September 2008: South Pacific
Luganville, Espirito Santo, Vanuatu pt 1 (S 15.30.905 E 167.11.027)
Aore Island, Vanuatu (S 15.32.252 E167.10.810)
In a nutshell Luganville is steeped in history. I have read and studied and watched lots of WW2 documentaries of both the European and Pacific theaters and was moved to have stepped foot in this area. Before the war this place must have been pristine and unknown and to this day the scars remain; Quonset huts, rusted military equipment, wharf, shipwrecks and discarded unclaimed equipment and supplies unceremoniously dumped in the channel and now called Million Dollar Point.
We landed at Aore Resort (arh-ee) across from Luganville late in the afternoon, picked up a mooring ball and went in to inquire about checking in to the country. We learned that we needed to go to Luganville near the wharf and remain in quarantine until we had officially checked in. As luck would have it we showed up very near closing and part of the dance is making a payment ‘down the street’. It’s hard enough finding Customs and Immigration let alone finding an ATM to get the local funny money as well as finding the payment place. Out of time Bob came back to the boat that we had quickly secured near the wharf with the anchor and we sat on the boat and watched the rain and settled in.
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Most of these places we visit are ocean related. There are lots of boats that transit thru with many people landing on shore. Given these facts you’d expect some kind of pier or dock. Here, we had a small rocky beach landing. It is very primitive considering the history of this place but then again that was a long time ago, this place is really hard to get to and nature has taken its toll on everything man-made. Above, the other Dave quickly makes ‘tak-tak’ (pig-Latin for talk-talk). We aren’t good at it and it is a primary language here. Luckily, proper English goes a long way. Look closely at the pictures of signs because lots of it is actually written in pig-Latin as it is an official language in Vanuatu.
The Lonely Planet Guide and some of our cruising guides state that there is some of the best wreck diving anywhere located here in Luganville on the SS Coolidge. Simply put, it was a converted troop ship that struck a friendly mine on the way into Luganville resulting in 2 deaths and a complete loss by sinking on the shore. I am very critical of dive shops and like to ask a lot of questions and take a look at the gear and equipment. This stems from the scuba training I received early in my diving. All but one of the dive shops was taken aback not having fielded these questions. One shop had a gasoline compressor on his back porch at his house and a tour storefront in town; one shop we never did get a look at the equipment; we chose Aquamarine as they were very knowledgeable, had good gear and the new electric top-notch compressor capable of mixed-gas fills was the icing on the cake for me. This turned out to be a good choice as I had a good experience with them given the remoteness of the dive site and the local infrastructure (ie: the pavement ends not too far from town. Oh yeah, right, that was the end of town).
Bob and I scheduled an afternoon dive on the SS Coolidge. They generally make 1 dive in the morning and 1 in the afternoon due to the depth and the need to decompress. We had time to see some of the town and get some lunch. We were all flush with funny money (approx 1,000 Vanuatu Vetu = 1 USD) and stumbled into a French restaurant. All of us were stunned and thankful of the quality. This time I reverted back to my standard pizza-across-the-world-taste-test. This was by far one of the best thin crust pizza’s I have ever had. After lunch we made it into one of the 2 or 3 internet café’s on this street. This one had decent speeds and decent equipment. It’s always buyer beware in these places. I’m pretty sure we were paying in the range of 20-25 USD an hour. That’s a bit higher than the 2-3USD we paid in parts of Fiji.
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