Weather, Weather and more Weather.........and a few shakes

We were told before coming to Vanuatu that May to November is the dry season! I think I can count on my fingers the number of days we have had dry since our arrival on the 8th of July – 3, maybe 4??.

Each day we rise to look at the sky and every day the clouds have been evident. If it hasn’t been raining outright then we have had a few showers in the morning, and a couple in the evening, and a bucket down over night just to make sure we don’t dry out and suffer dehydration! It is nigh on impossible to get the washing dry.........

Many of the roads are coral and soil and quite frankly it defies belief that there is still soil to be seen between the chunks of coral! The topography is quite hilly and how we haven’t ended up with a major part of the island in Port Vila harbour I have no idea.

Now rain has its attractions and if we could just send about half of this current lot over to the Central Coast of NSW we would have a segment of Australia totally in our debt for many years to come! I am told we are on level four water restrictions at home and that is pretty dire.

And now to add insult to injury a cyclone call Xavier is threatening to dump monumental amounts of water on us. The northern provinces of Vanuatu are already under heavy fire from Xavier which is described as a small but very intense weather system – winds of over 110knots and waves that threaten to reach 28 feet in height. Predictions are it may turn west before it reaches Port Vila BUT......

We will know by tomorrow afternoon whether we need to ‘standfast’, pop up the cyclone shutters and gather in food, water and batteries to ride out the storm. We have never experienced a cyclone so we are in fact just curious enough to hope one comes our way – so long as it is a little one that won’t do too much harm!

Ron has discovered the cyclone tracking service provided by the Fiji Met Bureau and he is tracking Xavier and keeping an eye on it for us. I hope we get more warning than we did for the tsunami a couple of weeks ago – we were in the pub the next day when we heard that there was a possibility a tsunami was on the way – YESTERDAY!

AND there have been 2 earthquakes in the last week. One on Tuesday afternoon – measured about 5.7 and was centered just off Port Vila. The other was in the islands north of us on Wednesday night measuring about 6.3. They give us a shake, but nothing much more.

Trevor (our resident expert on things Vanuatu) said that we should worry when the NiVans get a bit giggly about the earthquakes – it means they are nervous. Well you would have thought it a full on pantomime at our office on Tuesday afternoon. People had a weird response to me asking whether we should be ducking under the table – nervous laughter was all I got in reply!

With cyclones and earthquakes reminding us of our tenuous hold on the earth of Vanuatu I will sign off and sit back and pick up a book, knowing that I have no control over any aspect of either phenomenon and simply let fate take a course that I hope steers us through to finer skies, warmth and sunshine, snorkeling and swimming – and just a tincey wincey bit of the dry we have missed out on!