Chlidonias versus Vanuatu - aka the most uninspiring travel thread of all time.
Once again, that time of year had come around where I had to use up some annual leave. Last year I took a couple of weeks in the South Island, the year before that a couple of weeks in the upper North Island. This time I decided to branch out a little further - I haven't been overseas since 2019 for some reason - and so I looked at where I could go without forking out too much money on airfares. Not very far as it turns out. Plane tickets over this side of the world are still very much ... let's say, "not cheap".
However, a little bit of light shone forth as I cast my gaze unto the internet. Air Vanuatu had a deal on with return airfares from Auckland to Vanuatu for NZ$600 which, at the moment, was cheaper than return airfares to Australia!
There probably aren't any New Zealanders and Australians who would need to be told what or where Vanuatu is, but for anyone else who hasn't heard of it Vanuatu is a large archipelago in Melanesia covering the distance between New Caledonia (east of Australia) and the Solomon Islands (east of New Guinea). Fiji and Samoa are east of Vanuatu. It used to be called New Hebrides (named by Cook after those Scottish islands), was colonised initially by the French, and was a major location in the WW2 Pacific war.
Before committing to anything I read through a bunch of birding trip reports to get an idea of what I could see there. I mean, I knew there were endemic birds there, but it was more about the accessibility and costs. Turns out that most birders who go to Vanuatu and write trip reports are either on a cruise ship or are spending at most a couple of days there before bouncing off to New Caledonia or Fiji, and most of them go to just one island. Espiritu Santo is the largest island in the archipelago and all the endemic birds can be found there, although a number of them can only be found in the mountain forests which are difficult to access. It is really peculiar to me that on an island chain stretching for 800km there are almost no single-island endemics such as you would find in other Pacific archipelagos like the Solomons or Fiji. There are a couple of species found solely on Santo (such as the Mountain Starling), and there is the Vanuatu Kingfisher which is only found on the three largest islands in the middle of the group. Otherwise almost all the species are found over the entire archipelago or over at least most of it.
But it isn't just birds I'm interested in, and while looking up to see what mammals are in the islands I discovered that there is an endemic flying fox in the Banks Islands to the north. There are three flying foxes in Vanuatu: the widespread Pacific Flying Fox Pteropus tonganus which I have already seen elsewhere; the Vanuatu Flying Fox P. anetianus which is found on most of the Vanuatu islands but not outside the archipelago; and the Banks Flying Fox P. fundatus which is found only on a cluster of small islands of which the largest is Vanua Lava. Very little is known about the Banks Flying Fox but while looking up where it was found and how to get there, I found that some of the birding cruise ships stop at the town of Sola on Vanua Lava, and from that I found out that several of the mountain-forest birds on Santo are found down to sea-level on Vanua Lava (because it is a much smaller island without much altitude). The Vanuatu Honeyeater is a street-bird in Sola, for example, and Baker's Imperial Pigeon - which few birders have seen apparently, because of the difficulty of accessing its habitat on Santo - can likewise be seen near town.
I didn't know how likely it would be that I'd actually find any Banks Flying Foxes (they are small and non-gregarious, unlike your typical flying foxes), but the combination of an endemic fruit bat and apparently-easier birds meant that Vanua Lava would have to be my primary island to target. That presented a monetary issue though, because the flights from New Zealand come into the town of Port Vila on the island of Efate, and from there I would need to take a flight to Luganville on Espiritu Santo, and then another flight to Sola. The flights between Port Vila and Luganville are NZ$210 each way, and between Luganville and Sola NZ$150 each way - meaning it would add an extra NZ$720 to the NZ$600 NZ-Vanuatu flights! It's no longer a cheap deal if the domestic flights cost more than the international flights.
I sat on the idea for another couple of weeks, and then had another look at the Air Vanuatu website. Playing with the routes I realised that instead of Port Vila I could get an Auckland to Luganville return flight and for some reason, despite the international flight landing in Port Vila and then being transferred to the regular Port Vila to Luganville local flight, the total would only be NZ$640 (i.e. in effect the Port Vila to Luganville return flight was NZ$40 rather than NZ$420). I had saved myself almost $400. That clinched it, and I booked the flight.
Then I tried to work out the flights from Luganville to Sola. Vanua Lava is a small island with a grass airstrip and planes only fly there and back three days a week. My only options were to get two days on the island or six days. Two days seemed too few, but six days was probably too many. But I also had two weeks total in Vanuatu because the international flights are also only three times a week, and the days ranged wildly in price from about $300 to $700 each way so I'd taken the cheapest in each direction. Therefore I went with six days on Vanua Lava, which would also give me a spare three days afterwards back on Santo where I could look for some extra birds not found on Vanua Lava such as the Vanuatu Kingfisher.
So that's the set-up for the trip. It was supposed to go thusly: fly into Santo, spend the next day there, fly to Vanua Lava on the third day, spend a week there, then fly back to Santo and have three days for some extra birding (expecting to have already seen most of the available birds while on Vanua Lava), then fly home. Things, however, did not go exactly to plan. Or even slightly to plan. It was mostly airline issues which caused things to fall apart, and therefore it was out of my control, but it made for a frustrating trip. In fact all the birds I saw in two weeks could conceivably be seen in just one day on Santo. As an aside, there are direct flights from Brisbane to Luganville, so any Australian birder could fly straight to Santo, spend one day there and still see all the same birds I did. That's kind of sad.
I'll cover the trip one day per post to keep it going for a little while, but be aware that a number of posts are therefore going to be about very little indeed...
