Vanuatu – The Missing Manual

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition. Some of you will recognise this as an amalgam of some earlier blog posts to a visiting friend. I’ve also updated it once or twice as the inclination struck me.]

At a dinner party recently, I met a lovely young couple, newly arrived in Vanuatu. On learning this, I started into my standard ‘welcome to Vanuatu’ spiel, illustrating the many interesting ways Vanuatu differs from Westernised countries.

But there are always things we forget to mention. After a few years living here, one begins to take for granted any number of Vanuatu’s mundane peculiarities. Here, for posterity’s sake, is a brief listing of things you need to know, but don’t get mentioned in the tourist literature….

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