Islands
Learning about the red-tailed boa on St. Croix, snakes on the loose.
My first beach read for this week on St. Croix was Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Read it fast, and enjoyed it, as eerie as it was to be reading a post-pandemic novel in the midst of a real pandemic.
Sprat Hall Beach, west end of St. Croix, U.S.V.I.
Waking up on St. Croix.
Got my nose plumbed for SARS-CoV-2 yesterday, and received a negative result by dinner, so I submitted my details to the USVI travel screening portal. Am excited to get back to St. Croix this weekend, visit family and my favorite beach, and walk through Frederiksted.
Family visiting for the birthday weekend (Anna and Erin consecutive days) and the request came in for cocktails so I called up Ruhlman’s Friday Cocktail Hour: The Mojito. In a few weeks I’ll be drinking mojitos at Rainbow Beach on St. Croix.
I was looking for another mango beer and saw this local brew made with guanabana (we called it soursop in Vanuatu). I was expecting the strong taste of watermelon jolly rancher—how I describe the taste of soursop—but in this white ale it was very subtle.
Major cyclone Harold hitting Vanuatu right now, will be going across some of the bigger islands and Paama (where I lived) will be hit hard. Worried for our family and friends in Liro Village.
New blog post to mark this special day that’s turned out very differently than I had planned - was supposed to be in New Orleans, then on St. Croix in the USVI. But, with health and a job and family, I feel fortunate: Fifty
I am once again a member of the North Carolina Peace Corps Association. (I served in the Republic of Vanuatu from 1997 to 1999.)
I changed name of my micro.blog to Wan Smol Blog, homage to Wan Smolbag Theatre Company in Vanuatu. I have great memories of watching them beneath the big Liro mango tree as they performed skits about importance of voting. In Bislama, ‘wan smol blog' means one micro blog. ;)
Oliver is 9 today and requested ‘burn your lips chicken,’ the family name for the Chicken with Asian-Style Sweet and Sour Sauce (recipe in The Best Recipe cookbook). I’m cooking, in the sailcloth apron I bought on the Roseway Schooner in St. Croix.
Sitting with my father at Leatherback Brewing Company first anniversary party. He’s having a passion fruit frozen lindy from Rosa’s Stand (St. Croix legend), I am drinking Backyard Guava IPA made with guava grown in backyard of Aaron, my step-brother & Leatherback co-founder.
Lukim yu, Mungau
I was astonished, and saddened, to see an obituary for Mungau Dain in today’s NYTimes. He was Ni-Vanuatu from Tanna Island, starred in the film Tanna.
Mungau was young, and died from an infected wound. And he was in the capital, which has the best health care in the country. “Mr. Dain had traveled to Port-Vila because he was seeking work as a fruit picker in Australia or New Zealand.”
The geographer Kirstie Petrou has published a number of research interesting articles about urban-rural migration in Vanuatu, as well as what happens to Ni-Vanuatu when they go to Australia and New Zealand to work in the orchards.
My trip to Austin gave me flight-time to finally write a long post about our homecoming to Vanuatu this summer : A return to Paama
Heaviest rains yet from Florence, this morning in Chapel Hill. The deluge reminded me of the rains in Vanuatu during cyclones, so heavy and loud on the tin roof there we couldn’t hear each other speak. Chapel Hill and Durham roads are flooding, so I’m at home still.
Sounds of the South Pacific
We’ve been back from our epic South Pacific trip for nearly two months, and only now am I getting a chance to log the various sound recordings I made during our week in Vanuatu. I hope to stitch together the best of the sounds and interviews into an audio postcard. Here, though, is one full clip of my interview with my son, Oliver, on the morning we first woke up at Erakor Island Resort in Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu.
That’s Oliver in the green swim shirt in the photo above.
During our trip to Vanuatu, I was happy to see World Cup fever, with many people flying the flag of their chosen team on their trucks, buses, and attached to bamboo high above their houses. Here’s a truck for France crossing the Yasur ash plain on Tanna.
One photo from our evening atop Yasur volcano on Tanna Island in the Republic of Vanuatu. If things ever settle down at home (major plumbing and water problems!), I’ll write about the trip and all we did.
Home again. Our grand family adventure in Vanuatu is complete.