Food

We love the food in Vanuatu! And there are lots of great options. There are many different nationalities here so we have found that most cuisines are represented here. There is a very big French population here so the French supermarkets are really good. We can buy wonderful croissants, french cheeses and pates.

The bread here is amazing! It is baked fresh every day and has no additives or preservatives in it. The French certainly know how to bake great bread.

Yummy French Bread

One of my favourite local snacks is the Nems - they are like spring rolls but have noodles and beef in them.

Local snack - Nem

At the supermarket - "Au Bon Marche Numbatu" they have a fantastic section of takeaway food, including curries, pasta, pizza, filled rolls, quiche and another of my favourites prawn cutlets, which are large prawns, crumbed and fried.

The chickens here are also really good as they do not have anything pumped into them to make them bigger or last longer.

The meat in Vanuatu is really cheap. They produce the most amazing beef and we can also buy veal which is so good.

The seafood is also really good, Lobster is quite cheap at 1500vatu a kg which is about $20.00 a kg. The currency conversion is 1000vatu = approx. $NZ12. Mum and Dad have lots of 1000vatu notes in their wallets!

Dad makes wonderful fish curries with a local fish called Basa Fish.

Lobster

There is lots of tropical fruit and different kinds of vegetables like snake beans. We buy our fruit and vegetables at the local market or, one of the girls, Noeline, who works for us brings them to us from her village. The Avocados are huge...the locals call it Vanuatu butter because the inside is so soft and delicious.

Local Tropical Fruits

Local Fruit & Vegetable Market

Huge Avocados - this one compared to a mandarin

At school we can buy are lunches...Jungle Cafe in town collects the orders every morning, makes them and delivers them for lunch time. There is a selection of hot and cold, the hot is not very healthy so Mum only lets us have one hot item a week. Mum loves that we can order our lunch because she gets sick of making lunches.

We have a great French restaurant that we go to called L'Houstalet, Millie and I tried escargot (snails) there and loved them!

They also have Flying Fox on their menu which is Bat! We love different foods but no one in our family has wanted to order this!

Escargot (Snails)

Local Bat

Another of our favourite cafes is Numbawan on the waterfront. They have the best pizzas in town, our favourite is the smoked marlin and they also have an outdoor movie screen so we go there and watch family movies in the weekend while eating pizza.

Nambawan Cafe

Out door Movie Night at Nambawan

Smoked Marlin Pizza

First week as a family...

Our first week as a family was really good. Dad was in Tanna Island for most of it and we were busy getting into our after school activities.

I had my friend Travis over and we swam in the heavy rain!

In the weekend we played tennis and on Saturday night we went to the movies. The difference here though is that the cinema is outside! It is at a cafe on the waterfront called Numbawan, we booked a table and ate pizza while watching Robocop. They gave us free popcorn!

Outdoor cinema at Numbawan Cafe

There are so many different things about living in Vanuatu, over the next few months I will talk about them but today these are the ones that I have been thinking about:

Even though it is really hot the sun is not as strong as the NZ sun. It is more a humid heat and we don't get burnt.

When it rains it is still really hot and the rain falls so heavy that is like a sheet of water falling from the sky. And it will start to rain and then stop and then start again throughout the day. In between the rain it is always sunny.

The rain makes the Roads which already have bad pot holes even worse. There are so many that the car goes up and down like a mini roller coaster.

Also the driving laws are different here like you don't have to wear seat belts and we are allowed to ride on the back of Mums truck. We love doing this!

My brother Joe on the back of Mums truck

Hello from Vanuatu

The first 2 weeks we were in Vanuatu were really great because we were on holiday. We had lots of visitors and we did lots of cool stuff like off road buggies, zipline, swimming at the blue lagoon, walking up to the cascade falls and going to a fire dancing show.

Cascade Falls with Uncle Buck

Ziplining with friends 

Fire dancing show

The best thing I have done so far is to get my Padi Junior Open Water dive ticket so now I can go diving with my Dad. It took a lot of hard work especially reading and remembering all the things I needed to know for the exam.

Dad and I on my first open water dive

My Instructor, Gerry presenting my with my Padi certificate

The first day at school was good I met a whole lot of new friends like Travis, (comes from Christchurch) Steven, (from china) the twins Nathan and Josh, (from vanuatu) Daica (from Vanuatu) and Christian (from America). I am finding the work quite different and sometimes harder.

First day at school in our uniforms

Living here is a lot different to staying on holiday. Our house is cool, we have a big garden and a swimming pool which we have been in a lot. It is really hot but we are getting used to it now.

The day we arrived Dad gave us coconuts from our garden

There are huge spiders here, lots of land crabs and we even saw a snake.

Here is the massive spider we found

Now all our visitors have left we are looking forward to settling into local life.