Ford Rocks in Vanuatu!

‘11/02/20, 06:00AM Tropical Cyclone Uesi Cat 2, centre left of B8. Mov S/SW past 6 hrs. Moderate rainfall over Vanuatu, very rough seas with heavy swells…’

Uesi is giving New Caledonia a pizzling right now.

In Efate it is warm, humid and cloudy. We’ve had strong winds and 162 mL of rain over the past couple of days. Our tanks are full, Mary’s tank too.

Cyclone alerts have gone from red to yellow to blue. We are not on a colour alert at the moment but we will continue to get bulletins every three hours until the threat is well out of range. It’s a watch and act time.

Last year, Cyclone Oma hung around for ages, wandered over to Australia then wandered back to Vanuatu. It went on for weeks. It was not a good time to build a house which is what we were trying to do. While Oma wasn’t destructive, it was persistent. Rough seas interrupted shipping and all of our building materials came from overseas; China and New Zealand. Heavy downpours turned our dirt track to mud. Problem followed problem and we were hemorrhaging money.

I call our house ‘The Miracle House’ because it’s a miracle it was ever built, on so many levels.

We’d arrived in Port Vila mid-way through January 2019.

For the first five days we stayed at the Kaiviti Hotel which is clean, spacious and friendly. Kaiviti has self-contained accommodation, right in the middle of town with comforts including air-conditioning, a lovely pool and a poolside café, handy for those nights when you’ve had a big day and you’re too tired to cook a meal.

We hit the ground running. First job was to buy a vehicle. We initially rented one from Mackenzie at Hertz as we had when visiting Vanuatu on previous trips. This time we weren’t leaving, we were staying so we needed to stop the flow of rental costs as soon as possible. We had a budget of about 2.5 million vatu (AU$30 000). We hoped to buy a used duel-cab 4WD in good condition. If we spent that much money on a truck, we didn’t want to be spending more on renovating it.

There are a plethora of used vehicles for sale in Australia and you don’t have to go too far to find them, even in the outback. Prices are competitive and strict registration processes ensure a decent standard of roadworthiness.

While in Australia, Tim had been keeping track of used vehicle ads in Vanuatu through websites and by subscribing to local newspapers online. Every now and then he’d see an ad that got his motor racing and I’d remind him that you can’t buy a car without actually driving it then he’d volunteer to take a quick trip to Vanuatu to do just that. If we’d been living near Sydney or Brisbane, I might have agreed as return flights to Vila would have only been about $500. Living in Menindee in far Western NSW, domestic flights between Broken Hill and Sydney cost double the international flight plus accommodation in Sydney when the flights can’t happen on the same day.

We have flown from BH to Vila via Sydney in the one day before but it is a marathon. We’d leave Menindee at 4am to drive 120km to BH, driving slowly through hordes of kangaroos hanging around on the road, nibbling at the tiny shreds of green growth on the sides of the bitumen. Even in the arid climate, a miniscule amount of dew trickles off the bitumen overnight, enough to grow a narrow strip of green fuzz on each side, more than enough to attract the starving roos, poor buggers. Two hours later we’d arrive at the airport which is the home of the Flying Doctor service for this region. It’s a beautiful airport. Floor to ceiling Pro Hart wall paintings reflect this famous Australian artist’s connection to Broken Hill. They writhe with colour and action. As you zoom up into the air, the Mars landscape below, all cinnamon and russet swirls, reflects the colour palette of Pro Hart.

Departing Broken Hill at 7am, it’s a three hour direct flight to Sydney, longer by forty minutes or more if stopping at Dubbo in mid-western NSW or Mildura in northern Victoria.

You arrive in Sydney sometime before lunchtime, depending on delays and taking into account the half hour time difference between BH which operates on Central Australian time and Sydney, on Eastern Australian time. Then you have an eight hour wait for the 8pm Air Van flight, if it’s on time which it often isn’t at that time of night being the last flight of the day.

If things go sort of according to plan, you’ll arrive in Vanuatu after midnight, could be twelvish, could be 2am.

Could be two days later. It happens. It’s The Rock Factor.

Anyway… we needed to buy a truck urgently so we arranged for Edmond and our friend, Willie to come with us to visit every car dealership in Vila, all seven of them, might have missed a couple of little ones. We quickly discovered that any vehicle priced at less than 2.5 million vatu, was not worth looking at. Late model used vehicles in good condition were expensive and tended to sell quickly. We drove from place to place, test driving vehicles with increasing disappointment.

One truck, we really didn’t want to go near but somehow found ourselves talked into taking it for a drive. Tim drove out of the lot onto the road, turned right at the first opportunity and drove straight back to the dealership, all of 100 metres. The steering wheel wobbled so badly he couldn’t drive it in a straight line.

At the last dealership of the day, we found a truck that we wanted to test drive. It had no fuel so Tim gave the man 1000 vatu to buy some. We took it up Klems Hill, a steep climb behind Vila. If we were going to part with so much money for a truck, it needed to be able to cope with this hill. We were almost to the top when the truck broke down, leaving us on the side of a rural road with no tools and no phone number to contact the man who’d recently waved goodbye to us. Tim found the jack and hammered at the battery terminals with the lever. The car started and we sailed down the hill and into the dealership, thankful that we’d been able to start the bloody thing before dark.

That night, we found ourselves talking about the truck we’d had to sell when we left Australia. It had been a wonderful vehicle and Tim had kept it in excellent condition. The only problem with bringing it to Vanuatu was that its steering wheel was on the wrong side.

The next day we set out alone on our search. It looked like our luck had changed. The first place had a new arrival, a nice looking, late model 4WD. The salesman came over rubbing his hands together, he could smell a sale. We were excited when we heard the price, 2.5 million; the best value for money we’d seen. The salesman accompanied us on the test drive. It went very well. Tim liked what he saw under the bonnet. Everything was looking good. We returned to the dealership, the salesman went inside the office to get further information about the car’s history. He went away upbeat and came back downcast. He’d made a few tiny errors. The sale price was actually 3.8 million vatu and the car had already been sold, just before we arrived. Imagine buying a car then seeing someone else drive your new car out of the lot while you are signing the paperwork! We eventually saw the funny side of it.

On the way back to revisit dealerships in the hope that a new vehicle may have just arrived for sale, we found ourselves in heavy traffic, crawling past Saralana Park. There, in the car park, sat a green-blue Ford Ranger with a sign on its windscreen. It had been there yesterday too, we'd passed it often. The price was 2.9 million vatu, more than we wanted to pay. What we wanted to pay wasn’t cutting the cheese. We stopped and looked it over. No obvious rust or repairs. We rang the number and in ten minutes a man arrived by bus to tell us more. After inspecting the engine, we took it for a drive. It seemed solid. Tim was happy with it so I was happy with it. Though we managed to reduce the asking price a little, the budget was about to suffer its first blowout.

It took the rest of that day to pay for the truck, or ‘common vehicle’ as it is called at the registry and to arrange transfer of ownership, registration and insurance as well as returning the rental truck.

At the end of the day we thought we’d done pretty well to buy a decent vehicle at a reasonable price within two days considering what had been available in Vila at the time.

A year later and our Ford Ranger still rocks around Vanuatu! It’s only let us down once which is another story for another time.

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