Ekasup village
After another nice breakfast we get picked up and driven over to Ekasup cultural village, where we are joined by over 100 Australians on a P&O cruise. There wouldn't be this many ugly tattooed people at a local skinhead concert. The jokes that fly around are cheap, peroxide blond hair is omnipresent. We walk through the jungle and are soon "hunted" by scary-looking tribal warriors. Screams come from seemingly everywhere around us (for a flavour, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZdY4-PjylA). The village chief takes us through different aspects of the traditional village life and customs. We learn about medicine and herbs, hunting, trap making, food preservation, and more. At one point we see how spiders wire is used to make fishing nets. Half the crowd it horrified at the sight of these big spiders and the way a kid from the cultural village plays with them as pets; I'm part of the intrigued half. Fantastic how the locals use all that Mother Nature gives them to their advantage. And all information is served with a nice ladle of humour. These Ni-Vanuatu (=people from Vanuatu) know how to entertain a crowd of Ozzies, that much is clear. The village plays a few songs for us, then we head back to Port Vila. It's a great excursion, really, I'm happy to have gone through this experience. We arrive at "Room with a View" three hours before our flight, check out, then spend our last Vatus on a taxi to the airport.
On to Oz
The flight to Sydney is incident-less: it leaves on time and arrives even a bit early. We set foot in a hyper-modern airport, without an orchestra of sweaty, colourful locals entertaining us. Customs gives us no trouble whatsoever, Australia feels laid-back from the start. I snap a "Krispy Kream" donut from the arrivals hall before we hop on the shuttle bus to our downtown hostel.
Wake Up! (www.wakeup.com.au/) has all you can expect from a travellers hostel: friendly, helpful staff, an internet café in the lobby, keys that give access to your floor only, a student-priced restaurant/bar in the basement. We stumble into our squeaky clean room, tired as a three toed sloth running a marathon ("tired as a whore on nickel night", anyone?). Blandine runs into the bathroom, I look around the room for a place to sit, then "Bammm!" a flashback to high school pinches me in the cheek: we'll sleep in bunk beds with a blue metal frame! Correction, in boarding school there were bunk beds, but not with a double bed on the bottom and a single bed on the top. This will be a cool night.
Enough pho you?
But first we have to eat something. The night air is cool, much cooler than we've gotten used to, the wind is forced between the high-rise buildings and, irritated, she blows straight through our jackets. Vanuatu was "cool" with night temperatures in the lower twenties, here the thermometers read 5C currently. A Vietnamese-owned pho shop is the closest place to our hostel, and it will do just fine. Blandine is starving and orders the big portion, I point at the picture for the small portion. I can barely finish mine, after twenty minutes Blandine gives up: her bowl looks like it is barely touched. We can't take any with us, what a waste, but we console ourselves with the fact that this delicious meal cost us next to nothing. Bye-bye Pacific prices! We pay and hurry back along the chilly boulevard to the warmth of our hostel, hugging each other closely.
At the reception I make an international phone call to ASUS in Bangkok, and agree we bring the netbook for repair. The guy on the other side of the phone speaks English with a thick Asian accent and doesn't always understand what I ask him, but I get through to him that they need to send the repaired unit on to Cambodia. A dead weight is lifter from my shoulders, and soon from my backpack as well.
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