed… her best friend was also there and we got her inside while her teenage daughter cleaned up the husband (her stepdad). The whole afternoon was very awkward though. I mean, she was still drunk the whole time, her husband was stomping around angrily (understandably), and she kept badgering him to be polite and come talk to me, which was definitely not necessary and made me feel even more awkward. I managed to separate myself around 6, and then went to bed really early that night.

The 2nd we went across to Aore Island, which has a resort on it. It rained though. But the food was good. I don’t think there’s anything else exciting to say about it.

The 3rd we did the Mellenium Cave hike, which was freaking ridiculous. We took a bus about an hour into the bush. Then we walked through mud for about 30 minutes to get to the village where the guides start the tour from. A few of us in the back of the group had bets for who would fall down first, and our cry was, “Pringles!” so that the others would know we were falling and had time to look and laugh. (We’re really nice to each other.)

After about an hour and a half of hiking, we got to the cave. It was massive, and full of water and bat poop. And bats and sparrows. But mostly bat poop. They gave us flashlights (headlamps would have been handy, but I guess we’re not technologically advanced enough for that yet) and sent us down in. It was pretty awesome. The only nervewracking part was that I ended up being the last person and I kept feeling like everyone was going to leave me behind. Also people kept turning around and shining their flashlights in my faces. Clearly, these people did not attend Girl Scout camp to learn about flashlight etiquette!!

Once out of the cave, we ate our lunches, then started “canyoning,” which was pretty terrifying. We climbed over lots of rocks, whitewater in a few places, and then they gave us floaties to swim down the river. There was about a kilometer of swimming with occassional climbing over rocks.

After all of this, we had to climb back out of the gorge, which involved climbing straight up the side of a cliff, climbing a waterfall, and a couple of muddy and slippery ladders.

The good part is that no one died, only one shoe broke (RIP to Alexandra’s Chacos), and the thunderstorm didn’t hit until we were on our way up and out.

I was going to try to find good links for you guys to look it up, but I think I’m just going to say: type “Millenium Cave” into a Google Image search.

The 4th I headed back up north and brought Michael with me. He’s enjoying it so far! My host papa took us and all the kids to Mosina on Sunday for picnic and swimming, and hopefully we’ll get out to Alligator River too.