Saturday, January 16, 2010

First day in Port Vila...


A couple of days have passed since we arrived, and I have been struggling with how to write about this. I started writing immediately at the end of the first day but am having an extremely hard time to wrap this up in a post. There is too much to tell and whether I start chronologically or by themes, I get invariably stuck.  I think I give up on the day-by-day description and will post things in a more relaxed order...


These first three days have been extraordinary. Against all odds we wake up early every morning (around 6:00 a.m.), even on the first day when we were extremely exhausted from the trip. The rock hard mattress makes sure that I never sleep too much... perhaps it's an alternative design to an alarm clock...

From the room, in City Lodge, I could hear some loud screaming on the street. Now I know that it is praying, at the time it sounded like advertisement. I went out to get some bottled water (first and only time I did so, tap water here is great), and the perspective was completely different from the night before.


First thing it took getting used to is greeting everyone passing on the street: "halo", "Gudmoning", "Gudnaet", depending on the circumstances, is a must. People are very nice, and when you talk with them they often say this about themselves. They are very proud of being so nice and warm.

Vila is an extremely expensive city however, perhaps more so than Stockholm or London. This fact put some pressure on us to find a place with a kitchen so we could save some money. Eating out is very very expensive, even if just a hot dog or a simple burger. Nothing is cheap here... well, apart from Kava, but we'll get to that later...
We walked a lot around the area of Port Vila, the market place, the trees filled with Papayas, coconut trees, breath taking views, and a immense heat that we are slowly becoming accustomed to.


We had been in contact with Ghislain, a Canadian guy who's been working in an IT company in Vanuatu for around 2 years, and decided to meet up for some Kava. I will talk about this in the next post.
We got the directions to Galaxie Nakamal, a Nakamal (Kava bar) in the area of Freshwota 2, near another nakamal, called "Green Light". And off we went...


2 comments:

  1. Already on Kava?!! Sounds like you're having fun dude!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Please blog som typical prices, its interesting to know.

    Here i EXPENSIVE phuket, you can for example eat decent thai-food in the street for 50 baht which is roughly 10SEK. Cigarettes in 7-Eleven is about 60 baht..

    ReplyDelete