Aelan Kakae

In Port Vila there are plenty of supermarkets and corner stores where you can buy pretty much whatever you need. True, often products are out of date by months or twice what you would pay in Australia, but really, everything is on offer.

Better still there is a massive fresh fruit and vege market in the centre of town that they call 'The Mama's Market' and it is open 6 days a week (closed Sunday) from early in the morning until unnecessarily late at night. Food here is great. Everything is local, fresh, organic and cheap.

Certain things grow better in the tropics than others which means the variety isn't mind blowing and because it is all local, it is also seasonal. But it feels good to eat things that have just come off a tree or been dug up from the ground that morning and it also makes me savour things more because I know that in a couple of months time whatever it is will probably be out of season. At the moment we have heaps of papaya, starfruit, mutant grape fruit the size of soccer balls and even bush raspberries.

There is a constant and massive range of root veges - some I find delicious like the sweet potato, some not so much like the vomitous taro. There are heaps of green leafy veges too like bok choy which locals call 'waet poon' or 'white spoon' and they're right!! - it looks like white spoons! There is also the omnipresent 'aelan kabij' (island cabbage) which they eat by the truck load. It is very very cheap and undoubtedly good for you. It comes in enormous bunches for about $2. We bought a bunch the other day and it took over the fridge.

Anyway, we have been dabbling in a bit of local cooking - or aelan kakae. Most of our creations have so far consisted of island cabbage, some sort of root vege, onion, garlic, a bit of meat thrown in for good measure (did I mention that you can get locally produced sirloin steak for about $12 a kg!) and lashings and lashings of freshly squeezed coconut milk.

The lovely Lissi Lala heard of our enthusiasm for local recipes and decided to give Romain and our neighbour Noelle a cooking lesson. The recipe was Simboro!

Here is Lissi sorting out the ingredients. First up - manioc - which needs to be peeled and then grated into a gelatinous pulp.

Once that is done, you take a handful of the manioc pulp and place it in the middle of an island cabbage leaf.

Then you roll it up like a dolmade.

Meanwhile you should probably get someone grating coconut for the next step. Or, if you would prefer to do everything yourself like Lissi (I don't think she quite trusts our skill with coconuts yet), you set your rolled-up cabbage leaves aside, hoik up your skirt and get down to the cathartic business of gratin' coconuts. scratch scratch scratch scratch, turn, scratch scratch scratch scratch, turn, scratch scratch scratch ... and so on until you have a big pile of shredded kokonas.

(As an aside, Romain is getting very good at hacking open a coconut with his newly acquired machete - or bush knife - and reducing the two halves to a pile of shredded coconut in no time. He's got skills!)

Then the messy, squelchy bit. Take big juicy handfuls of the shredded coconut and squeeze and squeeze until all the milk runs out. Quick bislama lesson: the left over stuff, which is considered to be pretty useless, is called 'makas' and if you want to say something is really good, you say that it is 'nomakas'. We have a shop around the corner from us called this very thing.

So then you take the coconut milk and tip it all over the rolled up manioc-cabbage-leaves which have been gently placed in a pot with some onion, garlic, salt and pepper. So I suppose this recipe essentially uses all the ingredients that we had been using to make our own concoctions, but just in different quantities and assembled differently. Which I think is the essence of cooking in Vanuatu.

Then the pot goes on the stove for about 20 minutes. Lissi wanted Romain to take a photo of the pot bubbling away on the stove to build the suspense....

And then - voila! Simboro! It was much more delicious than it looks in this photo - really!

Mt Taputaora

Pour les francais: aujourd'hui nous sommes alles sur une ile au nord de l'ile d'Efate (ou nous habitons). C'est en fait un ancien volcan, le Mt Taputaora (ca c'est un nom qui semble dire, me fait pas ch## petit car si je veux, je te reduit en cendres), qui est entourre d'une foret tropicale et de cannes a sucre. Kala a ecrit le reste en anglais car elle est plus courageuse que moi et c'est pour cela que je ne peux pas mettre les accents sur les mots; le clavier est anglophone. La marche vers le haut du cratere nous a donne l'occasion d'avoir une petite lecon de botanique de la part du guide que nous avons trouve dans un petit village a notre arrivee. Voila, je vous laisse lire le reste dans la langue de Benny Hill.

Today we set out to climb Mt Taputaora - an extinct volcano on Nguna (noona) Island - seen here looming behind this intrepid traveller.

Together with 4 other members of the newly formed Adventure Club (slogan: if you like adventure, you'll love Adventure Club!) we hired a mini bus to drive us about 60 km north of Port Vila to the Nguna Is. wharf. Then we phoned a guy on the island to come and pick us up in his spid bot and ferry us across.

We set out on our journey to the top, passing on the way some beach goats...

...a jungle cow....

...and a lovely little village where we met up with our guide, Kirk. Poor Kirk didn't realise that he was going to be our guide until we came traipsing through the Sunday morning stillness of his village asking after him. One of the group members had heard from a work mate that finding your way to the top of the volcano was nigh impossible without the skills and local knowledge of Kirk, so we had no choice but to razzle him out of his jarmies and convince him (with the help of a fair wad of vatu) to take us to the top!

The flowers along the way were quite spectacular..

... as were the tips and tricks provided by Kirk. Here he is giving us the low down-on a bit of Nguna black magic. Apparently, if you get tired of the local playboy cutting your grass, you can take the leaves of this wild kava plant and with a bit of ceremony (involving a lot of wrist swirling and puffing) you can blow the knobbly warty things off the leaves of the plant and onto the face of the would-be Casanova, rendering him too ugly to pull chicks ever again. Kirk assured us that this very thing had, in fact, happened to a local chap he knows. Hmmm.

We battled our way through swathes of bush cane....

And finally made it to the top!

This is a shot of the crater. Kirk couldn't remember how long it had been since it last blew its top, but it must have been quite a while, at least long enough to let a forest of palm trees flourish. There are actually nine active volcanoes in Vanuatu. I reckon next time we'll climb an active one, because I bet that looking over the rim into a bubbling broiling pit of lava would be just that bit more gratifying.

We were still pretty stoked to have reached the top nonetheless.

The End.