In Port Vila we were staying at Le Lagon Park Royal Resort. It is located on the otherside of Vila from the Bauerfield International airport and cost VT1500 to get to, by taxi. The airport is named after an American WWII pilot, who after a flight from French Caledonia to Vanuatu heard of Battle of Guadalcanal and flew straight to the Solomon Islands without refuelling and successfully shot down 6 Japanese planes. Several weeks later he was reported lost at sea. 

The hotel sits at the edge of the lagoon and is surrounded by a golfcourse and has a very capable staff. It would be quite possible to spend a whole vacation based at the hotel, taking hotel organised tours. In the afternoon we went down into Port Vila to eat and look at the shops, shops being somewhat of a novelty after two weeks in the Solomon Islands. We found a small chinese restaurant and ate squid satay chow mein in their garden overlooking the lagoon and drinking Pripps. Port Vila appears to be fairly compact and has a reasonbale number of shops of a wide variety; the difference between Port Vila and Honiara was quite striking.

As you would expect quite a number of the shops are aimed at tourists selling items you can pick up in any major city around world. However, in recent years various Pacific Islands have started to experiment with pearl fisheries, and now some of the finest black to be found come from this region. Although we would kick ourselves later we decided not to buy a beautiful black pearl, for V20,000, thinking mistakenly that we would be able to find a comparable specimen in either Samoa or New Zealand. Our own preference is to buy gems loose not already set. The settings of rings is usually exactly what you like and there isn't much of an additional cost in having a ring designed to your own taste, most of the cost goes on the gold not the labour.

An somewhat related aside for anyone that might find themselves bound for Australia. Australia is the worlds only producer of black opals, by our own reckoning the most beautiful of all precious stones. We picked up 3.5 carat harlequin in Sydney for A$450. We brought it back to London to be set, but before we let anyone work on it, we got it valued so we could insure it. The valuation obtained in London was almost 10 times what we paid for it Australia. It seems that if you have a couple of hundred pounds spare there is some easy money to be made. But be warned, one of the jewellers we took it too in London refused to to attempt a valuation because he had had an unfortunate experience some years previously. He bought a number of black opals, only to find out at a later date that they were normal opals that had been boiled in treacle. Also don't buy doublets or triplets, they are just a waste of money.

Like other capital cities in the Pacific, Port Vila has a large market. We visited it in the middle of the afternoon and it was obvious that most of the business for the day was done, and there were only a few stalls left with produce. The building itself is a modern construction and unlike the markets in Samoa and Fiji lets plenty of light in. 

When we returned to the hotel we went snorkelling in the lagoon. There was not very much to see, the bottom of the lagoon is covered in grass and had only a few fish although we did find a moray eel in a hiding in a crevice, there are large numbers of a fat 5 legged starfish which is pale brown colour except for the lumps in which it is covered, which are orange.

That evening we ate at the hotel. It was a buffet of traditional Vanuatu food, and was either over cooked, or just didn't appeal to us, although I did eat quite alot of the corned beef and banana and of course there was plenty of roast pork.I find it strange that corned beef should be popular in Vanuatu, one of the countries major exports is beef, and so why a western tinned import should be used I cannot imagine.

Traditionally pigs were too expensive eat, because they provided one of the sources of the islands currency, their tusks. Pigs would be kept in a confined space, their upper front teeth would be removed, and they would be fed by hand. After seven years the tusks would have grown right around so that they formed the first ring of a coil. It is these coiled tusks that had a great value associated with them.