Vanuatu: Small Nambas on Malekula
After a few idyllic days on the coast of Tanna, we returned to Port Vila for the second of our quick stop turn-arounds. Annoyingly Air Vanuatu, the only domestic carrier, uses Vila as a hub and internal flights do not necessarily integrate with each other very well (or indeed at all), so anyone wanting to see a variety of islands effectively has to spend at least one night in town between flights. We had three of these instances planned in. The luggage allowance for domestic flights is paltry too, so we had to store most of our gear or face exorbitant fees, hence we continued to stay at the same ropey motel in Vila despite the walls being as thick as paper and the somewhat rocky relationship I had with the owner. At least on our second visit she was sober and doing her best to ingratiate herself. The ear-splitting racket of the karaoke place was mercifully absent too.
We had breakfast at the tennis club opposite, which was busy at 7am with pupils and coaches and the odd few matches. All, as far as we could tell, were ex-pats. One couple limbered up, played for 15 minutes at the pace of snails, then left. But they were at least ‘seen’ and I think that’s what mattered. There were a lot of Ni-Vanuatu kids there too, all hitting balls against the walls or on the grass outside, presumably as they weren’t members or couldn’t afford the court fees.
The issue with my toe had been getting worse and was spreading now to the ball of my foot, making walking extremely painful indeed. The drugs I’d acquired on Tanna appeared to be having no impact at all, so we thought it best to seek a second opinion before we disappeared off again to another remote island. The waitress at the tennis club suggested a private clinic a few miles away. We caught a bus there, which in Port Vila involves flagging down a passing minibus, stating where you want to go and seeing if the driver agrees to take you there. If he does, he works out the most efficient route to get all his passengers to their destinations in turn and you pay a flat fee when your turn’s up. It works rather well.
At the clinic I was sent in to see the bizarrely named Dr Israel Wore. I asked him how his stock of munitions was faring after his recent obliteration of Gaza, but as he wasn’t appreciating my warped sense of humour I let it go. I showed him the drugs I’d got from the Lenakel clinic. “These are for boils,” he sighed, in a manner suggesting all provincial GPs were incompetent quacks. He was more inclined to think I might have gout based on my age, alcohol intake (a small beer a day apparently equates to my being a rampant dipsomaniac) and the amount of acidic fruit and seafood I’ve been eating. We had to leave for our Malekula flight in an hour so did not have time to confirm it via a blood test, but he prescribed a load of drugs that would see me right in the meantime and gave me a strict instruction. “No booze for 2 weeks please,” he gleefully chirped. The pharmacist said the same thing, with depressingly equal gusto…..
Norsup ‘airport’ Malekula
The flight, at least, was a beauty. Sat at the very front of a 16 seater DeHavilland Twin Otter prop, we could see right into the cockpit and watched with intent fascination as the pilot neatly and wordlessless re-routed the flight path to avoid a nasty looking patch of weather on his digital display, then one-handedly adjusted the engine throttle and banked low and fast to line up against the runway. He might well have been showing off his skills knowing he had a rapt audience. The runway was a stretch of tarmac half covered in sand, which turned out to be an old disused road. We landed and got out at the ‘airport’, a tiny lean-to on the grass with a half-dozen pick-up trucks waiting for passengers.
Edna, our genial host, took us to our lodgings, a little terrace of villas with high ceilings and a little deck area. Not for the first time, we were the only guests there, if you discount the alarmingly large community of cockroaches in our bathroom and a few rats near the camp-kitchen. We realised soon after that our time on the island of Malekula was not going to be the fun-packed & activity-laden five days we thought it might be, primarily due to the difficulty of organising anything, the significant expense of everything, and the fact that both of us were coming down with some unpleasant bouts of stomach trouble. Expectations, as well as food and drink intake, needed to be tempered.
Malekula has never really been on the beaten track in Vanuatu, but it still used to have a few big draws in the shape of two unique tribes, the Big Nambas and the Small Nambas. They reminded me of arch satirist Jonathan Swift’s depiction of the towns of Lilliput and Blefuscu, in which Gulliver encounters the Big Endians and the Small Endians, whose entire political ethos is irreconcilably based on whether boiled eggs should be cracked open from the top or the bottom. Though times have changed, the two Malekulan tribes were once as bad, though the only real difference between them was the relative size of their penis sheaths. Since their conversion to Christianity in the early nineteenth century the tribes are no longer at war with each other, nor seek to eat their rivals or kidnap their children, but have still maintained a tradition of practicing kastom as best they can, recently being able to exploit the tiny tourism market as a means to keep things alive. At least, that is, until the advent of Covid-19 when tourism here, as it did everywhere, stopped entirely. The Big Nambas in particular have since descended into an apathy where no-one seems able to convince them to resurrect their songs and dances for a new paying audience. I thought to re-christen them as ‘Big Namby-Pamby’s’, though to no-one’s amusement but my own.
The Small Nambas doing a turn
Edna, through the intermediary of her friend Veronique, managed at least to convince the Small Nambas to do something for us. It seems we were lucky. Most of the tribe were employed full time on a road building project, but we happened to be there on a Sunday, their day off, and so a bit of spare time was found after church services had finished. We arrived at the tiny settlement of Rano having slowly bounced our way down dirt tracks for an hour courtesy of Edna’s son who told us pretty awful tales of his experience with a brain tumour a few years ago. Veronique did her best to manage the participants, barking out orders in Bislama when people were not in the right place or banging on the right piece of wood or not booming out honks from the conch shell when they should have been. Clearly a little rusty at first, the dancing performers gradually gained more confidence the more they got into it. We had a mixture of little kids, old women and a few adult men – I suspect at their height of their powers and prowess we’d have got a bigger party and a livelier result, but to be fair it was good fun and greatly entertaining. At the end we lined up and the performers filed past so we could shake their hands in turn, like we’d just beaten them at a rugby match.
