Coverage / Vanuatu
Vanuatu
Melanesia
A Y-shaped chain of some eighty islands in the South Pacific, between Fiji and New Caledonia, Vanuatu is a Melanesian nation of active volcanoes, WWII wreck dives, blue holes and living kastom culture. Espiritu Santo in the north holds the SS President Coolidge wreck, Tanna in the south has the drive-up active volcano Mount Yasur, Pentecost is the home of the vine-jumping Naghol land dive, and Port Vila on Efate is the capital and gateway.
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What you can do in Vanuatu
Witness / Attend
- Mount YasurApr May Jun Jul Aug Sep OctMount Yasur is the volcano you can walk up to and watch erupt. Standing 361 metres over the ash plain of Tanna, it has been in near-constant eruption for centuries, earning the name Lighthouse of the Pacific from the sailors who navigated by its glow, and unlike almost any other active volcano you reach the rim by a short walk from a 4WD track rather than a hard climb. At the crater edge you look straight down into vents that boom, hiss and fling incandescent bombs of lava into the air, the ground shuddering with each blast, and the show is at its most spectacular in the last light of the day when the red is vivid against the dark. The volcano is sacred to the people of Tanna, and the same trip usually takes in the island's kastom villages, hot springs and the John Frum cargo movement at Sulphur Bay, so Yasur is both a raw geological spectacle and the centre of one of the Pacific's most intact traditional cultures.
- Naghol (Land Diving)Pentecost IslandApr May JunNaghol, the land dive of Pentecost Island, is the ritual that gave the world the bungee jump, except here there is no elastic and no safety line. Through the yam harvest season, from April to June, the men of southern Pentecost build tall wooden towers on a cleared hillside, sometimes 20 to 30 metres high, and lash two forest vines to each diver's ankles. One by one they climb the platforms, clap and call to the crowd below, then throw themselves head-first at the ground so that the vines snap taut and their shoulders or hair just brush the freshly tilled earth, an offering meant to ensure a good yam crop and to prove a young man's courage. The whole village turns out, women and children singing and stamping at the base of the tower, and each dive is a genuine risk of life taken by choice. Witnessing it is one of the most extraordinary things a traveller can see in the Pacific: not a show staged for tourists but a living rite of the community, held on its own land on its own terms.
- Port Vilayear-roundEkasup Cultural Village is the closest place to Port Vila to step inside Vanuatu's kastom way of life. Set in the Erakor rainforest about ten minutes from town, it is a working traditional village where the chief and his guides meet you in fibre and leaf dress and walk you through daily Melanesian life: which forest plants are used as medicine, how mats and baskets are woven, how hunting traps and weapons are made, how food is grown and cooked in the ground, and how kava is prepared and shared. You taste local food and kava, watch string band music and custom dance, and hear the stories and beliefs that still shape island life. On Saturday nights the village lays on an island feast cooked in a stone oven. For a traveller arriving on Efate with limited time, it is the most direct window into the culture that the outer islands live in full, and it has twice been named Vanuatu's best tourist attraction.
Best months at a glance
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