Harmonie - Slumming it in Santo - Palikulo Bay, Espiritu Santo Island, Vanuatu

Slumming it in Santo - Palikulo Bay, Espiritu Santo Island, Vanuatu

Harmonie

Don and Anne Myers

Wed 16 Sep 2009 02:23

15:29.555S 167:14.939E

Note: Scroll down to see the picture and description.

August 30th we left Oyster Island as planned and motored (wind from the wrong direction) the short eight or so miles south along the coast of the big island of Espiritu Santo to Palikulo Bay. There we reunited with Storyteller and spent three nights in the calm, reef-ringed bay. Palikulo Bay is close enough to Luganville that a taxi ride into town takes half the time on the rutted road as it does from Oyster Island. Also, the cell phone signal is pretty good, so we were feeling completely at home in yet another picture postcard spot. Never mind that in order to catch the taxi we had to call the driver and ask that he wait for us on the part of the road that runs nearest the beach while we hauled the dinghy up on the sand and cabled it to a palm tree. Not that theft is really a problem around here, we are just, as everyone says, 'very American' - which can be loosely translated to mean 'overly and possibly even absurdly security conscious'. As a matter of fact, we are often ridiculed by these Australian, Kiwi and Brit boaters when we admit that we close and lock the companionway (entrance to the cabin from the cockpit) every night, regardless of where we are. They also eye the steel bars Don installed in our hatches before we left home with envy? wonder? no, just a barely veiled glee. 'What's this?' they are thinking, 'The security crazed Americans have bars in their hatches??' Yeah well, it allows us to sleep with no worries. Predictably, the reaction we get from other American boaters is completely the opposite. They are always fully sympathetic and sometimes envious of our barred hatches.

Beaching the dinghy is always a treat when we are wearing our 'town' clothes. For boater women this means wearing ankle-length pants which then have to be rolled up high in order to slide out of the dinghy and wade into the beach with dinghy in tow. Not so bad until your Crocs or flip flops fill completely with sand and despite all efforts your pant legs unroll and float along in the salt water as you slog to shore. This was the way the four of us (Sue and John from Storyteller and Don and I) arrived ashore on the cloudy day we had designated as 'going to town day'. We called the taxi guy - his name was Da - dressed in our town clothes, crammed in Da's smaller than a VW bug car with no window controls and made the usual rounds to the market, ATM, bakery and grocery store. Then we moved on to our real going to town mission - extended lunch at the new French restaurant. Luganville, or Santo as it is often called, doesn't have much. It's full of old Quonset huts from its days as the largest US military base in the South Pacific during WWII, it has a couple of Chinese stores filled with a mish-mash of merchandise, a couple of small cafes, a market, a grocery store, two banks, a couple of scary-looking hotels and a new French restaurant. Vanuatu or what used to be called New Hebrides, was ruled by a 'condominium government', which unfortunately for the ni-Vans, was a combo French/English governing body with double the bureaucracy of the more typical single-power colony. Vanuatu gained its independence around 1970 at which time many of the French and English left. Lucky for us, there are still a fair number of French people living in Vanuatu and one particular family opened a new restaurant in Santo (Luganville) just a few months ago.

Picture 1 - John, Don and I slumming it at the new French restaurant in Santo. We didn't even mind that they couldn't make half the items on their menu because the ingredients weren't available. We know what it's like to make do with bananas, papaya and grapefruit when what you really crave are raspberries, strawberries and apples (not to mention ice cream). Note the white linen tablecloth - this is almost unheard of in these parts. We didn't get back to the boat until 4pm that day, and once there we laid around and did positively nothing. Now don't be thinking that this is something we do all the time. This was highly unusual boater behavior and only happens on rare occasions when Sue, acting once again as tour guide extraordinaire, identifies a French restaurant that we 'must try because it will be lovely and we're sure to adore it'.

Anne