In search of Vanuatu’s mythical yacht club
After hours of roving through the jungle, a stupefying sight awaited. At the end of a long dirt road, a man appeared. He was entirely naked, walking a goat on a lead. The South Pacific sunlight spotlighted the dazzling sight of an enormous pair of testicles and a tiny penis. The hours of nothingness stretched out behind us only added to the incongruity of the miraculous apparition. Suddenly, a trek that seemed fated to be fruitless had borne a man, his goat, and what appeared to be a button mushroom sitting atop two hay bales between his legs.
His name was George, and he greeted us warmly. The sense of surprise among us was mutual. From his perspective, it’s not every day that you gaze down the local dirt road and see three young white men in matching Newcastle United jerseys heading towards an isolated village of a few families in the most remote reaches of Vanuatu’s far-flung Tanna Island. All told, it was hard to know whether that was respectively more startling than witnessing a man taking his goat out for a stroll in the nude.
George welcomed us and led the way to his village. His evident pride imbued the auspicious encounter with an aura of awe. One of the great hurdles of human existence is that there is always somewhere else you could be or something else you could be doing. Infinite unfurling hypotheticals are constantly pulling us away from the present with the nagging wonder of whether we’re drinking in the right bar, ordering the right main course, living in the right city, clocking into the right job, sleeping with the right person, even wearing the right pants.
But for one of the few times in my life, George’s quiet charisma made me feel certain that I was meant to be in this idyllic spot with this naked man and his goat for unfathomable reasons that I have gained no further understanding of in the subsequent years. There was simply a sense of ‘arrival’—a rare and beautiful thing in a life of comings and goings. With the gentle hush of the ocean lapping against the shore, which somehow seems closer to silence than sound, somewhere in the near distance, a friendly man showing us the pink and purple Bougainvillea that flowered in his peaceful village as he guided us towards the Yacht Club, I knew I was living a life.
My journey to this village, which appears to be unlisted on maps, began years earlier. Back in Newcastle, a man took to the stage as the compère of an amateur comedy night. His routine centred around hand-painted flags. At one point, he uttered the fateful phrase “It’s Vanuatu, you flag idiots” as a punchline. Myself and my friends not only laughed, but as is often the case with comedy, we immortalised that line as part of the parlance of our group’s patter.
So, some years later, while I was living in Australia and looking for somewhere nearby to holiday after an unrelenting period of work, Vanuatu leapt off the map. ‘I’ll never be closer to this mystic land’, I thought to myself. It was still a three-hour, 40-minute flight away, but that’s pretty much as close as Vanuatu gets to anywhere. The volcanic archipelago is sprawled in the sparsely populated South Pacific—scattered spots of perennially erupting jungle, odd Prussian blue pools, and naked goat walkers. Two friends and I quickly booked up. Any hesitancy would’ve quashed the plans.
So, we arrived in Tanna grossly unprepared. It turned out volcanologists had taken up every spare bed on the entire island. This was a setback. We would need to find a bar to reconcile our sudden, unfortunate homelessness. We inquired with a local. He informed us the nearest bar was the Yacht Club, a two-hour walk away. Under the unrelenting midday Pacific sun, on fine ashy ground spewed out from the local volcano over the last thousand years of constant eruption, such a walk seemed daunting.
We were told about an alternative—homemade moonshine brewed in a village just 15 minutes away. Sadly, we were also informed that it has a tendency to render the uninitiated blind. It says a lot about a man’s disposition if he is willing to lose his sight to quench his sudden thirst for a spot of liquor. Had it not been for the saving grace of news that there were two unoccupied tents on the island that we could sleep in, then I believe we would have risked the potentially poisonous brew.
Instead, buoyed by the news that we had two tiny nylon structures from God knows where to spend the night beneath at the foot of an active volcano hurling projectiles the size of a small van into the air, on the brink of a mystic jungle, we decided to find the Yacht Club. In fact, this fabled bar began to acquire an untold majesty with every passing second. Initially, finding a bar was touted as a purely logistical operation. Somewhere we could regather and take stock in the unfortunate news that we had nowhere to stay thanks to a team of fucking volcanologists. Now, finding the island’s only identifiable bar was akin to a pilgrimage honouring the beauty that beer had bestowed upon our lives thus far.
In due time, we would scale the volcano, staring into the swirling centre of this living planet’s heart and feel the exhilarating rush of witnessing such an affirming sight. We would even dupe the dastardly volcanologists with a doctored picture of a lit cigarette against the night sky that we purported to be a large eruption that we had caught on camera, and they later excitedly asked us to email it to them so they could analyse the proportions in their lab. We would feast on the unrivalled bounty of Vanuatu’s beauty. Alas, in the interim years, no sight on that trip of a lifetime was as affirming as George, his charming smile, his pet goat, and his stumpy cock upon bulbous testes.
We would never find the Yacht Club. It’s hard to even tell whether it existed. While I’ve been assured it is real through further research, there are only so many times you can be told by locals that it’s ‘five minutes down the road on the left’ before you start to think that the whole thing is some sort of island-wide in-joke. But in trying to find it, I learnt one of the secret pleasures of travelling in itself: the miracle of things not working out as once intended.
In fact, everything was so unintentionally brilliant about Vanuatu that I’ve been reluctant to ever mention it since let alone write about it. I’ve checked its usually damning football scores, glanced at its current weather forecast, stayed on top of its rather uneventful news, and kept the mini flag I acquired over there in a prominent place in every property I’ve since lived in. But I’ve done all of this tentatively, each time hoping that not much has changed.
When I was there seven or eight years ago, it was already clear that Chinese TNCs were sniffing about the place, ostensibly present to build roads as part of a humanitarian project, but you wondered where those roads led. The presence of these incumbent TNCs remained a symbol of how wonderfully quirky the country is and threatened its delicate sensibilities. It’s not quite untouched—it has been colonised, and cruises dock there regularly, but it is still wholly unspoiled and singular.
With that in mind, I’d recommend that you didn’t seek out this perfectly barmy spot of paradise, not for my sake or even Vanuatu’s, but for yours. Because to uncover the random magic of travel’s affirming curveballs, you have to adhere to your own mystic guides not those you read in a review or someone else’s account. So, you’d be wise to look for your own signs of the universe guiding you towards an entirely unintentional encounter with a friendly man, his goat, and disproportionately aligned genitalia.
