Going Bananas! Life in Vanuatu

Life is short and you only get one go at it. Some of us dream of different ways of living. Choose a dream that sings to your soul and live it.

Turning dreams into reality takes perseverance. Rarely do you win the lottery of life by sitting around, waiting for it to fall in your lap. Plan. Focus. Be patient but persistent. Be flexible; accept that there will be roadblocks then find ways around them. You can even have the occasional meltdown, it’s allowed, but after you’re done, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get going again.

Big changes aren’t easy but you are guaranteed a challenging journey.

Seven years ago my husband and I decided to move to Vanuatu. It was a massive decision which had been brewing for years. We were getting older and like many Australians, we were putting one foot in front of the other on the treadmill of working life, earning money to pay the bills. My superannuation fund was our only savings and I couldn’t access that until I retired. Sometimes I get annoyed about being old(er) but one advantage of being born so many years ago was that I could retire at the age of 58. These days the Australian Government expects young people to work until they are 70 years old. They’ll work for 50 years. When I think about that, I’m happy to be old(er).

We could have stayed on the treadmill and kept living the same lifestyle until we became even older, then retired, bought a small home and lived out our days surrounded by all the comforts of Australian life; things like medical services, mains power and water, shops, hairdressers and television reception, or we could make a drastic change, take a leap of faith and move to a village in Vanuatu that has absolutely none of the comforts described above.

‘Are we crazy to do this?’ Tim and I said to each other on numerous occasions during those years of planning. In truth, we probably said something more like, ‘Are we fucking crazy?’

In the last year of planning when we began telling people that we were leaving, many looked at us as if we were mad while others asked us outright, ‘Are you fucking crazy?’

Yes. We must be.

How did this infatuation with Vanuatu begin? I blame it on my daughter, Georgia.

In 2005, Georgia was working as a night security escort at the University of Queensland while completing her degree in science. It was late when I rang to see how she was. It had been raining in Brisbane. She was wet, tired and she had a cold. Tim and I had been talking about what to give her for her 21st birthday a few months away so I thought it would cheer her up to think about her choices.

‘What would you like for your birthday present?’ I asked her. ‘Money? Or a trip overseas?’

‘A trip overseas!’ was her immediate response. No thinking time required. She’d not travelled overseas before and it had been twenty years since I had left Australia.

‘I’ll come with you. Do you still want to go?’

‘Yes! Great!’

‘Do you want to go to Hong Kong or Vanuatu?’ I’d visited Hong Kong years before and found it vibrant and exotic but I’d recently seen alluring glimpses of Vanuatu on a television series.

‘Vanuatu!’ she said.

A few months later we were there, drinking coconuts amid lush greenery, learning our first words of Bislama, driving on the wrong side of the road, snorkeling blue waters and climbing a lava-spouting volcano during a Category 3 cyclone. How could you not fall deeply in love with a country like this?

That trip was the first of many. I’d work like a demon for three months and return to Vanuatu for two weeks. Often I’d book my next flight back to Vanuatu on the same day that I returned to Australia. I could not wait to get back to that amazing place. There are grooves in the runway at Port Vila’s International Airport where people had to drag me off the tarmac to get me on the plane back to Australia. It only got worse over time.

On my second visit I stayed for two weeks with Joel, Elizabeth and their family at Bethel, near Ekipe on the island of Efate. It was life changing. I’ve never subscribed to the theory of Fate but somehow I found my way to Bethel. Did the mystical Finger of Fate point me in the right direction or was it just a happy accident?

I visited The Family every time I returned to Vanuatu but I also spent a lot of time on the outer islands of Malekula, Epi, Tanna, Ambrym, Rah which is one of the Banks Islands, Vao, the Maskelynes and Santo. Santo and Tanna are popular tourist destinations, the other islands are off the beaten track and you probably won’t see another tourist until you get back to the mainstream islands. I traipsed around the islands by myself at the beginning, staying in local village accommodation, learning so many new things from ni-Vanuatu who were delighted to tell me about their way of life and who encouraged me to take photos and film clips to share with the world.

