Our first house guests

We are already having our first house guests. Everyone kept telling us when we left Canada that they would come visit, but we never expected anyone to come so soon!

After our first night in Port Vila Erin and I woke up at 4:30 a.m. The rooster crowing outside was trying to keep us awake. But since we had gone to bed early the night before at 9 p.m. we were ready to wake up anyway. We decided to go for a walk on the beach. But needed to find our flip-flops and a flash light since it was still a little dark. We went downstairs to the living room to look for those things and noticed a bug crawling across the floor. At first we thought it might be a centipede (which although not poisonous, can give a nasty sting) but on closer inspection realized it was a millipede. It looked cool since it was basically a black line like a piece of moving spaghetti. The legs are small and located under the body so you can't see them. We thought it was very unique and grabbed the camera to make a little video clip. After making half the clip the battery on the camera died. Then we found another millipede! Wow, two. Then another, and another. After a quick count there was at least 7 or 8. Then suddenly they weren't so unique, but still interesting. By that time dawn was starting so we didn't need a flash light and left for our walk along the beach and our first swim of the day. Our little A-frame house is about 30 seconds walk from the ocean and small coral covered beach.

Later in the evening just before the kid's bedtime we were on the sofa reading a book and had our next house guest adventure. Suddenly we heard a banging noise coming from behind the fridge. We thought MOUSE! Since we had seen one the night before and decided to get the cat from outside and let it have a snack. We called the cat over and lead it to the fridge then sat in our sofas being very quiet to let the expert hunter do its work. The cat heard the noise and was looking for the mouse, not having too much luck I thought I would go over and bang the top of the fridge to scare out the mouse and make an easy catch for the cat. I went over to the fridge and took a look. About half way up the back of the fridge between the back panel and the Freon tubes I was horrified with what I saw. It was dark so I could only see the outline of something that had the head of an insect, a few insect legs but had a body about 6 inches long and as thick as two fingers! Then it started jumping and hitting the Freon tubes making noise. I jumped back and ran to the sofa, telling Carren what I had seen. We thought we better get the flash light so we could be better prepared to name our recent biological discovery. With much trepidation we tip-toed to the fridge, turned on the little flashlight and saw a large gecko with a giant cockroach in its mouth. Suddenly our horror became laughs. The boys named our new friend "Sticky", since the boys said "lizards have sticky feet to help them climb". We ushered out the cat since we like the idea of something other than our shoe for killing the occasional cockroach that sneaks under the door to visit us. The roaches are somewhat large. The body is probably about the same size as your thumb measured from the base where it joins your hand to the end of the finger nail.

We can now hear our buddy Sticky calling us with an "eack, eack, eack" clicking sound to let us know he is still on duty.

Thanks Sticky!

We Made It!

So we arrived safely in Port Vila (Vila to the locals) after a long flight. All in all about 21 hours of travel. Just slightly longer than the drive from Fairview, Alberta to Vancouver, British Columbia, where we go every year to visit Carren's family.

We suspected it might take longer than usual for us the clear immigration so we listened to the Ni-Vanuatu (name for native people) sting band that was set up to greet the tourists and waited to be last in line.

After everyone else had chosen which line to go in, we got in the 'residents and citizen's line-up rather than the tourist line since we had arranged to pick-up our residence permits at the airport as instructed by the Immigration Office.

When it was our turn I told the agent who were and that we were informed that our residence permits would be waiting to be picked up from the airport. He took about one second to look around his little kiosk and then shook his head "no". I said, "are you sure, so-and-so from the immigration office said it would be here". He said, "wait" and got up and left. He went to a little office beside the kiosk and returned about five minutes later saying, "I tried to call so-and-so but didn't reach her". I'm not sure where he called since it was Sunday, then he said, "its ok, just go to the immigration office on Monday and pick them up". Then he stamped our passports and let us through. We had been worried since we were travelling on a one-way ticket and normal requirements for entry to the country are either a residence permit or a return ticket out of the country. Since we knew we were staying we didn't want to waste a couple thousand dollars on a ticket we would not be able to use.

After we got through Carren and I looked at each other and thought, "you've got to love the laid back island life!"

Some Posts

Hi Everyone,

So we made it to Port Vila and have some ocassional access to email. So here are a few posts that I wrote with our son Erin. We wrote them at different times but I'm posting all together since I have access to the internet today.

Steve