For 3 days, we plodded the dirt paths below the damp green canopy and mango trees of Anatom. We visited natives in their villages and tapped our hands in fresh water pools that oozed from the shoreline at low tide. In other islands, such fresh water would be hot enough to scald a hand or cook a banana. The islands of Vanuatu are geologically very new. Some islands to the north have erupting volcanoes.

Most villagers live in thatch huts, yet a few have concrete walled houses. No one has westernized furniture. Everyone sits and sleeps on the floor, whether dirt, cement or a raised wood floor. Pigs, chickens and children, with wads of green snot congealed under their nostrils, all run wild and barefoot around the villages. We had to remember to carry hand sanitizer as the friendly, otherwise cute, children always wanted to shake or hold our hands.

Large fruit bats hang from the trees making them easy targets for a small bow, bent from a short tree branch, and multi pointed wood arrow. They are skinny animals taking 5 bats to make a meal. Vanuatu is a very traditional place yet very much in transition. If one man works all week cutting the meat from brown coconuts, dries it in the sun to the proper moisture content to make copra, then fills a large burlap bag, the man will make $15. Not long ago he was paid $30 but the price of coconut oil has plummeted.

What forced the price of copra down, affecting millions of villagers across the Pacific, was the anti coconut oil campaign sponsored by competing U.S. soy bean growers. Do the research and you will find coconut oil is not the heart stopping poison the TV commercials reported. The oil can have beneficial properties raising HDL levels. It is predicted one day the word will get out and people around the world will be eating coconuts and maybe drinking Pina Coladas as a health food.

Tourism and passing yachts represent easy money. One cruiser paid the equivalent of $14 for a few common vegetables easily plucked from the ground. Other cruisers pay exorbitant prices to watch "native" dancing. It might seem reasonable to wealthy European cruisers but it is a cash boon to the natives. We normally do not give money for the things we need from the natives. They actually get more value in the solar yard lights, thread and needles, T-shirts, fish hooks and medicines we trade for their locally grown food or when a villager acts as our guide to a waterfall.

Since there are so many dialects spoken in Vanuatu, Bislama, a pidgen English is the most universally spoken amongst the natives. But English and French is also used.

In Anatom, an adjacent island forms the southern armor protecting this anchorage from all directions except the west. It is that manicured island, lined with lots of well maintained outhouses, onto which a skyscraper of a cruise ship from Australia disgorges its passengers for a "native" outing. But the morning the cruise ship appeared through rain and wind, the weather ignited itself to 25 knots from the west throwing curling waves into the anchorage. It was a scramble for the 6 yachts, including Brick House, to pick up their anchors and make their way to open water. On the way out, the cruise ship became a danger to be avoided as it drifted in the middle of our escape. But the huge ship was having its own struggles to turn around and abort the passenger's beach party.

So we would sail on, to the north.