Once again, that time of year had come around where I had to use up some annual leave. Last year I took a couple of weeks in the South Island, the year before that a couple of weeks in the upper North Island. This time I decided to branch out a little further - I haven't been overseas since 2019 for some reason - and so I looked at where I could go without forking out too much money on airfares. Not very far as it turns out. Plane tickets over this side of the world are still very much ... let's say, "not cheap".
However, a little bit of light shone forth as I cast my gaze unto the internet. Air Vanuatu had a deal on with return airfares from Auckland to Vanuatu for NZ$600 which, at the moment, was cheaper than return airfares to Australia!
There probably aren't any New Zealanders and Australians who would need to be told what or where Vanuatu is, but for anyone else who hasn't heard of it Vanuatu is a large archipelago in Melanesia covering the distance between New Caledonia (east of Australia) and the Solomon Islands (east of New Guinea). Fiji and Samoa are east of Vanuatu. It used to be called New Hebrides (named by Cook after those Scottish islands), was colonised initially by the French, and was a major location in the WW2 Pacific war.
Before committing to anything I read through a bunch of birding trip reports to get an idea of what I could see there. I mean, I knew there were endemic birds there, but it was more about the accessibility and costs. Turns out that most birders who go to Vanuatu and write trip reports are either on a cruise ship or are spending at most a couple of days there before bouncing off to New Caledonia or Fiji, and most of them go to just one island. Espiritu Santo is the largest island in the archipelago and all the endemic birds can be found there, although a number of them can only be found in the mountain forests which are difficult to access. It is really peculiar to me that on an island chain stretching for 800km there are almost no single-island endemics such as you would find in other Pacific archipelagos like the Solomons or Fiji. There are a couple of species found solely on Santo (such as the Mountain Starling), and there is the Vanuatu Kingfisher which is only found on the three largest islands in the middle of the group. Otherwise almost all the species are found over the entire archipelago or over at least most of it.
But it isn't just birds I'm interested in, and while looking up to see what mammals are in the islands I discovered that there is an endemic flying fox in the Banks Islands to the north. There are three flying foxes in Vanuatu: the widespread Pacific Flying Fox Pteropus tonganus which I have already seen elsewhere; the Vanuatu Flying Fox P. anetianus which is found on most of the Vanuatu islands but not outside the archipelago; and the Banks Flying Fox P. fundatus which is found only on a cluster of small islands of which the largest is Vanua Lava. Very little is known about the Banks Flying Fox but while looking up where it was found and how to get there, I found that some of the birding cruise ships stop at the town of Sola on Vanua Lava, and from that I found out that several of the mountain-forest birds on Santo are found down to sea-level on Vanua Lava (because it is a much smaller island without much altitude). The Vanuatu Honeyeater is a street-bird in Sola, for example, and Baker's Imperial Pigeon - which few birders have seen apparently, because of the difficulty of accessing its habitat on Santo - can likewise be seen near town.
I didn't know how likely it would be that I'd actually find any Banks Flying Foxes (they are small and non-gregarious, unlike your typical flying foxes), but the combination of an endemic fruit bat and apparently-easier birds meant that Vanua Lava would have to be my primary island to target. That presented a monetary issue though, because the flights from New Zealand come into the town of Port Vila on the island of Efate, and from there I would need to take a flight to Luganville on Espiritu Santo, and then another flight to Sola. The flights between Port Vila and Luganville are NZ$210 each way, and between Luganville and Sola NZ$150 each way - meaning it would add an extra NZ$720 to the NZ$600 NZ-Vanuatu flights! It's no longer a cheap deal if the domestic flights cost more than the international flights.
I sat on the idea for another couple of weeks, and then had another look at the Air Vanuatu website. Playing with the routes I realised that instead of Port Vila I could get an Auckland to Luganville return flight and for some reason, despite the international flight landing in Port Vila and then being transferred to the regular Port Vila to Luganville local flight, the total would only be NZ$640 (i.e. in effect the Port Vila to Luganville return flight was NZ$40 rather than NZ$420). I had saved myself almost $400. That clinched it, and I booked the flight.
Then I tried to work out the flights from Luganville to Sola. Vanua Lava is a small island with a grass airstrip and planes only fly there and back three days a week. My only options were to get two days on the island or six days. Two days seemed too few, but six days was probably too many. But I also had two weeks total in Vanuatu because the international flights are also only three times a week, and the days ranged wildly in price from about $300 to $700 each way so I'd taken the cheapest in each direction. Therefore I went with six days on Vanua Lava, which would also give me a spare three days afterwards back on Santo where I could look for some extra birds not found on Vanua Lava such as the Vanuatu Kingfisher.
So that's the set-up for the trip. It was supposed to go thusly: fly into Santo, spend the next day there, fly to Vanua Lava on the third day, spend a week there, then fly back to Santo and have three days for some extra birding (expecting to have already seen most of the available birds while on Vanua Lava), then fly home. Things, however, did not go exactly to plan. Or even slightly to plan. It was mostly airline issues which caused things to fall apart, and therefore it was out of my control, but it made for a frustrating trip. In fact all the birds I saw in two weeks could conceivably be seen in just one day on Santo. As an aside, there are direct flights from Brisbane to Luganville, so any Australian birder could fly straight to Santo, spend one day there and still see all the same birds I did. That's kind of sad.
I'll cover the trip one day per post to keep it going for a little while, but be aware that a number of posts are therefore going to be about very little indeed...
