Hello All, This is our first entry on behalf of our service in Vanuatu with the Peace Corps. It is partly to distinguish this portion of the blog from my entries from Mexico and partly to alert those who are still on the e-mail list that they are still active subscribers to this blog. I'm sure that action can be reversed if you are uninterested in our upcoming adventure (imagine...). We'll be leaving September 17 for 3 days of preparation in California. Then we depart for our island home in the South Pacific. Further contact information is available through our parents. [View Full Entry]

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August 4th, 2008 Port Vila Harbor The past few weeks in Port Vila have been quite an adventure in logistics. After arriving so much earlier than planned, I had some time to survey they scene before diving headlong into purchasing supplies. The time proved to be invaluable. Most of the industrial supply shops here in town sell the same general items for about the same general prices. Certain stores have certain specialty items, so hunting for what you need takes a lot of trips to a lot of places. In the first week of our time here I must have met [View Full Entry]

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July 22, 2008 Port Vila, Vanuatu I’m sorry to be so slow with the updates. It’s just that my time here doesn’t belong entirely to me. There is a major time crunch with the purchase of supplies and I find myself with little time to upload photos. To catch up a bit… There we were in Fiji. Lautoka turned out to be smaller than Suva but about as equally dirty. It’s an industry town with a container ship pier. One of Fiji’s greatest exports is sugar and the country’s largest refinery was there in Lautoka. The smell of factories left much [View Full Entry]

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We Arrived in Vanuatu on 09/06/08. It was a little cooler than we had expected, having travelled to Fiji and Samoa in the last quarter of the year. We stayed in Pt Vila for a week taking in a few tours and then hired a car and travelled around the Island. The people were wonderful, the scenery was great and we had a ball. We could explore at our leisure and we were never hassled by people wanting to sell things which is always a bonus! The car we hired was a little 850cc Kancil ( not sure but it looked [View Full Entry]

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Relief, it is a wonderful feeling isn’t. The nervous tension that builds up, controlling your senses until that moment when it disappears. It may be sitting on the loo because you have been busting the 'drop off Les Enfants' or when your boss tells you that you don’t have to do a presentation. It appears in many forms; well our relief was when we got back to the Blue Pango. A mediocre style accommodation before we left but the very picture of opulence when we returned. The walls were concrete, the toilet did not talk to you, and the bugs were [View Full Entry]

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‘The happiest place on earth’. That is how Vanuatu is officially known, whether it is because it has friendly smiling faces and warm personalities, year round sunshine and crystal blue waters, or because it is a tax haven remains to be seen. Even arriving off our plane late at night was pleasurable, as we were welcomed by a local band in grass skirt playing happy island music, while we waited in the queue for immigration, which followed up with beaming smiles. Nothing like Heathrow eh? It was all with a sense of relief that we were even in Vanuatu as we [View Full Entry]

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"You are almost late!" Air Fiji check in counter guy Checking in at 7.30am for my 7.45am flight to Nadi and only being "almost late" - I love Pacific time! If any of you miss being able to visit the cockpit during plane trips these days, I highly recommend flying with Air Fiji on one of their EMB-110 planes. If you are seated in the 1st or 2nd rows, you can watch the pilots adjust all the important switches and levers as well as have a look out the front window if you lean into the aisle a bit (like I [View Full Entry]

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Ohh man, Im brand new to this fancy schmancy blogging thing, but Im going to give it my darndest. Ill try to use this format in order to let any of my family and/or friends ( basically anybody who cares to read some sometimes incoherent babble and waste 10 -15 min of their perfectly good time) know what is going on around this side of the planet. I hope that I dont let ya down... Here goes.... Well, after just around 40hrs of sitting on planes, but mostly in airports, my traveling partner and new attorney , The Benn and I [View Full Entry]

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So I managed almost 2 weeks back in Suva after my Uganda trip before I headed off overseas again. In that time I squeezed in an election night party and passing my Fijian Beginners language exam. This time it was back to Vanuatu to take a course on Community Organisation Law in the South Pacific at the University of the South Pacific in Port Vila. The course basically covered everything from charitable trusts law to tax law to new laws that cover all of the above and more. It was an interesting course and good to meet students from across the [View Full Entry]

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well that was an exsasting 5 days! As soon as we left the safety of the coral reefs in fiji and on our way to Vanuatu the heavens decided to open up and send rains of many different variations, from light drizzle to 'it doesn't matter if we wore wet gear or not!' after spending the first day either bent over the railing trying not to feel nauseous or in the fetal position holding on for dear life and trying not to be swung out of my top bunk! the second and third day wasn't much better. I wasn't sea sick [View Full Entry]

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