You land on Efate, and Port Vila is where the trip starts whether or not that was the plan: the harbour, the produce market, the dive shops and every onward flight are there, and the ring road covers the island's waterfalls and lagoons in a day. Then pick two. Espiritu Santo is the water island: the wreck of the SS President Coolidge lies close enough to shore to be a beach dive, the east coast is strung with freshwater blue holes, Champagne Beach is the one everyone photographs, and Millennium Cave is a full day of forest, ladders and a river float. Tanna is the volcano: Mount Yasur has been erupting more or less continuously for at least 800 years, and the walk from the car park to the rim takes minutes. Pentecost is a date rather than a place, because the naghol land dive runs between April and June. Malekula and Ambrym are the kastom islands, with masked dances, sand drawing and two more live craters. The Banks and Torres groups are the far end of the country and take real time to reach. A week does Efate plus one island properly. Ten days does two.
1 Vanuatu city guide
Fun fact
Vanuatu has the highest density of languages per head of population on earth. Linguists count roughly 138 indigenous languages still in daily use across a country of about 300,000 people, which is why Bislama, the English-based creole of the market and the radio, had to exist at all.
Stereotypes, sorted out
The realityEfate has the resorts, and they are genuinely good. Everything the country is known for is somewhere else: the wreck diving is on Santo, the volcano is on Tanna, the land dive is on Pentecost, and the kastom villages are on Malekula and Ambrym. Each of those is a separate flight. A trip that never leaves Efate has had a nice week beside a lagoon and has not seen Vanuatu.
The realityThe John Frum movement is a living religion with its own villages, its own Friday observance and its own political history, and it grew out of an actual encounter with American wartime supply lines. Some of what visitors are shown is staged for visitors, as it is everywhere. The belief behind it is not, and treating it as a novelty is the fastest way to be rude in a place that has been polite to you.
The realityThe archipelago runs about 1,300 kilometres from the Torres group to Aneityum, and the islands differ in language, custom, landscape and how hard they are to reach. Santo is limestone, forest and water. Tanna is ash and volcano. Pentecost is a calendar. Ambrym is masks and two live craters. Picking by photograph rather than by island is how people end up flying twice to see one thing.
The realityVanuatu did top the Happy Planet Index, in 2006 and again in 2024, but that index measures wellbeing against ecological footprint rather than an easy life. The same country sits at the top of the World Risk Index for exposure to natural hazards, and the December 2024 earthquake took fourteen lives and a chunk of central Port Vila. Both facts are true and neither cancels the other.
How to get it right
- Land belongs to clans rather than to the state, and that includes beaches, waterfalls and paths. Ask before you cross, and expect a small custom fee at anything that looks like a natural attraction. It is rent, not a scam.
- Ask the chief before staying in or photographing a village, and pay for the bed and the meal you are given. Introducing yourself first is the whole protocol.
- At a nakamal, arrive quiet, drink your shell in one go, and spit where everyone else does. Do not tip the person who served you.
- Dress covers more than a resort implies. Shoulders and knees away from the water, swimwear at the water only, and a shirt on for a village, a shop or an office.
- Ask before photographing people, dances and masks. Kastom ceremonies on Malekula and Ambrym are religious rather than theatrical, and some of them cannot be photographed at all.
- Open in Bislama rather than assuming English. Halo and tankyu tumas cost nothing to learn and change how a conversation starts, and Bislama is the one language everyone in the country shares.
Famous ni-Vanuatu faces
Walter Lini
Grace Mera Molisa
Ati George Sokomanu
Ralph Regenvanu
Nikenike Vurobaravu
Marcel Melthérorong
Vanessa Quai
Miller Pata
Linline Matauatu
Brian Kaltak
Must-try Vanuatu food
Tusker
The local lager, brewed in Port Vila, on tap in every bar in the country and named after the boar's tusk on the flag.
Laplap
The national dish: yam, taro or cassava grated to a paste, mixed with coconut cream, wrapped in banana leaves and buried in a hot-stone oven for hours. Dense, plain and the thing to judge a kitchen on.
Tuluk
Laplap's celebration version. Grated cassava wrapped around spiced pork or beef, then steamed or baked in leaves until the outside sets.
Simboro
Grated root vegetable rolled inside island cabbage or taro leaves and simmered in coconut cream. The closest thing here to a comfort dish.
Nalot
Roasted banana, breadfruit or taro pounded smooth with grated coconut and served in a slab. Usually a side, occasionally the whole afternoon.
Coconut crab
The giant land crab of the outer islands, grilled or done in coconut cream. It is slow-growing and locally regulated, so eat it where the community says it is in season and not otherwise.
Reef fish in coconut milk
Whatever came off the reef that morning, poached in coconut milk with lime and island cabbage. The default plate everywhere from a market stall to a resort.
Santo beef
Cattle grazed on the coconut plantations of Espiritu Santo, grass-fed year round, and the one thing on the menu that surprises people who came for fish.
Island cabbage
Not cabbage at all but the leaf of the slippery cabbage plant, cooked down in coconut cream until soft. It turns up beside almost everything.
Yam
The crop the calendar runs on. The harvest sets the date of the Pentecost land dive and of festivals across the islands, and the yam itself is boiled, roasted or grated into laplap.
Taro
The other root, grown in wet ground and eaten daily. Leaf and corm both go into the pot, which is why nothing is wasted.
Kava
Root pounded, strained through water and drunk from a shell at dusk. Vanuatu's is strong by regional standards, and the nakamal it is drunk in has its own etiquette. Not a cocktail.
Tanna coffee
Grown in volcanic soil on Tanna and roasted in Port Vila. The one souvenir from here that is worth the luggage allowance.