Anyway..
Zack and I were planning on spending Christmas together and two days before I walked up to his village and he came down to mine to hang out. One volunteer Kara on East Ambae said we should hang out with her for Christmas so we thought that was a great idea and had it in our heads to walk from West to East (which is rarely done).
I timed it using the stop watch on my watch and when we ended it was 8 hours 23 minutes. That doesn’t include a 10 minute stop for lunch – it was all walking. Needless to say I physically couldn’t move after that – it was the most intense walk of my life. Because I knew we were eventually going to Santo for New Years, I packed my kindle, laptop, ipod, speakers and cell so I basically had all of my electronics with me. I did not know that it was going to downpour like crazy and have to ford three different raging rivers. I was so scared I was going to go down and lose all my stuff but we made it through. Afterwards we found a family of cows on the beach who then proceeded to charge down the beach towards us so we had to make a run for it up in the bush. It turns out there wasn’t much of a trail so we got lost for a few hours after completely running out of water so I was survivor man style and sipping the collected rain water from lily like leaves. Apparently we only got half way and had to charter a really expensive boat to take us the rest of the way, by the time we finally got to her house my legs just could not move anymore and I slept incredibly well. Later the next day I found out that during that crazy adventure my kindle got soaked and water got under the screen ruining it. It’s pretty sad because I use my kindle a LOT and now it’s gone :’[ all is not lost though because my parents already got one and sent it to a current volunteer who’s visiting the states and he agreed to bring it back to Vanuatu with him when he comes home from vacation! So my replacement is already on its way and until then it’s back to physical books..
Our Christmas was pretty great, another volunteer Megan from North Ambae joined us and we had a whole bunch of American food! Fried turkey spam, mashed potatoes, gravy, Mac & Cheese, sweet potato fries and a pumpkin pie (which turned out more to be pumpkin pudding, but still delicious!
It was definitely a different experience and didn’t really feel like Christmas being on a hot island with no snow anywhere in the future. It was definitely sad to be away from my family and friends for the holidays but everyone here is in the same boat so it was good to share it with people who are going through the same thing and we had a great time.
We just hung out for the next two days and then found out that the Efate Queen, which is a passenger ship, was heading for Ambae to go to Santo and that’s where we needed to go. Santo is the other main city in Vanuatu and has power and Internet and all that so we all went to go stay with Ryan. We left at 7:00AM to walk two hours to the north port and didn’t get to Santo until 2:30AM the next day! The distance is only a four hour boat ride but it had to stop a few times and let people on and off. The ship system is truly inefficient to say the least, a little boat that can hold 4-5 people per trip had to keep coming and going from the trip transporting hundreds of people, adding up to several hours of just waiting. There really must be a better way but no one has seen fit to adopt that way as of yet.
So we finally made it to Santo and hung out in town for a few days which was great – cheese burgers, beers and milkshakes. There’s really nothing better than that after living off of bread and rice for the past few weeks. A bunch of us got together for New Years, partied all night – just like the states. After New Years we went to this place called Champagne Beach (which if you Google real quick you’d see it’s one of the best beaches in the world) was absolutely gorgeous (pictures to follow in next post).
All in all my first Christmas and New Years away from home was a pretty good time.
0 comments:
Post a Comment