It’s early evening in Port Vila, Vanuatu, as Frank Aru, a round-faced\u00a0man with straight white teeth, farewells a dozen tourists outside\u00a0Mangoes Resort with the same singsong voice and sweaty-templed\u00a0enthusiasm he’d started the day with.<\/p>\n
“We’re going out to original\u00a0Vanuatu,” Aru, a guide with Melanesian Tours, had told the Kiwi and\u00a0Australian visitors, before taking them in a minivan around Efate\u00a0Island. “This is island styyyyyle,” he’d said, flaunting a flowery blue shirt and lurching from side to side while holding on to a rail\u00a0in the aisle of the bus. “You know what I’m saying?”<\/p>\n
The 42-year-old’s audience, a mostly grey-haired bunch, whistled past gnarled whitewood trees, waving villagers, the odd cattle farm and roughshod houses, some covered in tarpaulins. To a soundtrack of their guide’s non-stop chatter, they saw piles of roofing iron on the side of the road, wind-felled coconut trees and denuded bush, rapidly sprouting and creeping its way back six months after Tropical Cyclone Pam. “Look at the coconut treeeees,” Aru had said. “The fruits are falling dooooown.”<\/p>\n
Glenda Kitney and her husband Ray, New Zealanders, bought Melanesian\u00a0Tours about a decade ago, and employ 14 Ni-Vanuatu. After Cyclone Pam, their staff helped other people\u00a0involved in the tourism sector with the clean up. They also\u00a0volunteered with ProMedical, a non-government pre-hospital emergency\u00a0service. “We had hardly any work for 12 weeks. We were very lucky we\u00a0had family members who sent us money to help,” Kitney says.<\/p>\n
Six to\u00a0eight weeks after Pam, “some of the bigger hotels started laying staff\u00a0off”. Cyclone Pam “ruined many a person and\/or their business”, Kitney\u00a0says. Not least her close friend Troy Spann, the owner of Edge\u00a0Vanuatu.<\/p>\n
“If I said that it was hard, it would be an understatement,”\u00a0Spann, 47, says. Just six days prior to the cyclone, his business\u00a0offering abseil tours of Efate Island’s Cascades Waterfall won Best\u00a0Adventure Tour at the Vanuatu Tourism Awards. On March 27, he posted\u00a0on Facebook: “Landslides and the sheer force of \u2026 water have forever\u00a0altered the landscape out there.”<\/p>\n
Aru, a former shopkeeper, is optimistic about Vanuatu’s recovery. \u00a0“Tell your people, ‘Let’s go and meet Frank.’ Everything is back to\u00a0normal,” he says.<\/p>\n
But despite his assertions of normality, and the\u00a0fact that much of Port Vila’s essential infrastructure has been\u00a0restored, Melanesian Tours’ business is down about 50 per cent on last\u00a0year, “along with most other tourism businesses”, Kitney says.<\/p>\n
Bryan Death, a tourism spokesman for the Vanuatu Chamber of Commerce\u00a0and Industry, says visitor arrivals by air for the June quarter were\u00a0down 27 per cent on the same time last year. Holiday Inn Resort and\u00a0Iririki Island Resort in Port Vila, which together employed more than\u00a0450 staff, are closed until early next year. Pam’s impact is also\u00a0evident on the market floor. Before the cyclone, coconuts sold for 30\u00a0to 50 Vatu (approx NZ50cents). Now, they are 100 to 200 Vatu.<\/p>\n
According to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade,\u00a0tourism and tourism-related activities account for about 40 per cent\u00a0of Vanuatu’s GDP. While Efate is usually a traveller’s first point of\u00a0call, Santo, Tanna, Malakula and Pentecost Islands are also popular.\u00a0Tanna was hard-hit by Pam, while Santo escaped largely unscathed.\u00a0Tourism suffered just the same, however.<\/p>\n
