Our journey starts

Originally, when we looked at dates to go to Vanuatu, we had planned to turn up on Christmas Eve and spend a week only.  I was extremely busy and stressed, so we decided, instead of me doing the flights and the whole itinerary thing, that I would take that stress away and get a travel agent to arrange everything. I’d been to a few and found one whom I had thought listened to what I was after.  Anyway - cut a long boring story short, I am a fussy ferret who is anal on details and it would seem no-one provides the information the way I like it and in the amount of detail I like it.. much less this poor lass. Little details like transfers and flight times were incorrect or left out.. but hey - who needs all that sort of certainty?

I’d had a niggling doubt as she was unable to find out if shops or food stores were open on Christmas Eve - so we opted to arrive a few days earlier. Just as well… the entire country shuts down 24th of dec till 28th and then for the new years eve thing too….ANYWAY - We had an early morning flight - so kids were so excited, they hardly slept the night before.  We trundled off in the rain to the airport and breathed a sigh of relief as our bags shuffled off and we waded our way through security.  Age must have looked dodgy as he had a spot check going in. We were up in the air for about an hour and a bit when the captain announced that we needed to return to Brisbane as we were having engineering issues.  Nothing to panic about as it didn’t impede our safety...yeah right.

After sitting round for ages, we were given meal vouchers - a sure sign of a very long wait. We wandered off to sit in more comfortable seating, when an announcement for our family to return came over.  Along with a few other families, we were being shunted off to Sydney to catch a late night flight to Vanuatu.  lost of buses and planes later, we lay around the Sydney airport - having been through security… again…. delighted to be handed a sheet from the airline to tell us that they were not responsible in feeding us on the plane and that we needed to bring things from the cafeteria with us. nice.

I have to say the kids were awesome. They followed instructions and were responsible for their own bags the entire time.  They kept good humour, even when things got a bit fraught and stressful.

So instead of getting to Port Villa at 2 pm, excited and refreshed, eager to go shopping and stock up our self catering cupboards and explore our surrounds; we staggered into a hot steamy wet and dark place at nearly 2 am.

Thomas, the security guard was very kind and over the next few days, we struck up a friendship with him, gaining some great insights and information from him.

Our villa was on a hillside, had air conditioning and could be blacked out completely from the early morning sun… perfect for our exhausted family to collapse in till very late the next day.