Around the island tour Efate

24/09/2016 0 Von andiline

Since I couldn’t dive any more today (my flight is at 7 AM tomorrow morning) I had booked a tour around the island. There is only one street around the island (meaning you can’t just cut short by going in the middle…). I had thought about going with a tour bus but then I wouldn’t have been free with taking pics whenever I wanted and whenever I saw something interesting. And it was a good decision. The tour guide/driver came to get me at 8:30 AM and then we went to Mele beach first. There is a small market and an older woman approached us. I wasn’t sure what she wanted but it turned out that she had been looking at the shirt from the dive-shop that I was wearing… I somehow had not really checked the number of clean shirts that I still had so I had done some washing yesterday evening but they weren’t dry yet. So I had to wear the dive-shirt. And the guides are mostly from Mele-village so the people were curious if I was a Ni-Vanuatu (meaning long-term inhabitant)… 😀 😀 😀 We went up the hill to ‚The summit‘ where I took some of my first ‚Cologne Cathedral‘-pics… The idea for those pics is my sister’s but I really liked it so I instead of a duck this time I have my cathedral with me… After that we continued around the island. You can see the destruction of cyclone PAM everywhere. It was one of the strongest ever in the Pacific and it is very, very sad to see that. In the villages they partly still don’t have new houses yet and those who have them have houses in the sun now whereas in the past they were in the shadow. There are some relicts from WWII there. For lunch we went to the Taka Castom Village. Castom dances are the traditional dances with old songs that the villages all have. They differ from island to island. But first I had the buffet-style lunch with rice, sweet potatoes, chicken/pasta salad, some coconut-milk-pastry and citron-juice. It was really good. Since the other tourists had already seen the castom dance the guys did it again just for me. It was just a 10-minute show though which was OK with me. They had the Welcome-dance, the Bird-dance and a Peace-dance (funny that they do a peace-dance when they try to scare you… 😉 ).
After that we continued around the island and found some really nice, white beaches. The ‚Blue lagoon‘ (big tourist attraction) to me was not really blue though. It was more greenish lagoon… 😉

But let me show you the pics… On this one you still see a boat that has been thrown on the island by PAM (lower right side)