Standing off Port Vila

The stress levels on Kukka have been over the top. We’ve had power trouble. One of the biggest challenges for live-aboard sailors like us is keeping up with the demands of the mod cons. Ours are comparatively modest. We have a small fridge, and of course, our laptops and the array of  navigation instruments now considered essential equipment, but we don’t have a television, a microwave oven, a washing machine or a freezer, all relatively commonplace on “serious” cruising yachts.

Like everyone who is disconnected from mains power, whether they be on land or at sea, we have to generate amps enough to stay out of trouble. There are only a few ways of doing this, and like most yachties we use a combination of solar and/or wind power, and fossil fuel to keep the batteries charged up. So if I say that we’ve had problems with both our wind generator, and our engine alternator, you’ll possibly appreciate why the charms of Port Vila are only slowly revealing themselves to us. We’ve spent far too much time looking inwards, and far too little looking at where we find ourselves. 

We’re swinging from a mooring near Iririki Island, a short dinghy ride from the seawall marina run by Yachting World. This is a pretty nice place to be stuck, and there’s even more to look at since the round-the-world ARC fleet came in during the weekend. Alex is beside himself with excitement since, as he says, all the major Swedish production boat builders are represented here in Port Vila. We are flanked by a sleek Hallberg-Rassy 42 and a Najad, and on the seawall there’s a Sweden Yachts 45, which is the raciest of them all. Who needs boat porn when there’s a live boat show happening around you?

I hurried along the Lini Highway to get to the market before it closed at noon on Saturday. There was a traffic jam along Port Vila’s dusty main drag, cars and minivans crawling nose to tail, people pouring out of town for the weekend, I presumed. I knew I wouldn’t have much choice of produce, but no less than any other day. People sell what they grow – bananas, yams, firewood, coconuts, kava root, pawpaws, citrus. If I wanted tomatoes or capsicum, I’d have to go to the supermarket. I walked back to the dinghy dock with 10 passionfruit, a small eggplant, a bunch of basil, two pink grapefruit, a green pawpaw, and sweet potatoes, the last packaged in a sweet little basket woven from fresh woven palm leaves. 

 The markets, open 24 hours a day during the week, are a window into another world which I can’t claim any understanding of yet. Port Vila is not the best place to start. It’s a town of 45,000 people, and one of only two towns in the whole of Vanuatu, where 80% of the population still live in villages of less than 50 people. Port Vila has ATMs and internet and a casino. The pharmacy is well stocked, and a few cafes have espresso machines (Vanuatu grows coffee). Still, it’s not so long since there was no town, just a generation or two ago, and the people you see here don’t feel like townspeople. 

There’s been a rice shortage in Port Vila this past week, and the last 5 kg packets of Sun rice have been selling out “like hot tuluks”, according to Friday’s Daily Post. “Though some of us may hate to admit it, we are directly or indirectly dependent on rice,” the front page article said. In many homes, people don’t have gardens and can’t afford the steep prices of root crops, fruit and leafy greens at the main market (even I, with vatu spilling out of my wallet, don’t find the market particularly cheap). The Daily Post report ended philosophically; “But then, the best things in life do not come free and this is town life.” 

Alex and I have walked up the hill at the back of the Lini Highway, and peered through the gate of the prime minister’s house, checked out the presidential palace and the parliament house. There’s a surprising amount of barbed wire around the perimeters of houses and schools and other institutions. I’m not sure how people who mostly still live under traditional communal rules understand private property, but the barbed wire suggests that there’s some tension there.

On the positive side of the ledger, when Vanuatu celebrates 30 years of independence on July 30, the Port Vila authorities are putting on a free public lunch after the Flag-raising. They are expecting to feed 40,000 people, the paper said. Who does that leave out?