I appear to have brought home a rather pesky cold from Vanuatu which is, if I may use the common parlance for a moment, completely retarded. I mean, malaria I would accept as only my due (though we were sucking down the tonic water like it was, well, water, albeit liberally salted with gin). Something exotic and tropical and probably mosquito-borne seems appropriate. Of course, everything that fits that description is a horrible, awful, debilitating thing to have, so I should suck it up and deal, but hey! I'm sick! I'll whinge if I feel like it!

Lord knows there's precious little else to do but build little houses out of germ-infected tissues and try to see if I can replicate Anthony's feat of snotting in his own eye.

Two weeks in Vanuatu: certain things stick in your memory

• The friendliness of the Ni-Van people. Wandering down the street our first night there (a Sunday), everyone we passed said "Halo" or "Gud Naet" as we passed, with a great big smile. Everyone we interacted with - guides, wait-staff, shop assistants, bus drivers - was friendly and chatty, asking where we were from, whether we'd been to Vanuatu before, what we'd done, what we were going to do, whether we'd tried kava, whether we liked it... Anthony noted that in most places, one didn't make eye-contact on the street, especially not after dark, for fear of being mugged. Here, mugging seemed infeasible in general, but most likely to occur for not making eye-contact and saying hello.
• Amiable chaos. "The thing about this country," our in-situ friend declared, "is that everything works, it's just a question of how and how long it takes." One was never quite sure precisely how things were going to work, whether you were going to get what you ordered (or what you had last time) or something subtly (or considerably) different. Travel was vague, because the buses were basically taxis, not driving set routes but whatever the driver felt like doing (or, presumably, where his passengers wanted to go). Everybody spoke Bislama (the local pidgin) and one of English or French - thankfully Anthony speaks both, so communication was more or less assured... mostly. But for all the confusion, misunderstandings, delays, vagaries and oddities, everyone was thoroughly cheerful about everything, so it didn't really matter. Let go and chill, man.
• Economic disparities. There were people doing everything. There were waitstaff and bar staff and maintenance and cleaning and shop people and guides and drivers and crew. There always seemed to be at least three people filling what would be a single position in Australia. But, on the flip side, they were being paid, collectively, less than a single wage. We had guides who were earning around $12 a day (a fraction of what we'd paid for the tour, suspiciously). The resort staff were paid a pittance. And sure, they went about their jobs in a generally relaxed way. But this is Vanuatu. What's your rush? We found hints about "local rates" all over the place. (For instance: we got an upgraded room for $50 a night. Due to the sort of clerical error endemic to the place (amiable chaos, remember) we ended up with a double upgrade for that price, and a deluxe penthouse bigger than our apartment for a pittance.) Though there was a great urge to make use of the local rates (through our in-situ associate) I sort of had to wonder if we should - our income was so much more than anyone local; shouldn't we contribute what we could? Tough call.
• Meat. "Oh no," I thought, barely a week before we left, "I hate seafood and I'm going to a Melanesian nation. What the fuck was I thinking?" But actually, we discovered that the Ni-Van people don't actually eat that much fish. (There was, of course, copious seafood around the place for big-spending tourists.) They're fond of pigs, which are pets, livestock and currency all in one, but there are also cows wandering free-range around the island. The happiest cows in the world, and they make tasty eating! Since Vanuatu has had equal British and French influence, there are lots of serious French restaurants around the place, so all my concerns about starving were washed away by foie gras, crazy steak and crepe suzette.
• The tourist schtick. Yeah, sure, we did all that. We swam in, purportedly, the largest pool in the south Pacific. We swam in the other pool during day after day of happy hour, nursing our gin and tonics by side-stroking. We swam with fishes and coral and flippers and snorkel gear. We went on all-day cruises with turtles and dolphins and more snorkelling. We went up the Mele Cascades, where the water looks like it was coloured in by a six-year-old who's found the crayon labelled "aqua". We kayaked up a river into the heart of darkness as the lowering clouds split open and bucketed down upon us (that, actually, was one of the best days of the whole holiday). We did not a) get our hair braided; b) get riotously sunburnt (a little, yes, but not riotously); or c) buy a whole lot of kitsch shit (only useful things, including the fan and the ukelele).
• Adventures in localism. Hanging with a friend over there on a youth ambassador program, we spent quite a bit of time socialising with other volunteer quasi-locals. They took us to the out-of-the-way nakamals and fed us kava (the world's only legal and side-effect-free narcotic? shame about the taste). We all played board games for the duration of a wet and worthless Good Friday. And they taught us Bislama, sufficient for Anthony deciding his mission this holiday was to learn how to play Paranoid Android on the ukelele in Bislama. A great deal of ingenuity was expended on the project, but a great deal of mirth was caused, so I think it can be declared a success in general.
• The roughing it. The roads! Oh god, the roads. Tail-end of the wet season, of course, and asphalt is a thing of scarcity in Vanuatu. A lot of the roads were in various stages of washed away. We shelved a plan to drive around the island of Efate (capital island) because it would have required a tank, not the doorless ex-Chinese army jeep we'd contracted for the purpose. On Tanna Island, we slalomed down a mountainside in a 4WD. Fortunately when the time came to go back the other way, the roads had had a chance to dry out a little, and there were only two or three spots of multiple-attempt. We also, in Tanna, stayed in a lovely little village-run guesthouse. Very authentic, very close to nature, very dark when the lights went out at 9:30 when the generator got turned off and the trip to the lone, communal (but flushing!) toilet seemed very, very long...
• The volcano. Speaking of Tanna, we went there to see Yasur, one of the most accessible active volcanos in the world. We went up there with a local guide around sunset. "We'll sit back a bit," he said, "until I get a feel for what the volcano's doing, and where it's safe to stand." Later, as he led us up to the rim of the crater, he said, "If it throws stuff up there, it's safe. If it's up here, then listen to what I say. You will be fine." We remembered his advice later, when a chuck of red-hot rock went whistling on a high trajectory over our heads, to land some thirty metres behind us. Boomboom.

It's nice to be back home, though.