Couple look back on being stuck in Vanuatu
Phil and Natalie Snowdon were hit with a double whammy almost a year ago while on holiday in Vanuatu — but they can’t wait to get back to the Pacific island once borders open.
A category-five tropical cyclone stranded the holidaying Kerikeri couple, before they had to go into a 14-day quarantine upon their eventual return to New Zealand in early April last year.
They were due to return from Vanuatu in 12 days but their Air Vanuatu flight got cancelled a day before the scheduled departure. They were later flown home on a Royal New Zealand Air Force Hercules with other stranded Kiwis.
“Can’t believe it’s been a year. We still feel very grateful to be able to leave, otherwise we’d have been there for a lot longer. We’d have been back to Vanuatu by now . . . it feels like a very long time since we’ve travelled overseas,” Phil Snowdon said.
The friends they stayed with in Vanuatu are doing OK after getting a container load of stuff from Australia after the cyclone and Snowdon hopes the Covid vaccine does the trick so that people can travel again.
“Vanuatu is Covid-free, as are other Pacific countries like the Cook Islands, so I can’t see why we are not getting workers from there. Vanuatu people rely on seasonal work, they need us and we need them.
“Whereas Covid still exists in Australia and yet the Government is talking about a trans-Tasman bubble. It defies common sense. I don’t quite get that.”
Phil and his wife missed Vanuatu and would return there as soon as practicable.
“I hold out hope that the vaccine is going to help because we can’t keep our borders closed forever,” he said.
The Snowdons stayed at a friend’s house in Luganville, the main town on the island of Espiritu Santo, during the cyclone and thought they could come home given the Covid-19 situation in New Zealand.
They flew to the capital, Port Vila, a week before their flight but the Vanuatu government cancelled all overseas travel on March 24.