Yu No Kick Part 19: Ambae

Aside from Mount Yasur, the volcano on Tanna, the volcano that gets talked about the most by Peace Corps volunteers is probably Manaro on the island of Ambae. I think a lot of Manaro's fame comes not from the volcano itself, but rather from the fact that it's associated with a tattoo that a lot of volunteers have gotten. Manaro isn't as active (at least not in the flinging-lava-up-into-the-air sense) as Yassur, and I knew right from the start that my penny-in-the-volcano dreams would not be fulfilled there, but the lure of visiting a volcano is always difficult to resist and so when I was invited to climb Manaro with a group of volunteers I, of course, accepted. Although not as active as Yasur, Manaro is generally considered to be more dangerous as the consensus seems to be that at any moment it could blow and begin raining fire down on the surrounding countryside. Some parts of the island of Ambae have even been evacuated in the past for fear of this.

Ambae is just a little bit northeast of Malekula (although the plane ride necessitates a stopover on Santo first), and so, unlike in Tanna, no pleasant changes in climate could be expected. Shockingly, Ambae's airport had even less going for it than Norsup's. The building beside the tarmac could, just barely, be called a shanty. It looked to have been hastily constructed using bamboo and coconut wood, but a few details had been overlooked, including a roof. A few coconut leaves rested on top of the frame, providing a couple, haphazard, patches of shade to waiting passengers. The office was covered by a hodge-podge of tarps and plastic sheets which looked like they would hold up in a rainstorm about as well as pieces of paper. They even seemed to be using a bathroom scale to weigh people's luggage.

Justine met me at the airport and we caught a ride into Saratamata, the provincial center of the province of which Ambae is a part. Saratamata followed the, what seems to be, standard provincial center town layout. There were a few stores selling canned and packaged food, a soccer field, and some government offices. They'd also apparently recently received some international assistance in constructing a new Provincial Education Office. Buildings built by Ni-Vanuatu on the outer islands all tend to share a number of characteristics. First, it's painfully obvious that none of the construction crew bothered to shell out a couple bucks for a level (keep in mind that buying enough cement, timber, and nails to put a small building together is going to run you at least ten grand in Vanuatu, so it seems like tacking on the extra couple dollars for the level shouldn't really be a problem). Doorways are uneven, window frames as well, walls tend to have a slight slant to them, which is most noticeable in the corners of the structure, which are never quite a clean 90 degrees. Second, it's equally obvious that no one knows anything about how to properly make concrete. The concrete bricks that houses and other buildings are built with have a consistency closer to that of a four-year-old's sand castle than the sturdy rock that they're supposed to resemble. Accidentally kicking one such brick will, likely as not, cause it to crumble and break. Thus, even newly built structures tend to look like they're in the rather advanced stages of falling apart. Finally, none of them make use of any shapes more advanced than the rectangle. Ambae's provincial education office, in contrast, had been built by an EU construction crew and made use of the rather advanced L-shape for its floor plan. Being on an outer island for a long time, you grow used to that new-yet-already-partially-dilapidated look that most of the buildings tend to have, and you sort of forget that it's actually possible to do better. Thus it's always kind of a treat to walk around a building where all of the doors are the same shape and the walls are actually perpendicular to the floor.

I was coming in on the tail end of a big youth leadership workshop that some of the volunteers were running at a big secondary school called Vereas Bay (not actually on a bay. Actually the school had originally been located on a completely different island in a village called Vereas Bay. For some reason they decided the move it to Ambae and didn't change the name). Vereas was a huge school, probably about the same size of my residential college at university. They had a nice campus with two long lines of dorms and classrooms enclosing a pleasantly maintained grassy quad. There was even a picturesque beach which seems like it would be a real distraction from any ongoing classwork. It was school break, so the majority of the students were gone, but there were still a fair number of people present as the school was hosting not only Peace Corps' youth leadership workshop, but also an unrelated cooking workshop (in my opinion, the latter is probably addressing the greater need in Vanuatu. While it's true that youth leadership is definitely lacking, the state of the cuisine here is far more deplorable), which seemed to be working out pretty well as the cooking workshop participants were able to try out their new cooking techniques on the leadership workshop participants. The group of volunteers I was to hike the volcano with were planning on catching a truck from the school at 5am the next morning to carry them to the base and so I hung out for the closing night of the workshop, which included a visit from our Peace Corps Country Director and the US Ambassador to PNG (and a number of other Pacific countries, including Vanuatu), which caused much excitement.

The next day 5am (followed by 6am and 7am) rolled by without the arrival of our truck, which meant that we would have to postpone our trip up the volcano as we would no longer have enough daylight for the drive to the base followed up the hike up and back down. It was actually later discovered that the number we had for the truck driver who was to pick us up was, in fact, incorrect and actually belonged to a random guy on Pentecost, who had good-naturedly agreed to drive us to Manaro despite the fact that he lived on a completely different island, probably didn't even have a truck, and had absolutely no idea who we were. Scrapping our original plan, we remained in Saratamata until the afternoon and made arrangements with a with another truck driver to drop us at a guest house at the base of the volcano, where we would spend the night and then climb Manaro the following morning. The guest house was pleasant, if primitive, and included kava and dinner that night, which was actually surprisingly good with lap-lap manioc (which is generally agreed to be the best kind of lap-lap), fresh prawns, and vegetables.