Many thought Pam’s trail of\u00a0destruction rendered all of Vanuatu closed for business.\u00a0 But visitor numbers are increasing steadily month by month, says\u00a0Vanuatu Tourism Office general manager Linda Kalpoi. “While we still\u00a0have a way to go to match the arrival figures of previous years, we’re\u00a0definitely on the right track,” she says.<\/p>\n
A $2.5 million marketing\u00a0campaign is planned for New Zealand, Australia and New Caledonia,\u00a0which Death says will “send a clear message to consumers that their\u00a0holiday in Vanuatu will be the most help that they can give to aid\u00a0recovery”.<\/p>\n
On Nguna Island, off the north coast of Efate, Kathy Garoleo, a 28-year-old tourism product development officer for\u00a0the Shefa Tourism Office, finds a narrow dirt track.\u00a0Her destination is Mere Sau-wia, a village of a dozen\u00a0extended families, who are itching to start offering homestay\u00a0accommodation. They built 10 modest bungalows last year to host a\u00a0group of Peace Corps trainees and now, the thatched-roofed huts\u00a0present a new opportunity.<\/p>\n
Cyclone Pam destroyed many of Mere Sau-wia’s crops. A large concrete\u00a0pad is the only thing left of the community hall. The ladies of the\u00a0village, or “mamas”, are holding kava nights and selling shellfish to\u00a0raise enough money to rebuild it.<\/p>\n
Taman Willie Onesmas, a spokesman\u00a0for the homestay project, says while the village’s gardens are “coming\u00a0back slowly, we need to find another way to earn income. We want\u00a0tourists to come here”.<\/p>\n
Denise Tatangis, a smiling mother of young children, is already in\u00a0homestay mode. She has lined her small, tidy bungalow with colourful\u00a0sarongs. There is a towel and a cake of soap on a mattress on the\u00a0floor. In Bislama, pidgin English, Tatangis explains how to have a\u00a0bucket shower in a tin-roofed outhouse. A white chicken sits in a\u00a0basket of clothes in the corner, making quiet but persistent clucking\u00a0sounds.<\/p>\n
Garoleo and her counterpart, Shefa Tourism Office business development\u00a0adviser Dianne Hambrook, a 59-year-old Volunteer Service Abroad\u00a0volunteer, will give the villagers a series of action plans to help\u00a0them to work towards tourist accreditation. But before they can start\u00a0charging tourists, they’ll need a business licence, paid to the Shefa\u00a0provincial government, Hambrook says. It’s likely they’ll also need to\u00a0upgrade their bungalows with things like hooks for clothing, locks for\u00a0doors and mosquito nets.<\/p>\n
A half-hour drive from Port Vila, on the beachfront, The Havannah is\u00a0one of Vanuatu’s higher-end accommodation options, with rooms from\u00a0$500 a night.<\/p>\n
Liz Pechan, who owns the resort with her husband, Greg,\u00a0lived through Cyclone Uma in 1987, but Pam was worse, she says. Large\u00a0trees were strewn like pick-up sticks, and The Havannah’s lush,\u00a0tropical gardens, which Pechan had built up over several years, were\u00a0destroyed.<\/p>\n
The resort remained closed for four-and-a-half months (“We couldn’t\u00a0open a half-damaged resort”), but the Pechans continued to pay their\u00a070 Ni-Vanuatu staff, who, to management’s amazement, all turned up for\u00a0work the Monday after Pam. Half a dozen had lost their own homes.\u00a0Housekeepers swapped mops for bush knives and maintenance workers\u00a0turned soils until Pechan was happy with the gardens again.<\/p>\n
Guests returned to The Havannah on July 27, and just this past month,\u00a0Pechan has started noticing hibiscus flowers behind some of the mamas’\u00a0ears, a common sight before the destruction of Cyclone Pam. Perhaps\u00a0Frank Aru, the tour guide, was right. Maybe everything is “back to\u00a0normal”. Either way, it puts a smile on her face.<\/p>\n
\u00a0–\u00a0Sunday Star Times<\/strong><\/p>\n Here are a few great articles I think you\u2019ll enjoy about Vanuatu, enjoy!<\/b><\/p>\n