About Port Villa

Today I will tell you a little about Port Vila, which is the trading centre and capital of Vanuatu, all of us went ashore when there and what we saw didn't impress us much but then we didn't really see much of the area maybe if we had gone into town it would have been different but we didn't so it is what it is.

Anyway from what I have learnt Port Vila has seen more history and change than many towns much bigger, when it comes to culture, tradition and history, how I don't know I just read that on the info sheet the ship gives you. I can also tell you that you can find a mix of cultures in Port Vila such as Melanesian, French, English and Chinese to name a few.

It is a pretty large place with a population around 45,000, they speak English, French and Bislama and the government is a republic. The currency is Vatu but we found that all the stalls at the port took Australian dollars and the same at the shop we went to when we took a taxi ride into the nearest town which turned out not to be the nearest town at all if we wanted to walk a bit we would have seen more but neither my parents can walk a great distance.

Now some of you may have heard about Port Vila in the news when there was an accident over there involving passengers off one of P & O's ships, I can tell you we saw no buses when we were there at the port there were many small taxi vans which are old Targo type vans and when I say old I mean old and as far as seat belt we rode in two different ones, one of them had a couple of seat belts but not enough for all in the van and the other had none that we could see.