Tom supplied this pick of the band playing at Fest Napuan, Port Vila on Friday, October 22nd, 2004.

Anyway, here are a few photos of the trip to Vanuatu…

Welcome at Mele village – October 21st, 2004

Ninjas, Mele village, Efate Island, Vanuatu

Noisy Boys @ Fest’Napuan – Port Vila, October 2004

I don’t think that anyone in the cyber-realm will have fretted much about my lack of posts over the last week. I was out of the country for four days undergoing a dose of altered reality in Vanuatu, and since I’ve been back, the duty to blog has seemed completely unnecessary.

One probably needs to be kind of angry and uptight to blog, and since I’ve been back, the shock of new perspectives has left etnobofin temporarily wordless. The experience of living, if ever so briefly, in a village where there are no telephones, no computers, no cell coverage and everyone grows their own food, has been a bracing reminder of what is in fact important in life. I’m missing the happy, generous kids, the wild chickens, the wild pigs, the fly-blown dogs, the smell of the offal pit next to the village cookhouse, the people.

Standing in the shadow of the mind-explosion that comes with exposure to a new culture, writing a blog entry seems insignificant.

I was planning to post some photos, but they will have to wait until I can get some time on the office scanner…I also got some great minidisc recordings from around the village – the crickets and night birds, the village kids singing church songs in their local dialect, a preacher calling down the wrath of God on adulterers and practioners of witchcraft in pidgin….

Wordless.