DAY 202 TUESDAY OCTOBER 13 - MYSTERY ISLAND, VANUATU

Another day ashore.  This time we dropped anchors and used the Rescue Boats as tenders to get to the small pier.  

Mystery Island is quite small and has no inhabitants.  There is another large island just across the way and people have set up stalls to use when a cruise ship comes in, so there was a lot of locals there, including a high school group on an excursion.

 It takes 45 minutes to walk around the whole island, which has a continuous sandy beach and coral reefs suitable for snorkelling.  In WW2 the Americans built an airstrip and it is still in use. (When Queen Elisabeth II was coming to Australia from Fiji on Britannia in 1974, she had a picnic on this island and made it famous).

Passengers were issued with tickets as a means of queueing for the tenders.  Each boat was to hold 90 people and five boats tripped back and forth to get people ashore.

We boarded at 10:30am and started walking along the beach.  Malcolm was walking along a rocky part of the shore and did not notice he had stepped on a wet section.  It was like grease and he fell sideways scratching his arm as he tried to break his fall and banging his left hip on the rocks.  He will have a bit of a limp for a day or two.

Half way around we came to the end of the airstrip, so decided to walk its length.  As we got nearly to the end a yellow air taxi came in to land.  We browsed the stalls which had quite a lot for sale and Lyn bought a necklace.

They priced everything in Australian dollars.  Local men were taking people out onto the lagoon in a dugout outrigger sailing boat.

We got back on the tender at 12: 30 and had a quiet afternoon of scrabble, sudoku and reading.

The 8pm concert was given by Colleen Williamson, an excellent American soprano, who sang songs from the musicals of the 50s and 60s, as well as "O mio babbino caro".

Only six more sleeps.