She now lies in 18m of water and is a beautiful dive. Unfortunately, the times that she is accessible are limited. She lies in the shipping channel, an area of great current execpt for short 30 minute windows where the tides change and the water is ‘slack’. Secondly, access to the channel is limited by incoming and outgoing ships. Divers are at the mercy of Melbourne Port Authority who only give a definite ‘all clear’ 1 hour in advance. This is was not our first attempt at this wreck; previously shipping had prevented us and we were forced elsewhere. Saturday, however, we were lucky and had a beautiful dive.

As I said, we stayed, ‘here’, Phillip Island, in a house with a couple of friends. There were kayaking trips exploring mangroves and the stunning surf bashed southern coast (thanks to some northerly winds calming the ocean down). There were cliff walks (and scrambles because not going up and down cliffs is boring). There were dives: an amazing rock feature called the pinnacle (an underwater version of the one in the userpic), rising from the sea floor at 45m (147ft) to a peak at 8m(26ft), where we saw sharks and walls of soft corals; a dive on the wreck of the ‘George Kermode’; a shore dive for abalone, but also saw another small shark I have not seen before at Smith’s beach. My left sinus was painful on all dives and I’ll have to give it a rest now, but it was worth it.

On Dec 12th we flew from Melbourne to Brisbane, Brisbane to Honiara (Solomon Islands) and Honiara to Santo (Vanuatu). The airport at Santo is one small building and nicer and clener than the airport in Honiara. Outside a giant sculture of a pig tusk, the symbol of Santo, stands in the sunshine. Our hotel has sent a minibus for us. Also in the bus is a girl to be dropped at the hospital for an internship and an American backpacker who has just come from the island of Tanna. We drive through the centre of Luganville, Vanuatu’s second city but I hardly notice it. It is barely even a small town.

Coral Quays resort consists of 18 small bungalows, each with a bed and bathroom, spread in a lush tropical garden full of palms, ferns and fruit trees. There is a pool and a restaurant area with a balcony looking over the sea. It feels like a tropical paradise. There is also a lock-room with large baths of freshwater for washing dive gear. The hotel is quiet: only two other parties besides us.

The first day the weather is gorgeous. Hot and clear. It is meant to be rainy season. We plan to dive in case it changes and we cannot do so later. We are picked up and taken to Luganville to do the paperwork and then out the side of town. Quickly the sealed roads run out. We bump along potholes for a few more km and turn off on a narrow track into jungle and down to the beach. 50m from the shore, with her bow in 20m of water and her stern a further 200m away in 70m of water lies the SS President Coolidge. She is a 330 tonne vessel sunk in WWII after hitting a friendly mine. Previously she was a luxury liner and so has artifacts of beauty and of war. Her dining room has chandeliers while her holds are full of jeeps, canons and aircraft fuel tanks. We did 5 dives on this ship including three penetration dives into her dark insides. One of these was at night when we saw schools of flashlight fish moving like too many Tinkerbells flying in spirals in the ship’s holds. That will be remembered as one of my favorite dives to date. Allan Powers, the owner of the dive shop here has built a coral garden at 5m for easy and interesting decompression stops. He also built a wall in the shallows to protect you from surf and to clip reef-shoes to. It must be one of the easiest dive entries anywhere. It almost takes the challenge out of it.

After our first dive we go back to the hotel, have lunch, rest and then visit a second dive site called ‘million dollar point’. After WWII, hundreds of tonnes of US equipment were dumped here – from bulldozers and aero engines to trucks and jeeps. After the war, American efforts to sell the equipment were unsuccessful – so rather than give it to the then Condominium government, the Americans dumped the lot. It makes for a very unusual sea-scape.

The second day we dive the Coolidge in the morning and then in the afternoon take some time to visit the market, buying fruit, eating at one of the very many small kitchens that occupy a single tiny building with a table outside. We also borrow some barely functional bikes from the hotel and cycle out the end of town until we come to coconut plantations and a wide river. The following day we dive only the morning again. In the afternoon we take a trip up the Eastern side of Santo. We meet Jaz who takes us in the dugout canoe that he and his father-in-law made down a river to a blue-hole. Here the water is slightly saline, exchanging with the sea through the bottom of the hole. It is an incredible blue, the jungle overhanging all sides.

After our last dive on the Coolidge, the incredible night dive, we arranged two further dives to see the outer reefs. We dive from a ‘banana boat’ with two dive-masters, one of whom wears a shark-shield. There are also two boat hands, one a girl from the Solomon Islands who has come to Vanuatu for peace. Four people and a boat seems like a lot to hire for 5 hours and I feel like a very rich tourist. The reef is gorgeous. Huge plate corals and schools of fish, giant walls of corals, clams, anemones, crays, swimthroughs and caves.

After all the exertion of diving we need a relaxation day. After buying some woven bags from the market we take the ferry to Aore island. The ferry (actually a tiny boat) is run by the Aore Island Resort. If you have lunch there the ferry is free and you can snorkel from their beach, use their pool and sea-kayaks. It is a hot day. We swim and paddle and swim some more.

All of a sudden it is our last day. Today we will visit the ‘Millenium Cave’ we don’t know exactly what it is but have been told it is amazing. We are driven for maybe an hour through jungle on muddy, rutted unsealed roads, another legacy of the Americans. Eventually the road is too bad. We walk another hour passing though a village where all the houses are made of woven palm leaves. In the second village we leave our driver and follow a local guide deeper into the jungle. Eventually we stop and he paints our faces so tghat we can enter the cave. We ask him about the name. Apparently the location of the cave was lost until some Japanese tourists in the lat 1990’s wanted to visited this fabled location. After a few years searching the jungle they found it again and called it the Millenium Cave. The cave is 20m wide, 50m high and actually isn’t a cave at all. It is a tunnel, carved by the river that runs through it. The tunnel is 300m long. We wade through the entire length with torches to see the hundreds of swallows that make their nests. At the other end we emerge into a sunlight and rest. But this is only half the story. Next we boulder-hop through rapids and edge our way through and past the thrashing foaming waters. Eventually the incline lessened and we are in an incredible canyon. Our guide gives us kid’s pool toys and we float, gently propelled by the flowing water, down the river for over an hour. Sometimes we stop and climb out and around rapids. The last section of the trip is to climb out of the canyon base up waterfalls and bamboo ladders until we are back to the level of the jungle. Then we retrace our path back to the village and eventually to the bus. It was an amazing day, much more exhilarating that I was expecting. I have a feeling some people might have been scared witless by some of the slippery descents, bamboo bridges and strong currents though :)

VANUATU: ♥ There was pumice washing up of the beach. Rubbish piles of coconut leaves seemed to smoulder for weeks. ♥ There was a girl that could sing Mariah Carey songs better than Mariah Carey, live, under the stars. ♥ Taxi-drivers seemed indifferent to being paid, or how much. ♥ Generally payment seemed almost optional. ♥ Highly prized items, for men, are woven bags imported from the Solomon Islands. ♥ People drink kava not alcohol from cups made of coconut shells. ♥ The taxis run on coconut oil not petrol. ♥ Nobody tried aggressively to sell us anything. ♥ Sunday Luganville is a ghost-town. ♥ The bags at the market are made of woven coconut-leaves not plastic.