Continuation from yesterday”¦.

There were quite a few shops, most selling a strange assortment of random goods, kind of like mini Targets with just a few food items, a few clothes, a few home improvement items, etc. It looks like they stock whatever they can get their hands on to sell. Eric did manage to find a used propeller for Kosmos that he thinks will help with speed.

We walked the length of town and stopped for burgers at a small café. It was really hot outside, especially along the tar road that seemed to just radiate heat. We caught a cab to customs, located at the commercial wharf just north of where we landed the dinghy. They checked our ID and made sure we had official business on the wharf before letting us in. Like most of the wharfs we have seen, there were a few buildings and lots of containers scattered about. The customs building is another leftover low blocky military building. We handed over the envelope and filled out a form. We were on our way in a few minutes.

The next stop was to the Shell office to find out about buying duty free fuel. We didn’t really need fuel, but it would be comforting to be completely full before embarking on our next long passage. It turns out that the fuel is not cheap and they pump the fuel from drums, and we decided it was more cost and hassle than it was worth.

We headed back to Kosmos to get ready for dinner. We were going to a buffet and show at the Aore Resort. We are sad to report that we all forgot cameras, so we have no photos at all to put up. We really would have liked photos and video of the evening’s events.

At 18:00 (6:00 pm), the show began. There was kava and fried coconut appetizers at a serving station that you could have as much of as you wanted. The kava wasn’t as strong as Epule village. A string band came on and played for about an hour. The music is happy and fun to listen to. The buffet opened at 1900 (7:00 pm). The national dish is called lap lap, and there were two varieties to try banana and taro. The lap lap is starchy and incredibly dense and heavy. It doesn’t take much of it to fill you up. It doesn’t taste very good. There was also a roasted pumpkin and kumala (sweet potato) dish that was good. The dish called tuluk looks like a sushi roll without rice on top of the seaweed. It is a cassava (aka manioc and tapioca) and beef filling wrapped in fried spinach in a coconut cream sauce. The tuluk was pretty good. There was a whole poulet fish out on the table and you just picked off as much of it as you wanted. The fish was excellent, and so was the curry sauce that accompanied it. The rest of the dishes were more familiar to us whole prawns in garlic sauce, beef curry, chicken in soy sauce, potato salad, green salad, rolls.

After dinner the main performance started. Dancers from the Banks Islands, an island group north of Santo, which are known for their flamboyant costumes, were the performers. Around where we were the traditional attire for the islanders is simply leaves to cover their private parts, so it makes sense that the resort imported dancers with outfits that may be less offensive to the tourists. One of the amazing things about Vanuatu is the diversity of culture. In Polynesia we saw lots of dancing, and most of it was similar from island group to island group. In Vanuatu, you could see a couple dozen dance shows from various islands and all would be extremely different.

The show started with an assortment of animal sounds coming from the darkness around the open gazebo dining area. The dancers were making the animal noises, and they sounded remarkably real. They mimicked sheep, chicken, birds, goats, and pigs. If we weren’t sitting in the middle of a resort we may have thought there were really animals out in the bushes.

Then they came out of the darkness and into the center of the dining area. The dancers were males of all ages, including kids as small as four. Some wore dry grass skirts, some wore two woven mats, one over their crotch and one over their buttocks, leaving the thighs exposed. They had white lines painted on their faces, chest and thighs. They all wore funny little hats with wigs attached to the hats. The wigs were made of dry grass. Some were natural color, some dyed a darker brown that is closer to the locals hair color, and one was striped with natural, red and blue. Some of the hats were pointy and some were round, most of them painted bright colors. They all wore several strings of the noisemaker nuts around their ankles. They all had big branches of assorted foliage tucked into the back of their waistbands, and the foliage covered most of their backs. Of course, they were barefoot.

There were two men in the center of the group, one holding a couple of branches of a certain tree that makes a hollow drum beat noise when hit, and one holding sticks and beating on the branches in the first man’s hands. They stood in place as everyone danced around them. Someone would yell out a command and the group would, in unison, move to the right or left, or change the dance step they were doing. The dances made low grunting noises that accompanied the music from the drums and ankle rattles. The dances involved a lot of hopping and squats and definitely took a lot of energy. In between dances, the dances would lean forward and grunt while resting for a minute or two before starting the next one. We were quite impressed with the show.