I uploaded video footage of my travels from those days on YouTube under the name SouthPacific2u. There are video clips featuring local accommodations, markets, Yasur volcano, Joel’s Paramount Chief celebrations, Rom dancing, Ambrym magic demonstrations, sand drawing, truck rides down the Malekula ‘highway’, making local bungalows using woven bamboo, making laplap and sweet nalot, snorkeling over giant, colourful clams, string bands, serene trips in dugout canoes and a not-so-serene flight in a sea plane with Tim at the controls for most of the flight which wouldn’t have been so scary if he hadn’t had a high temperature due to a raging infection from a cat bite (a story for another time).

My favourite clip was of a lady who was camped at the Luganville markets with her baby. Women come from out of town to sell their produce and will stay at the markets for up to a week, sleeping under their trestle tables on the concrete floor. There were very limited washing facilities at the markets in those days, I’m not sure if things have improved. This lady was washing her baby. His gusty shrieks of protest attracted my attention. She had a bottle of cold water, bought from the shop. The water was ice cold so she took a big gulp, warmed it in her mouth for a minute then directed a thin stream of warm water to flow from her lips over his brown and chubby body. She was so good at it; she must have done it many times. I think I called that clip ‘Spit bathing the baby’. Someone once commented that they thought it was disgusting. It’s funny how people see the same thing in completely different ways. I thought that lady was amazingly inventive and skilled.

Every time I visited with The Family at Bethel, Joel would suggest that I come and live with them in Vanuatu. ‘We will build you a house covered in flowers,’ he assured me. For a long time, I laughed about the possibility, so ingrained in my life in Australia, the routines of work, of earning and consuming at the appropriate Australian rate of consumption. How could I leave all of that?

And then one day, about seven years ago, we realised we needed to start thinking about life after retirement and what we saw as the standard ending for most Australians didn’t make us happy. We were still fairly young. We wanted something else; adventure, entertainment and a simpler way of living. We’d been fairly self-sufficient in a previous, younger lifetime, living in a tiny cottage in Northern NSW and we yearned for a similar lifestyle. Why limit ourselves to Australia? If we could live anywhere in the world, we asked ourselves, where would we want to live most of all?

Bethel in Vanuatu was our dream destination. It has become our reality. To achieve this, we took a four year detour via outback NSW which increased our income and lowered our rent, saving us a lot of money. We drastically limited our spending for instance, instead of having a meal in a restaurant we’d eat at home and have intense planning discussions. Tim spent years designing our new home which had to be cyclone and earthquake resistant as well as within our price range. We needed to provide our own water and electricity supply which sounds simple but took years of research and calculation. I was delighted to discover that I wouldn’t be able to use an iron as it would deplete the energy in our batteries too quickly. I happily gave the iron away. I was less happy about giving up my toaster. I like toast and a toaster is so much easier and quicker than lighting the barbecue. Ah well, sometimes you have to make sacrifices.

One of the big questions was when to actually retire. I could access my super at 58 years old or work a few more years and build the capital. Time is a big consideration. None of us are getting any younger. What we were planning wasn’t going to be easy. The sooner we started this adventure, the better. At the start of 2018, we made the decision to leave Australia at the end of the year. We would wait no longer. The downside - we’d have a smaller capital investment, the upside – we’d have extra years in Vanuatu. People say you can’t buy time, but I think we did.

Once we’d made the call, things started moving quickly. I lodged my resignation part way through the year. We gave away half of our belongings, bought a fridge, washing machine and a new Weber barbecue in lieu of having an oven in the kitchen. Wridgways who specialize in international removals organised a container to ferry our things from the desert of one country to the jungle of another. Our 4WD sold quickly. It was a shame we couldn’t bring it with us but the steering wheel was on the wrong side. We arranged for termination of power and phones and cleaned the little flat that had been home for the previous four years from top to bottom. We said goodbye to friends and our dear neighbor, Adam. After one last cuddle with Adam’s three cats, we walked across the road and boarded the Indian-Pacific train to travel 1300 km from Menindee to Sydney on our way to a new life.

Thanks to my uncle, Noel Bell for putting our photo (above) on the cover of his latest edition.

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