6 weeks out and counting...

Our reward for staying out so long

At six weeks, this is the longest we’ve ever been ‘out.’  We refuelled in Vila on the 13^th of September, and sailed out of there, full of food and water a couple of days later.  In Australia a scarcity of food outside supermarkets meant that we had to duck back into port to re-provision fairly often and the longest we’ve made it before is about three weeks between marinas.

Everyone has gardens in Vanuatu and we can trade or buy food wherever we go, and we’ve been able to collect and filter water in several places, so we’re not dying of thirst.  We left Vila with 400 litres of diesel and we’ve had pretty good sailing conditions, so we could keep going for much longer.  However…

We’re all out of UHT milk, thus also yoghurt; we’re out of honey, peanut butter, vegemite, chips, crackers, alcohol, cheese, meat, eggs, tahini and we’re dangerously low on chocolate (1 block).  The Cannery and the Shop are almost bare, and the fridge is spookily clean.  Yesterday we turned off the freezer.

Looking on the bright side, we still have toilet paper, plenty of rice, lots of GF pasta, three sticks of butter, a few heads of garlic and various dried pulses.  Depending on where we land and what’s in season, we can augment our diet with paw paw, eating bananas, cooking bananas, choko sprouts, island cabbage, bok choy, spring onions, star fruits, mangoes, rose apples, coconuts at various stages of ripeness, chokos, tiny capsicums, yams, sweet potatoes, manioc and just lately, mangoes.  Also ‘snake beans’, if I could figure out a way to cook them that didn’t make everyone retch and threaten to mutiny.

Miles pumping his tenth jerry can

The biggest loss to our diet has been eggs, which are almost impossible to come by on the islands.  There are soooo many chickens but they all free range and people have told us that they eat the eggs only when they find them.  On Ambrym we heard a rumour about a kind of jungle chook called malau that digs holes in leaf litter, lays its eggs in it and covers them back up, sometimes two foot deep.  These chickens, from all reports, look exactly like normal chickens but their eggs are twice as big!  Malachy is as keen as I am to sight the stretchy-cloaca-emu-egg-tarzan-hen and we keep our eyes and ears peeled whenever we wander through the jungle.  It’s possible the locals are having us on.

Island tucker - notice the cacao pods top right

Pretty sure this is not an egg-laying malau, but it doesn't hurt to be vigilant

Another consequence of being away from ‘civilisation’ for so long is that we’ve had to get over a few mood humps.  We’ve found ourselves saying things like, ‘god I would kill for a timtam,’ or ‘get me off this godamned boat and fly me to the nearest 5 star resort or I’ll scratch your eyeballs out.’

The island of Ambrym was the site of my most severe mood hump.  Ambrym is renowned for its sorcerers and black magic and I can only assume that I was hexed on arrival.  How else to explain the dread sense of foreboding, the debilitating heat, the swarms of flies, the rolly anchorages, the snappish paranoid shrew I turned into?  Ambrym is weird and spooky.  Hot water bubbles out of the ground, two volcanoes shroud the peaks in smoke and steam, the sand is black, the sky is grey and even though there are millions and millions and millions of chickens, there are no fecking eggs!  Our efforts to climb the volcano came to naught as the sky closed in and promised zero views for the ten hour return slog, we got kicked out of the Rom dance (for, er, trying to sneak in with some rich tourists)^* and as we went to pull up the anchor and get the flock out of there, we discovered we had no steering.  One of us spent three hours cooking himself in the engine room fixing a leak to the hydraulic line and the other of us spent three hours saying, can we go yet can we go yet can we go yet, like a seven year old.^**

Cooled lava

Rock cliffs that we obtained permission to jump off

This river is so hot it would boil your feet if you stood in it for too long - which didn't stop Budi from running through it

The twin volcanoes of Ambrym

(* Although we would never have pulled such a stunt under normal circumstances, one of the tourist ship’s crew invited us to join the grey melee, his boss agreed and we were only stymied by the local bouncer who demanded cruise ship prices for admission, i.e. $300 for the family.  Are you kidding me? Don’t these people realise there are gradations of wealth in the whitefella hierarchy and that retirees paying $1500 per person per day for their three week cruise are at the top of the heap and that scumbag cruising families who trade the shirts off their backs for a bag of mangoes are at the bottom???

** Not the actual seven year old on board, as it happens.)