We jumped on the paddleboards and headed into the village to speak with the chief and to explore a bit. With the shallow draft we were able to go straight over the reef making for a shorter paddle. Once on shore I walked up to a villager to ask if we could leave our paddleboards. Bill was very kind and explained that we had pulled up to the primary school but that he would walk us to the chief.
A short conversation with the chief gave us permission to anchor and to explore the island. Off we went on the nice road that circles the island and provides access to the three villages. All told it is about a 3.5km loop. The first village on the North side is Pelongk. We were met with a few inquisitive kids, one of whom followed us for a long way but didn’t seem to understand English. Bummer. We did talk for awhile to one villager who was headed to his garden. Carl and Roxy felt he was friendly but I felt I heard he didn’t like visitors and that it changes their village – hard to disagree. My interpretation could have been due to the language barrier, and we did see two home stay locations on the other side of the village so I don’t know.
More walking through the jungle led us to the Pescarus village and our longest conversation. We met a couple very nice families. The kids were playing a card game while a father was scraping coconut for lunch. Roxy had a long conversation with the mom while I was entertained watching and cheering for the card game. There was a good amount of trash talking going on in Bislama (local language). I pulled out my phone when asked about where I live and showed them pictures of the mountains and of skiing. I’m sure they must think that is a crazy sport. Around this time the husband of the mom Roxy was chatting with arrived. It turns out he is the Minister (religious type) for the Depart of Economics in Port Vila. His English was great and we got caught up on the full details of the village and his job, and most interesting how the Chinese were attempting to push out the Vanuatuans in Port Villa and Luganville. Many government buildings and a wharf have been built at the Chinese governments expense. No demands have been made yet but it is well known that China would like a military base in Vanuatu (China continues to deny these claims).
Saying our goodbyes we continued on and came across three ladies relaxing and kids playing in the ocean. Three, three year olds splashing around completely unsupervised. And yet they didn’t drown.
Conversations began and I learned that a guy from OZ (Alex) owns a nearby island and a catamaran. Two days ago the ground tackle broke and it washed up on to a reef. The locals were able to help him refloat the boat with the use of barrels and the breaking of some coral. The next challenge was getting his anchor back. Collin from SV Parlay put on dive gear and was able to find and get a line on the anchor to pull it up. What could have been very bad ended up with only damage to the bottom of the keels. Alex put on a big party for those that helped with a pig and food from the village. Along with kava and beer. Damn, we missed that one.
One last stop was triggered by someone calling to us as we headed back to our paddleboards. Another friendly villager wanted to trade some fruits. We had a t-shirt so next up was figuring out what he had, he handed us a couple papaya that were not quite ripe but okay, some bananas, and a small pamplemousse. Our goodbyes and thank yous said, we headed out of the village and back to our paddleboards. Our short hiked turned into a great three and a half hour adventure!
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