Day Nine:
The truck to the village of Matantas at Big Bay, where the Vatthe Conservation Area is situated, would be leaving Luganville at 2pm I had been told. Check-out at the Tropicana was at 10am, so after that I was basically just sitting around waiting until it was time to wander down the road to the petrol station from where the trucks departed.
The owner of the Tropicana knew I was going to Matantas and had made a few comments the day before about how the truck was at 2pm, or maybe 1.30pm so I should go a bit earlier, and also I should take food and water with me because there might not be much at Matantas (so I had been going to stop off at the supermarket on the way to the petrol station). I was therefore a little surprised when he (the owner) pulled up outside the hotel in a big truck loaded with building supplies some time after midday and said he was going that way and asked if I wanted a lift. He is constructing a new backpackers hotel up in the hills and although he wasn't going the whole way to Matantas it was only an hour's walk from the junction where he could drop me off. I knew it was going to be a walk in the hottest part of the day and my bag would be quite heavy on account of carrying bottles of water, but even if I stretched it out I could still consider it as just going out birding for a long walk. One shouldn't turn down the offer of a free ride after all.
As I have mentioned previously there is only one sealed road on Santo, which runs up the east coast. North of the turn-off which goes to Loru there is a dirt road running west off the main road, going up into the hills. The regular "trucks" which go to Matantas were, as I found out later, actually Toyota Hilux utes in the back of which the passengers ride so it was much better travelling in the cab of a truck, especially because anyone who is familiar with the tropics will know that almost any dirt road is basically just a series of ruts and gullies.
Three times I saw rails on the dirt road (as in, the birds called rails, not the things that trains run on), but they darted off too quickly to tell which species. I had seen a trip report from a few years ago where Spotless Crakes were seen on this road, but these didn't look small enough and even on a Pacific island I didn't think they would be on the road like that. I figured I would see more once I started walking but I only saw one and again it was gone too quickly to get a look at. My guess is that they were probably Banded Rails.
The Tropicana owner dropped me at a junction and said I just had to follow the road until I reached the ocean, and that was where Matantas was. It would take one hour? Weeeell, about one hour. So, probably much more than one hour then. After an hour of walking in temperatures of approximately 90 degrees (Celsius, of course) a ute came driving along the road from the direction of Matantas and they stopped to ask why I was a crazy person. I asked how far to Matantas, to which the response was "long way". Half an hour later I was thinking "did he say long way or wrong way?". Another ute came along, again from the direction of Matantas. I asked these guys the same question, to which the reply was (after some thinking) "half an hour". Half an hour later a third ute came past - how far now to Matantas? There was a bit of a discussion amongst the people in the ute, from which the answer came "one hour and a half walk". At one point I decided to just stop and wait for a ute heading to Matantas - there must be one coming along sometime soon! - but after about ten minutes rest I decided to just keep walking, which was just as well because it was only about an hour before dark when I finally got to the village, and I found out the next ute wouldn't be getting in until 8 or 9pm. It also turned out that the utes went back and forth at all sorts of times of day - i.e. not just leaving Luganville at 2pm each day as everyone in town had told me!
The walk to Matantas took three hours all up which doesn't sound like much in hindsight, but at the time it was not any fun at all carrying a pack in tropical heat through the hills for that far. I just roughly measured it out on Google Maps as well, and it was only about 15km [9 miles for Americans). However I did get a bird addition along the way, with Melanesian Cuckoo-Shrikes seen well several times. I've seen them in New Caledonia but they were new for my Vanuatu list. Red-bellied Fruit Doves were very common, regularly bursting out of the shrubs along the roadside where they must have been feeding on berries. I may have also heard a Vanuatu Honeyeater - it was song reminiscent of a Tui (a species of New Zealand honeyeater), but I couldn't find the bird itself.
Best sighting was a Vanuatu Flying Fox flying across the road. This is an endemic species which is active more often during the day than the Pacific Flying Fox. After not seeing them at Loru, and without getting to Vanua Lava at all, I had thought I wasn't going to get to see them. The bat circled back and landed in the top of a tree where I could see it clearly. My camera was in my bag (I just had my binoculars round my neck) but I was too tired by then to bother unpacking it and in any case the photo would have been silhouetted against the sky. I saw another one flying further along. In both cases I thought initially they were harriers because in flight they look chestnut rather than black - perhaps the reason the two species are distinguished as "white flying fox" and "black flying fox" rather than for the colour of the head as I had thought.
Another good sighting was right after I saw the second bat, when I heard some rustling in the undergrowth beside the road, and a megapode suddenly burst out and flew past me just a couple of feet away and disappeared into the trees. It was very brief but I saw it much closer and better than the one at Loru. Despite the draining hike, if I had taken a ute to Matantas I wouldn't have any of those sightings so it was worth it in the end.
