Port Vila is the capital of Vanuatu and has a near fully enclosed deep water harbor. Along the backside of the inner harbor are a network of moorings maintained for cruisers by Yachting World who provide various other services and were very helpful to us. Their dinghy dock was near the downtown area which proved very convenient to our explorations and provisioning. Our first priority was to find the one and only geocache, which eluded us until the third try. We also sampled several restaurants including Jill’s Café for an American style breakfast and the Harborview Restaurant which had very good Chinese food. Also of interest and highly recommended is the National Museum where we saw demonstrations of sand drawing and indigenous musical instruments as well as many artifacts.

Near Port Vila is a small anchorage called Mele Bay where we spent a couple of nights. The localBeach Bar had pretty decent burgers and pizzas and they did theme nights. Sunday night was the Sunset Circus with acrobats, jugglers and clowns. From here we toured the Tanna Coffee Factory. Imagine Wendy’s delight at that! We also hiked up to a local waterfall which turned out to be quite beautiful. It was modestly developed with a few handrails and footpaths that enabled us to climb up through the cascading water and swim in several of the pools. Very cool (and refreshing).