Edna, Helen & The Small Nambas
Possibly the part of most interest was the demonstration of traditional ‘laplap’ making. Laplap is a cooked paste made from a variety of roots or fruits, from yams and cassava to plantains and bananas. We stood in front of 3 rather large and semi-naked older women who used entirely natural products to prepare and cook a meal in 10 minutes. One scraped a yam with a sharp, self-made bamboo knife, one grated it on wood to create a paste which was fed into narrow leaves that were in turn fed into a bamboo pole. Another scraped coconut flesh with a shell and squeezed out milk from her vice like grip. A group of young men rubbed a wooden baton along a fire plow track igniting coconut husk fragments. The ember was transferred to a larger coconut husk. When this caught fire, dried reeds were used to transfer it to a small bunch of twigs and the bamboo ‘cooker’ placed on top. A few minutes later, the leaves inside the bamboo tube were drawn out to reveal a perfectly cooked, rubbery yam sausage. Dunked in the coconut milk the result was surprisingly a tasty and sweet desert and all done in next to no time.
The only disappointing thing was the absence of any discernable ‘nambas’ themselves, small or otherwise. All the men were wearing grass fronds front and back tucked into a waist band, but unlike at Yakel village, there were no woven sheaths in sight. Perhaps their nambas were so small they were embarrassed enough to cover their plight with fig leaves….
We effectively ‘lost’ a couple of days due to our stomach problems, but on one we at least managed to venture out on a small walk into the biggest town in the area, Lakatoro, to see the sights. In a fabulous example of complete incongruity, we stumbled across the Lakatoro tourism office. I asked the young lad inside what there was to do (other than Nambas). “Well,” he enthused, “we’ve a great market just next door and there’s a wonderful craft emporium just behind it. If you want to learn more about the cultural side of things, there’s the cultural centre just up the hill over the road.” OK, three things worth checking out for sure. The ‘market’ was an open air collection of concrete benches at which three stalls were trading small bags of peanuts and rather sorry looking bunches of bananas. The craft emporium gates were padlocked and by the looks of it, hadn’t been unlocked in a very good while. The cultural centre was there, but had fallen into a state of semi-dereliction. We looked through the filthy windows. There were a few dust covered artefacts strewn on the floor, but nothing else. Perhaps the tourism guy was really new, or totally self-delusional…..
Having recovered a little more, we went out the next day with Edna in a taxi around the local area. We saw local hospitals, schools, and churches, the latter two being run along segregated French Catholic and English Presbyterian lines, a legacy from colonial times when Vanuatu was administered as a rare joint enterprise between the two imperial powers. We learnt about Darvall Wilkins, a British district agent who founded and built up Lakatoro in the years before independence and is buried behind the small stadium that bears his name. Unlike most ex-colonials, the Ni-Vanuatu still remember the man and his efforts with a strong fondness and regularly tend his gravesite. We also visited 2 copra production plants. Copra, the white fleshy part of a coconut that’s used in the main to produce oil for food and cosmetics, is huge business in Malekula and a good deal of the population is employed somewhere along the production chain. We met two individuals whose job it was to split coconuts in half with an axe and scrape out the flesh with a small tool, to copra ‘roasters’ who shovel the flesh into large dry vats with heated pipes running beneath, to the shifters who bag-up the dry flesh into sacks for transportation. One company here takes already dried copra from small farmers, inspects it for quality, then transports it to the Philippines where they swap it for bags of cement. The cement is brought back to Malekula for sale around the island. Anywhere near copra plants, the unique and pungent smell of roasting coconut permeates the air and is difficult to remove from your nostrils.
Malekula sea shore
Coconut flesh separators, Malekula
Copra plant workers, Malekula
Unloading at the copra plant
For our final day on the island, we managed to stir up enough energy to take a day out to a local marine conservation reserve for a day of snorkelling, beach combing and hammock lounging. We met Jack, the owner of a small resort called Nanwut Bungalows, a set of 5 rudimentary shacks on the beach of Uripiv island, a 30 minutes boat ride away. He motored us over on his tiny, wobbling boat, cooked us a delicious lunch and lamented about the fact that he’d got no-one staying at all and indeed hadn’t had anything much since Covid. Nature was gradually taking back the property, but Jack was doing his best to repair stuff as best he could from recent earthquakes that kept knocking his toilet walls down. We’d have stayed, had we’d known his place even existed…
Nanwut Bungalows, Uripiv Island
Arriving back late in the afternoon, I took a call from an unknown number that turned out to be Air Vanuatu informing me that our flight back to Port Vila tomorrow morning was cancelled and that we were booked in for the next day, several hours after our other scheduled flight to Pentecost Island. This set off a chain of events that made us as frustrated as we’ve been at any point on the trip so far. I’ll cover that in the next post….
Our time on Malekula turned out to be nothing like we expected or wanted it to be. Difficult, uncertain, expensive, frequently challenging and with lots of time waiting around. It wasn’t helped by our sicknesses and pain. It was, though, a tiny insight into what life is actually like out in the provinces and the struggle to make a living here. Tourism is not the earner it used to be but there seems to be a distinct lack of drive to resurrect it, a situation we found odd given the vast potential. And there, again, we come up against the paradox of how we like to travel – we want the ‘real’, the ‘local’, the ‘non-touristy’, yet are perplexed when there isn’t somehow ‘more to it….’
Simon (15th May 2026)
Sounds like you were both challenged emotionally and physically in Malekula. Good authentic account of what everyday life is life beyond the tourist track. Hope the drugs are working, take care xx