Lamen Bay Adventures - Another Magical Time

Lamen Bay turned out to be a great place to spend several days. The bay is picture-postcard beautiful with some beaches black lava sand and others white coral sand. Every day we watched turtles surface for air all around the boat. Sometimes close enough to almost touch and others farther away. They look like the gophers that come up in the kids game where you try to whack the gopher with the hammer. They come to the surface and all you see at first is their shell just at the surface, then they quickly poke their blunt heads up, take a quick gulp of air, then put their head down. They do that once, twice or three times before diving down, showing the tip of their tail as they go under. They have flippers and are kind of a green color with yellow highlights. Their eyes are huge for seeing underwater. Very cute. There must be at least five or more, one being clearly larger than the rest. They are not very shy, except for motors, and you can snorkel above them and watch. White Swan got some great underwater pics that we will post when we get to an internet cafe.

There are also dugongs there. Cindy went with White Swan and Vicki on Kuna over to Lamen Island and swam with a couple of dugongs there. A dugong is like a porpoise but looks like a manatee with a big whale-shaped tail. They don't have a dorsal fin though and have a blunt, boxy snout. You can probably look them up on Wikipedia online to find out more. I did not go over so missed seeing them myself, but I got things done on the boat including taking apart and rebuilding my big fishing reel, which was a trip in itself after the bits fell apart in my hands and a parts drawing that was not much help in reassembling the reel. I managed though and used it to catch a big Wahoo fish on the way to Ambryn Island where we are now (more later on that).

The villagers at Lamen Bay were really nice. We met the "famous" Tasso at the Paradise Sunset Beach Bungalows Resorts and Restaurant/Yacht Club. Anything that occasionally has Tusker beer for sale at an anchorage is a "yacht club" out here. It does not take any more than a sign, or no sign at all. The beer there was only slightly cool as they have a tiny hotel-room size refrigerator that only runs when they run the generator which is not often. We had a great meal there which I think I wrote about already.

One of the highlights of our visit was the nature tour to the "Million Dollar View" with Atis Jack. Atis is one of the local elders and is missing most of his front teeth. He does have one in the middle on the bottom but it does not affect his speech. He had really good English and lived in Australia for a few years in the 1980's. He is very chatty and informative and put together his tour out of friendliness, ego and a desire to make some money. The tour was only 500 atu each ($5US). He starts from his sister's house, where he had just finished building a new house (hut built out of old tin sheets, posts and woven reeds) for him and his wife, Helen, to stay in when they are down from their house up on the ridge above the beach village. The tour ends up on the ridge and Atis shows you various shrubs and trees that they use for medicine or other uses along the way. There were plants for headaches, wounds, making childbirth easier, and getting your girlfriend to like you more. For the girlfriend you (the hopeful boyfriend) you take the leaf of this ornamental type bush, crush it and put it under your foot and put a sock over it. You then think of your girlfriend and stomp your foot and she is supposed to like you. Yeah right but it is a cute story and I think it has been used more than once. Or else, he just made it up for fun.....

Atis is very articulate though and makes a perfect guide, keeping your interest up and moving you along to the next thing. We met at 9am and it was already getting hot and muggy when we started up the steep slope on a single-track trail up the ridge stopping for plants along the way. Atis had to cut some steps in the slippery clay soil and put some pieces of beach coral in the steps to help us gringos/palanges from slipping down, which happened the last couple of tours before ours. At the top of the ridge is a disheveled, but neat and tidy (if you can picture that) cleared area with a shack house. This is Atis's and Helen's house on the ridge and where their orchard and gardens are. He showed us all the fruit trees and vegetable gardens and told us what each thing is and how they take care of them. Hung up on one small tree are pieces of a wrecked airplane wing or tail. His brother was in this plane when it fell and crashed in to some trees on another island and they brought the pieces over as a memento. His brother and the pilot lived and climbed out of the plane and down to the ground from the trees where they crashed!

Off to the side of the family homestead and towards the bay, Atis had cleared some trees and bush and put us a small shelter with bamboo benches. This is his "Million Dollar View" and how he named his tour. He is a real natural promoter and decided he needed a "hook" for his tour marketing, and it works. The view is excellent and we got some good pictures of the boats anchored in the bay in the blue waters. The tour was outstanding, especially for $5. We will be recommending it to any future cruisers who come by.