Manaro is a not a visitor friendly volcano like Yasur. There's no truck road leading up to the summit, making it accessible to your average out-of-shape tourist. Instead, a small, winding bush trail leads through six or so miles of jungle before depositing you at the top. It's recommended that you start the trip early as it's about a five hour walk each way so, if you leave around 6am, with ten hours of hiking and a half-hour or so at the volcano, you can just about get back before dark. We started walking around 6:30. The guest house provided us with bagged lunches, rice, taro, and canned meat wrapped up in little banana leaf lunch boxes. We also were provided with a Ni-Vanuatu guide to ensure that we did not become hopelessly lost in the bush. The trail, in general, was in very poor condition. Rocks, mud, tree branches and vegetation impeded progress with frustrating regularity. The trail cut up and down steep slopes (instead of traversing them), meaning it was often necessary to climb on your hands and knees or descend on your butt in order to keep from slipping and falling. I've actually heard that the trail becomes totally impassable during the rainy season and has to be re-cut every year when the rains let up. It also did not help that I was wearing sandals (although our guide was wearing sandals as well and didn't seem to mind). Really though, the main problem with the trail was its monotony. Aside from a plant oozing an unusual-looking gelatinous sap, there was basically nothing worth seeing for the duration of the five hour hike, just a lot of similar-looking jungle. Some Ni-Vanuatu on Ambae are trying to push Manaro as a major tourist attraction, but some very serious work is needed before this can become even remotely feasible.

Unlike Yasur, Manaro is not continually active. Not only are there no fireballs regularly flying out of it, but it occasionally it goes through spells where it doesn't do anything even remotely volcano-like at all. During these times vegetation begins to grown around the rim of the volcano. Then, when the volcano begins acting up, increasing amounts of hostile chemicals in the air and soil kill everything off. When we finally emerged from the jungle it was into a field of waist-high shrubs, the new growth since the volcano last went quiet a few years prior. Punctuating the shrubs were the twisted forms of dead trees, killed off some time before but not yet rotted. Their white, ashen trunks and branches looked like the bones of some great monster, picked dry of meat but not yet buried underneath the ground. The blighted trees surrounded a vast, misty crater, seeming to form the rib-cage of a recently slain titan. When we arrived, nothing was visible through the mists. The world seemed to end in an impenetrable fog of nothingness. We sat down to have lunch while our guide explained to us that, since it was our first visit to Manaro, we would probably not be able to see anything because the volcano is too shy. As he was saying this, the clouds overhead dispersed and the sun was able to shine through. In a matter of seconds the sun had burnt off all the fog and left us with an excellent view. Immediately below us, maybe fifty meters down, was a huge crater lake whose water was an unnatural bright greenish-blue. Supposedly, the lake is hundreds of meters deep and is unusually acidic. Some Ni-Vans claim that the water from the lake has healing properties while others hold that it's dangerous both to drink and to swim in. Either way, there was no apparent way to easily descend to the lake from where we stood to put these hypotheses to the test. In the middle of the lake, the cone of the volcano jutted above the surface, a protrusion of land that at first appeared to be an island but, as the fog lifted, became clearly visible as a sharp, circular upthrust whose center was oozing fog and smoke. The opposite bank of the crater was also briefly visible, home to more bone-white trees lining it like teeth. We had a clear view for a couple minutes and then the clouds rolled over the sun once more and the fog re-formed.

Manaro had an unquestionable mystical character to it. The fog, the dead trees, and the brief glimpse of the volcano all suggested a feeling of magic, and I could easily see how people living on the island would attribute spiritual properties to it. Really, more than the nature of the place itself, it was the lengths one had to go to get there that made it so mysterious. There was no parking lot visible from the top of Manaro, no Vanuatu Post mailbox (like there is on Yasur), and no collection of Australian tourists. It is not possible to take a quick trip to Manaro, just for the afternoon. It was a place where people were very obviously the strangers. It would be impossible to feel at home on top of Manaro because one is only ever there for a very short time, after a very long walk, and so it is by definition alien. Unfortunately, if Manaro were ever to become a major tourist attraction and a truck road were built up to its summit this feeling would probably be lost.

It had already been dark for a half-hour or so when we finally got back to the guest house where we'd started that morning. Our truck was already waiting to take us back to Saratamata, and had been for a couple hours, as we underestimated the time it would take us to get up and down the volcano. It was almost nine when we made it back to the volunteer's house in Saratamata where we were staying and we were pretty tired and not just a little bit beat up.

The next day some of our group were interested in getting the “road to Manaro” tattoo, having just hiked said road. The road to Manaro tattoo is a very simple concept, just two, black, parallel lines spaced slightly apart. According to local custom, those possessing the road to Manaro tattoo will dance on top of Manaro for eternity when they die. We made a few phone calls and a few hours later a young Ni-Vanuatu man showed up at the door carrying his tattoo supplies. The supplies consisted of a jar of ashes collected from a kerosene lantern, a napkin full of orange needles, and a few dark-colored leaves. We watched as he ground up the leaves and milked them to produce a black-colored juice. This he mixed with the ashes to form a sort of paste. He then used an orange needle to paint the paste onto the skin in the shape of the intended tattoo. He then worked over the areas he'd painted, jabbing the orange needle rapidly and frequently into the skin, forcing some of the black paste in with it. Finally, he rinsed the remaining paste off of the skin, leaving the tattoo to heal. Custom tattooing is incredibly imprecise and attempting to make any tattoo more ambitious than a few lines tends to be a mistake (I've seen some pretty horrible-looking tattoos on people in my village). Still, the road to Manaro is simple enough that it usually turns out fine, and all the tattoos that my group got looked decent enough. Myself, I thought one trip to Manaro was good enough and saw no reason to want to dance their for eternity after my death.