Imagine if you will stepping from the most backward-looking, primitive African village onto the welcoming, fragrant byways of, say, Palm Beach’s Worth Avenue and you will pretty much have in your mind the startling transition from Vanuatu to New Caledonia. This place has a powerful and, I have to admit, welcomed Wow! factor. […]
Located far to the south of Port Vila, Tanna is at once the most remote and primitive of all Vanuatu islands. Its people live today as they have always lived. Those in the bush have one-room huts with a thatched roof and woven grass mat or bamboo walls. Some have floors raised above ground to deter the rats that are a constant bother. […]
Once known as the New Hebrides, Vanuatu is today a collection of spectacular, jungle cloaked islands strung out across the South Pacific lightly populated and seldom visited by tourists. It is the first place we have visited whose people are Melanesians as distinguished from the Polynesians who dominate every island east of here all the way to Easter Island. […]
If you were to count every scrap of soil or rock above high tide, these islands would number in the thousands and you would have one of life’s more boring preoccupations. But of these only 322 are large enough for human habitation and just 106 actually have people living on them. […]
The Kingdom of Tonga is one of the world’s last constitutional monarchies, having declared its independence from the English in 1970. Its population of 120,000 are mostly native Tongans spread over an archipelago of 171 islands, only 36 of which are inhabited, divided into three main groups. […]