We promised ourselves a holiday post Covid, but really didn't want to do any long plane trips, so the South Pacific seemed perfect. We'd never been there before, and Vanuatu had a major draw-card - Mount Yasur on Tanna, one of the most approachable live volcanoes in the world.
In order to get to the South Pacific islands we needed to fly out from Brisbane; this led to the other part of this holiday: the decision to drive to Brisbane and back, visiting friends along the way. It was decades since we had been to the east coast, and nearly fifty years since we had seen some friends and relatives, so we were very keen to make the journey.
The holiday is written up in several quite short parts, treating the road trip as a single event:
Each section has its own slideshow.
The two parts of this holiday were of equal importance. We were really happy to be going overseas to new places and the islands offered us experiences we were keen to have, but the trip around Australia let us re-connect with cousins who we almost never see and old, much-valued friends who we first met in the early 1970s.
Overall it was a good trip. The Australian section worked out very well, and the islands were mainly great. Because each country required that we had an on-going ticket before letting us in we had been really conservative about travel between and within the islands. We pre-booked flights and ferries, and arranged accommodation using Airbnb before we left home. In hindsight we shouldn't have done any more than necessary to meet immigration requirements. It meant that when things went wrong (as they did in New Caledonia) we wrote off a lot of money for internal flights that we couldn't take.