It started raining about half an hour before I reached Matantas. Villages in the Pacific tend to be quite spread out, with strings of houses and properties scattered along the road well before you reach the main part of the village. As I trudged past the first house, a man fixing a car with his son called out a greeting. I waved back and continued on - the owner of the Tropicana had told me to keep walking to the ocean and that was where Bill's house was (and also I didn't realise I had even reached the village yet). This first man I came across was in fact Bill who was the person I was supposed to look for. Apparently after I had passed, his son had said "that was a white man!" and Bill had said the equivalent of "no way." As I passed the next house, someone came out to see why a white man was here, and when I said I was looking for Bill he took me back to the house I'd just passed.
Bill's guesthouse - which is on the beach even if his own house isn't - is a basic hut. There is no running water or electricity (although some houses in the village have solar panels). Amusingly the hut has mosquito netting across the windows but the walls don't reach to the roof so the upper section is a completely open flight-zone. One night there was even a bat swooping through the hut to catch insects attracted by my torch. The door doesn't reach to the bottom of the frame either, and at night land-crabs would wander in underneath and roam around the floor looking for dropped food. The less said about the cat-sized huntsman spiders the better though.
Seeing there is a dog in that photo, I have to give a thumbs up to Vanuatu dogs. As most people know, dogs are the worst, and Pacific dogs are normally the worst of the worst. But all the dogs in Vanuatu were totally chill. If I was walking through the village in the dark they would bark, as one might expect, but otherwise every dog I encountered in Vanuatu was as harmless as a little bunny.
There used to be about a dozen huts for tourists at Matantas but fewer and fewer people came because of the rough trip out from Luganville; then Covid came along and obviously zero people came during these last few years; and then all the other huts which had fallen into disrepair during this time were destroyed when four major hurricanes hit Vanuatu earlier this year one after the other. Now they just keep one hut for any locals who turn up, or the occasional tourist. They said they don't usually see white people now though - some of the kids there had apparently never seen one. I guess the birders all go to Loru now because it is easier, and no-one else has any reason to go to Vatthe. I liked it there though and I'd certainly recommend it if you can put up with a very basic lifestyle. It is much cheaper than going to Loru for a start. I stayed at Matantas for three nights and spent less in total than what the morning trip to Loru had cost me, and I saw everything I saw at Loru plus a bunch of birds I didn't see there (including, eventually, Vanuatu Kingfisher). If you do visit, it would be an idea to bring in your own supply of drinking water, and some spare food might also be brought just in case although meals are provided.
Originally I had been thinking I would only have one day at Matantas - up on Wednesday afternoon, Thursday full day, and then back on Friday morning - because in town I had been told that the trucks didn't run on the weekends. However in Matantas they told me that the trucks were every day, even on Sunday if necessary, so I ended up staying for three nights which gave me all of Thursday and Friday. I decided to go back to Luganville on the Saturday rather than Sunday because my flight home was on Monday, and with things regularly going wrong on this trip I didn't want to risk something happening where I would get stuck on the Sunday and not be able to get back for the Monday flight.
If I'd had more days at Matantas (or if it hadn't taken so long to find the Vanuatu Kingfisher!) I might have used a day to get a ute back up to where I'd started walking in order to try and find a Vanuatu Honeyeater. Walking back to Matantas would have been much easier without the pack and I could have spent more time birding in the forests along the way, knowing how far it was that I actually had to walk.
BIRDS
Common Mynah Acridotheres tristis
House Sparrow Passer domesticus
Polynesian Triller Lalage maculosa modesta
White-breasted Woodswallow Artamus leucorynchus tenuis
Cardinal Myzomela Myzomela cardinalis tenuis
Satin Swiftlet Collocalia uropygialis uropygialis
Black-headed (Chestnut) Munia Lonchura atricapilla
Pacific Kingfisher Todiramphus sacer santoensis
Australasian (Swamp) Harrier Circus approximans
Uniform Swiftlet Aerodramus vanikorensis vanikorensis
31) South Melanesian Cuckoo-Shrike Coracina caledonica thilenii
MacKinlay's Cuckoo-Dove Macropygia mackinlayi mackinlayi
Coconut Lorikeet Trichoglossus haematodus massena
Red-bellied Fruit Dove Ptilinopus greyi
Pacific Imperial Pigeon Ducula pacifica pacifica
Vanuatu Megapode Megapodius layardi
MAMMALS
4) Vanuatu Flying Fox Pteropus anetianus aorensis
The truck to the village of Matantas at Big Bay, where the Vatthe Conservation Area is situated, would be leaving Luganville at 2pm I had been told. Check-out at the Tropicana was at 10am, so after that I was basically just sitting around waiting until it was time to wander down the road to the petrol station from where the trucks departed.