At the end of the tour, Atis asked the six of us to come to his sister's house by the beach for a dinner of laplap and kava if we wanted it. We all agreed and decided to each bring something even though he said that was not necessary. And he did not want us to pay him anything. We think it was partially just the native hospitality of these fine people and also a house warming for the new house. The house was furnished with some finely woven floor mats and he drug in a couple of long square timbers and propped them on some stumps for a bench seat. On the mats were all the dishes made by everyone. Cindy made a chocolate cake with some chocolate/peanut butter frosting that went over really well. It went so fast Cindy did not even get a piece. Helen wrapped some of it up in tin foil and kept it for sharing with her kids or herself for later! Helen and her kids had made the laplap. Laplap is a big treat out here as a local food. It is made with different starchy foods like taro, cassaba, yams and/or bananas. Tonight it was yams and bananas. These are mashed up together into a batter like mixture and made in to a big round "pancake" about and inch thick on big banana leaves. On the top of this they put a small layer of "island cabbage" which is like a turnip or spinach green. They built a fire outside over some small lava rocks and get them really hot, then scoop some over to the side leaving a layer on the bottom. The laplap, covered with the leaves, is placed on top of the rocks and then the other rocks are scraped back on top of the laplap to cook it. I almost forgot - they usually also put small portions of meat on top of the mixture before covering it - sometimes fish or chicken but ours was beef.

The laplap comes out almost like a thick chewy pudding. It is tasty but not gourmet fare in our part of the world. Over here it is a staple dish but one that you would make for when guests come over, especially when it is made with yams, which are for "special" guests or special occasions. It was very nice of them to make it for us. Before dinner they made kava, which they seem to make every night any way. Atis's daughters ground up the kava using an old sausage grinder after cutting it up in small pieces with bush knives. It is not washed off very much so has some dirt still on it. This is mixed with water in some old wash basins on the ground by Atis. He takes a cloth and scoops up the ground kava mixed with the water, and wrings the juice out in to another wash basin. He does this repeatedly until he produces a big basin full of this dirty looking "water". On Epi, it is OK for women to drink the kava and to help make it. That was totally taboo on Tanna.

I had promised I would not try it again, but I took a couple of bowls from Cindy and downed them and it was definitely better than I remembered from Port Vila. I still would never make a habit of drinking this foul stuff though. Cindy and Dianna both liked it though and got quite a buzz from it, some much that after dinner and we were leaving that Atis told me to make sure I helped Cindy home in the dink, which I did. Cindy's legs were not working too well at that point. Dinner was quite a success. Atis made a little speech about the house and his guests and did the blessing (he is Presbyterian) before dinner. Cindy thought he was totally cute. All and all, it was a very special day topped off by a long evening with Atis and his family. Pics will show up as before, sometime.

Another part of Lamen Bay was Mis' Katy. Katy is a volunteer from Australia and is a degreed librarian. Lamen Bay is the home to a boarding secondary school with many concrete and tin roofed buildings. The kids come from other villages on Epi and even other islands and stay for weeks at a time and go to school - boys and girls - no "dating" allowed. If they "date" they get expelled after one warning and there are the occasional pregnancies. Hormones!! Any way, Katy is on contract here trying to organize the library, which is a nice big building with proper shelving but minimal reference materials. She is trying to change all that. She is pretty and very outgoing in a direct and blunt manner. She is also missing having a boyfriend here in a big way and even came over to the yachties one night at the yacht club to see if there were any single, 30yo white guys available! Her hormones were obviously showing and she made no bones about it. Very strange and funny to be joking around like that with her. We were all in stitches and laughing so hard it hurt! She is 32 years old and a bit of a vagabond. She is applying to be a camp counselor in the US and has already been picked for an interview after a quick application but she does not have access to email, nor regular mail, nor internet, so she was trying to figure out how to get the thing done. Her contract here expires in January so she does not have too long to wait. We brought her some primer books in English we got in Vila. She will put them in the stacks for the kids who are supposed to only speak English at the school - no Bislama - the pigdin English of Vanuatu. Ex. "Me save toktok Bislama. Naem blong me - Joe."

We had to keep moving though as the season will be over here in one month, so we got up at dawn and left for Ambryn Island for a 42nm passage in light winds. We had to motor almost the whole way, in mixed conditions, including several convergence area squalls where the winds blow at near gale force from all directions with driving rain for about 30 minutes, then go away to a dead calm. We had to get to the upper end of Ambryn so had to go around the west side where we had a great view of the active volcano inland. It was belching huge clouds of steam and ash which we could smell on the way across from Epi, 15 miles downwind. I got some pictures but they don't do justice to it.

At the end of the passage it was blowing a steady 15kts out of the northeast, which is supposed to be a bad direction for the anchorage we were headed for. We scoped it out and decided to chance it with lots of anchor chain out and then the wind died so it has been OK. We also caught our big Wahoo on the way over, then White Swan caught an even bigger one. Ours was over 30# and a very pretty fish. It was hard to get it up out of the water and on the boat as we motored along. My rebuilt reel worked nicely. I gutted the fish in a large plastic trash bag to keep the innards and blood off the decks but that only partially worked and I had to wash the decks twice. We cut it up and put it in the reefer and will have fish for days. WS gave their whole fish to the locals when we got here so they owe us something. Anyway - got to go to shore now. More later.

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