Untouched paradise
A world away from the tourist trail but just a 45-minute flight from Port Vila, Vanuatu’s Tanna Island is an incredible mix of tradition and natural wonders, writes Anabel Dean
It takes a leap of faith to enter the Blue Cave. And the man at my breakfast table is disconcertingly short on detail about the cavern concealed within the limestone coast on the northwest tip of Tanna island in Vanuatu. “You can’t see under the opening because it’s dark,” he says, “but it only takes four or five fin kicks and you’re in.”
It’s sounds alarming — diving from the base of a high sea cliff through the dark into an iridescent pool inside a subterranean grotto — but there is no time for equivocation. The crew from White Grass Ocean Resort & Spa are waiting in a small boat moored at water’s edge beyond a tussle of garish pink bougainvillea.
Within minutes, we are speeding into salty headwinds on turquoise water, colour ebbing into a distant deep blue. Along the shoreline, a few palm-thatched bures peep through greenery and there is a hotchpotch of human activity, figures frozen in motion as we skitter past.
The journey from jetty to cave takes about half an hour. Anchor secured, we flip overboard then glide to the ragged rock wall that, the boatman reassures us, is the entrance to the cave. We have only his word for it. Following directions, we plunge beneath rocks into sunless depths and sure enough, seconds later, heads pop out of water into a compact universe crowned by ethereal blue shafts of sunlight.
It’s an unearthly realm, cathedral quiet but for the drip of droplets, and the slapping of waves outside the watery void. How much time passes in this exalted dome of serenity? I cannot say, but the Blue Cave is a surreal introduction to the little-known surprises of Tanna, an island redolent with customs and legends harking back to a distant era.
The clock stops on “Day Two” after we began a teeth-rattling journey by 4WD to Mount Yasur, along narrow dirt roads, through fertile forests of lush tree fern, over lunar plains of thick volcanic ash. Along the way, there’s a passing parade of villagers emerging from hillsides embroidered with cassava and coffee. Some have the distant look of revellers not yet recovered from an all-night circumcision ceremony with kava. Hot pink and malachite green-feathered headdresses are flaming skywards and cheeks are painted with fluorescent stripes.
In Yakel, one of the world’s last tribal societies, villagers embrace traditional life according to their belief in “kastom”, just as they’ve done for hundreds of years. The women are dressed in grass skirts, the men in penis sheaths. Their bamboo walled huts have thatched roofs and bare dirt floors. Livestock are part of the furniture. Bows and arrows are still used to hunt game and children wander about wielding huge machetes (“bush knives”) against leaves shaped like paddles.
At Sulphur Bay, next to the village of Ipelukel on the eastern side of the island, there are hot springs on black sand. The water temperature, in parts, reaches 60C. This bay is Port Resolution, where Captain Cook came to explore Mount Yasur, in 1774.
The village people worship a God called John Frum (as in “John from” America). Here is a curiously disjointed story about a man who was stationed nearby in World War II, stumbled into Ipelukel, and suggested greater prosperity would follow those who threw away their Bibles and returned to the old ways. The people did as they were bidden but still wait for the prodigal to return.
A village girl called Mary appears by my side to offer services as guide. “What are you chewing?” I ask. “Lap lap,” she answers.
Lap lap is a gluey ricey thing stuffed with marinated meat and wrapped in banana leaves that are buried in a hot lava stone oven. I’m thrilled to find it on the following day, lined up on tables amidst the whirl of colour that is the Lenakel town market.
It’s Saturday and my guide has woken early to stock up on resort kitchen supplies. Philemon is a heroic figure, the grandson of Chief Tom Numake, with dreadlocks that fall to the earth as if they are the roots of a giant banyan tree. His hair, like Sampson, is a personification of manhood.
“The girls are asking always to lie with me but I don’t do that,” he says emphatically. “I am with my wife.” Marie works
as a nurse at the local hospital. “So you can see why she cost me so many cows,” he says, laughing.
Philemon was meant to marry within the blood line of Chief Tom but met Marie in a kava bar in Port Vila. “I tried really hard to get her,” he confides. “I took her to my place after about six months but I had first to give four big pigs, and one cow, and some fish like tuna, to her family.”
“Wow, she must have been some looker,” my companion jests. Phil is laughing too as he stuffs a pile of earthy brown taro into a bulbous woven palm basket. He loads the jeep with tropical fruits and leafy vegetables. There’s a dead bat that’s slung from the low-hanging bough of a tree but resort guests do not eat bat. Another marketeer grabs the corpse quickly, snaps the wings for easy stowage, then hands over wads of notes. “It’s good,” says the man.
We head back to the resort where Phil works as dive master. Employment is a family affair here: his mother is a chef; his two sisters work in the restaurant. Connections run deep and community is lore.
“I love the people in this place,” confesses John Marsh, the Australian who owns the resort. He had dreamed as a young teenager of owning an island, sailing around the South Pacific, “girls in every port”. He ended up with eight acres of leasehold land on Tanna after a kava deal clinched with Philemon’s grandfather — Chief Tom — 20 years ago.
Kava is a drug made from the roots or stump of the kava shrub. It is known to cause such unsavoury side effects as apathy and skin ulcers. “I woke up about 10 hours after the kava ceremony,” John recalls. “I couldn’t lift my head: it was like a brick tied to the pillow.”
The Marsh family were regular holidaymakers in Vanuatu from the 1980s, but John came for the first time to Tanna on a tourism conference, venturing out from Port Vila in search of the volcano. The distance necessitated an overnight stay in one of three thatched bures near the airport. The local Ni-van people who ran the “resort” restaurant asked John if he would like to buy the land.
“I don’t know what got into me,” John says. “The place had a nice feel but it was all just coral rocks here. It was a good price and, eventually, I bought the leasehold for 75 years.” By then, John had only one girl in port, his wife Robyn.
Today, the resort is the biggest single contributor to the Tanna economy, employing 50 people. It’s a shady palm-tree pad, criss-crossed with whitish coral pathways. Hibiscuses flank my spacious family-size villa set back from the
beachside bures. The quiet forces you to notice the wind clacking through palm fronds and distant bonfires with smoke curling upwards. Days dawn to the sounds of village life — kids, dogs, cockerels going off, sometimes accidentally around midnight.
White chairs for books or snoozes or sunsets sit beside a nice pool that seems barely used. Eileen, the receptionist, spots me paddling in the chlorinated water before lunch one day. “Oh,” she says, slightly chastising, “there is the ocean there.” She is gesturing towards a largely untouched coastline studded with some of the South Pacific’s best-preserved coral gardens.
This is my first experience of an archipelago uncontaminated by hotel chains, fast food outlets, reality television and legal liability clauses. Somehow, charmingly, Tanna has been overlooked by mass tourism in spite of being only 45 minutes by air from Port Vila. How heartening it is to land at an airport without a baggage carousel but with a sign that reminds passengers: “Time you travel you mas putum on slipper or shoe”.
With and without slippers, island life on Tanna hints at what the world might have been, had we not stomped about so much on the natural order of things. It’s an education in the simple traditional values of people, language and culture; a place of green peace where every day is an adventure.