The owner of the Tropicana knew I was going to Matantas and had made a few comments the day before about how the truck was at 2pm, or maybe 1.30pm so I should go a bit earlier, and also I should take food and water with me because there might not be much at Matantas (so I had been going to stop off at the supermarket on the way to the petrol station). I was therefore a little surprised when he (the owner) pulled up outside the hotel in a big truck loaded with building supplies some time after midday and said he was going that way and asked if I wanted a lift. He is constructing a new backpackers hotel up in the hills and although he wasn't going the whole way to Matantas it was only an hour's walk from the junction where he could drop me off. I knew it was going to be a walk in the hottest part of the day and my bag would be quite heavy on account of carrying bottles of water, but even if I stretched it out I could still consider it as just going out birding for a long walk. One shouldn't turn down the offer of a free ride after all.
As I have mentioned previously there is only one sealed road on Santo, which runs up the east coast. North of the turn-off which goes to Loru there is a dirt road running west off the main road, going up into the hills. The regular "trucks" which go to Matantas were, as I found out later, actually Toyota Hilux utes in the back of which the passengers ride so it was much better travelling in the cab of a truck, especially because anyone who is familiar with the tropics will know that almost any dirt road is basically just a series of ruts and gullies.
Three times I saw rails on the dirt road (as in, the birds called rails, not the things that trains run on), but they darted off too quickly to tell which species. I had seen a trip report from a few years ago where Spotless Crakes were seen on this road, but these didn't look small enough and even on a Pacific island I didn't think they would be on the road like that. I figured I would see more once I started walking but I only saw one and again it was gone too quickly to get a look at. My guess is that they were probably Banded Rails.
The Tropicana owner dropped me at a junction and said I just had to follow the road until I reached the ocean, and that was where Matantas was. It would take one hour? Weeeell, about one hour. So, probably much more than one hour then. After an hour of walking in temperatures of approximately 90 degrees (Celsius, of course) a ute came driving along the road from the direction of Matantas and they stopped to ask why I was a crazy person. I asked how far to Matantas, to which the response was "long way". Half an hour later I was thinking "did he say long way or wrong way?". Another ute came along, again from the direction of Matantas. I asked these guys the same question, to which the reply was (after some thinking) "half an hour". Half an hour later a third ute came past - how far now to Matantas? There was a bit of a discussion amongst the people in the ute, from which the answer came "one hour and a half walk". At one point I decided to just stop and wait for a ute heading to Matantas - there must be one coming along sometime soon! - but after about ten minutes rest I decided to just keep walking, which was just as well because it was only about an hour before dark when I finally got to the village, and I found out the next ute wouldn't be getting in until 8 or 9pm. It also turned out that the utes went back and forth at all sorts of times of day - i.e. not just leaving Luganville at 2pm each day as everyone in town had told me!
The walk to Matantas took three hours all up which doesn't sound like much in hindsight, but at the time it was not any fun at all carrying a pack in tropical heat through the hills for that far. I just roughly measured it out on Google Maps as well, and it was only about 15km [9 miles for Americans). However I did get a bird addition along the way, with Melanesian Cuckoo-Shrikes seen well several times. I've seen them in New Caledonia but they were new for my Vanuatu list. Red-bellied Fruit Doves were very common, regularly bursting out of the shrubs along the roadside where they must have been feeding on berries. I may have also heard a Vanuatu Honeyeater - it was song reminiscent of a Tui (a species of New Zealand honeyeater), but I couldn't find the bird itself.
Best sighting was a Vanuatu Flying Fox flying across the road. This is an endemic species which is active more often during the day than the Pacific Flying Fox. After not seeing them at Loru, and without getting to Vanua Lava at all, I had thought I wasn't going to get to see them. The bat circled back and landed in the top of a tree where I could see it clearly. My camera was in my bag (I just had my binoculars round my neck) but I was too tired by then to bother unpacking it and in any case the photo would have been silhouetted against the sky. I saw another one flying further along. In both cases I thought initially they were harriers because in flight they look chestnut rather than black - perhaps the reason the two species are distinguished as "white flying fox" and "black flying fox" rather than for the colour of the head as I had thought.
Another good sighting was right after I saw the second bat, when I heard some rustling in the undergrowth beside the road, and a megapode suddenly burst out and flew past me just a couple of feet away and disappeared into the trees. It was very brief but I saw it much closer and better than the one at Loru. Despite the draining hike, if I had taken a ute to Matantas I wouldn't have any of those sightings so it was worth it in the end.
