After a good too many hours circumnavigating the globe, we arrived in Port Vila, Vanuatu's capital 'city', close to midnight on Saturday. This is the first blog since then, because internet doesn't exist on Sundays here. We booked into a nice enough hotel, found Australia had conned us out of about 30 pounds each and settled in for some proper sleepikins.
Sunday was filled with small nostalgia bombs. Bongos, Twisties, Splashe, Tusker and in a small corrugated iron shack with a red light above its door, kava. Kava, kava, kava. Like drinking mud laced with peer-pressure. We were on about 7 or 8 shells a time when we lived here previously. Now, after one, we almost threw up, got pretty upset with ourselves, and basically ran away from the whole affair.
On the reverse side of that, the Bislama has been working out sweet. It's the national language, and by the end of our original tenure, we could chat away fluently. Recent attempts to revive our understanding of it between the group have been hesitant and stilted. But, once to oppressive skies of British grammar were far behind us, all nervous verbal stumblings fell away, and we conversed freely once again. People here love it. We're set apart from the usual, annoying, condescending tourists. And with sunburn shifting slowly but definitely into tan, our worries are dispelled: Vanuatu welcomes us back.
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