Visit To Vila

We went back to Vila for a VSO session of updating, more Bislama and reporting about the projects. Rupert was also included! Vila was very busy and noisy with traffic jams of almost empty minibuses looking for customers!
Port Vila is an odd place. The town is orientated around the rich expatriates who dine in good restaurants, buy smart clothes and furnish their houses with imported goods. Most of the shops are run by Chinese who are generally lazy sellers. The Nivanuatu seem to be confined to the market place and there did not seem to be one Nivanuatu owned store in the centre.
(Sorry, having problem with the photos jumping all over the place)

There is a very attractive Parliament building built by the Chinese, a good Cultural centre and some fine old colonial building hidden away in gardens. There is significant apparent corruption in land deals and when the Minister of Lands announced he personally was going to examine over 2000 land deals going back twenty years he was promptly moved to the Ministry of Justice.

The water front is pleasant with stalls selling objects for tourists, the Numbawan cafe with excellent vanilla milk shake and a good view of the setting sun and a boule ground where people gather in the afternoon to pass the time of day and speak French.

There is a large supermarket Bon Marche  which sells an amazing selection of French cheeses like Morbier and Cantal and has a huge selection of french wine priced at £10 plus a bottle due partly to 40% import tax. One can buy most things except what one really wants like a cafetiere (for the lovely coffee from Tanna island). However the story goes that the Chinese man who owns it has a cartel in Vanuatu and nobody is allowed to price less than Bon Marche, also some odd story about how he may have got a monopoly on rice importation just after independence etc etc.
Emma , one of our volunteers involved in catering, is not impressed about the way the Nivanuatu staff generally are treated. A local five star resort apparantly charges $100 for a massage and the masseuse gets $1.50 an hour with no tips allowed.

We bought three cases of wine before we left and asked them to ship them up on a boat. They said the Christie Lee would leave that night to arrive on Monday morning. It never left or arrived and we thought the wine had been drunk and crew were disabled then the following weekend we read that the Christie Lee had been impounded for illegal entry from the Solomons and for illegal trading. |Oh dear over £200 worth of wine impounded in Vila. How to get it out? Then next day we hear it was no longer impounded due to the intervention of a Minister of Utilities! So it arrived in Santo 10 days after we entrusted our boxes and lo and behold the box of wine is bought out of the hold having been cushioned by tons of copra.