It started raining about half an hour before I reached Matantas. Villages in the Pacific tend to be quite spread out, with strings of houses and properties scattered along the road well before you reach the main part of the village. As I trudged past the first house, a man fixing a car with his son called out a greeting. I waved back and continued on - the owner of the Tropicana had told me to keep walking to the ocean and that was where Bill's house was (and also I didn't realise I had even reached the village yet). This first man I came across was in fact Bill who was the person I was supposed to look for. Apparently after I had passed, his son had said "that was a white man!" and Bill had said the equivalent of "no way." As I passed the next house, someone came out to see why a white man was here, and when I said I was looking for Bill he took me back to the house I'd just passed.
Bill's guesthouse - which is on the beach even if his own house isn't - is a basic hut. There is no running water or electricity (although some houses in the village have solar panels). Amusingly the hut has mosquito netting across the windows but the walls don't reach to the roof so the upper section is a completely open flight-zone. One night there was even a bat swooping through the hut to catch insects attracted by my torch. The door doesn't reach to the bottom of the frame either, and at night land-crabs would wander in underneath and roam around the floor looking for dropped food. The less said about the cat-sized huntsman spiders the better though.
Seeing there is a dog in that photo, I have to give a thumbs up to Vanuatu dogs. As most people know, dogs are the worst, and Pacific dogs are normally the worst of the worst. But all the dogs in Vanuatu were totally chill. If I was walking through the village in the dark they would bark, as one might expect, but otherwise every dog I encountered in Vanuatu was as harmless as a little bunny.
There used to be about a dozen huts for tourists at Matantas but fewer and fewer people came because of the rough trip out from Luganville; then Covid came along and obviously zero people came during these last few years; and then all the other huts which had fallen into disrepair during this time were destroyed when four major hurricanes hit Vanuatu earlier this year one after the other. Now they just keep one hut for any locals who turn up, or the occasional tourist. They said they don't usually see white people now though - some of the kids there had apparently never seen one. I guess the birders all go to Loru now because it is easier, and no-one else has any reason to go to Vatthe. I liked it there though and I'd certainly recommend it if you can put up with a very basic lifestyle. It is much cheaper than going to Loru for a start. I stayed at Matantas for three nights and spent less in total than what the morning trip to Loru had cost me, and I saw everything I saw at Loru plus a bunch of birds I didn't see there (including, eventually, Vanuatu Kingfisher). If you do visit, it would be an idea to bring in your own supply of drinking water, and some spare food might also be brought just in case although meals are provided.
Originally I had been thinking I would only have one day at Matantas - up on Wednesday afternoon, Thursday full day, and then back on Friday morning - because in town I had been told that the trucks didn't run on the weekends. However in Matantas they told me that the trucks were every day, even on Sunday if necessary, so I ended up staying for three nights which gave me all of Thursday and Friday. I decided to go back to Luganville on the Saturday rather than Sunday because my flight home was on Monday, and with things regularly going wrong on this trip I didn't want to risk something happening where I would get stuck on the Sunday and not be able to get back for the Monday flight.
If I'd had more days at Matantas (or if it hadn't taken so long to find the Vanuatu Kingfisher!) I might have used a day to get a ute back up to where I'd started walking in order to try and find a Vanuatu Honeyeater. Walking back to Matantas would have been much easier without the pack and I could have spent more time birding in the forests along the way, knowing how far it was that I actually had to walk.
BIRDS
Common Mynah Acridotheres tristis
House Sparrow Passer domesticus
Polynesian Triller Lalage maculosa modesta
White-breasted Woodswallow Artamus leucorynchus tenuis
Cardinal Myzomela Myzomela cardinalis tenuis
Satin Swiftlet Collocalia uropygialis uropygialis
Black-headed (Chestnut) Munia Lonchura atricapilla
Pacific Kingfisher Todiramphus sacer santoensis
Australasian (Swamp) Harrier Circus approximans
Uniform Swiftlet Aerodramus vanikorensis vanikorensis
31) South Melanesian Cuckoo-Shrike Coracina caledonica thilenii
MacKinlay's Cuckoo-Dove Macropygia mackinlayi mackinlayi
Coconut Lorikeet Trichoglossus haematodus massena
Red-bellied Fruit Dove Ptilinopus greyi
Pacific Imperial Pigeon Ducula pacifica pacifica
Vanuatu Megapode Megapodius layardi
MAMMALS
4) Vanuatu Flying Fox Pteropus anetianus aorensis
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