Commodore
May 18, 2025

Monday 19 May – visiting Yasur the live volcano

We started the day by going to the Customs shack to clear Immigration and Biosecurity. We ticked that we had more than the allowed booze allowance, plus plenty of fresh provisions on board, they were not bothered at all, as long as we paid up and filled out the forms they were happy. Once cleared we had a little wonder around the village, gorgeous traditional houses with very neat colourful gardens. We managed to book ourselves into dinner for tomorrow night. We found the beach on the other side of the village, wonderful white sand compared to all the black volcanic beaches in the bay.

We returned to the boat to have a little rest as we had to be back in the village at 3pm for our trip to the Yasur Volcano. We booked a trip with Rob and Frances and their Belgian friends, also on a catamaran (called Jiyu). We all sat on the back of the truck on hard wooden benches. Not the most comfortable journey as the roads were atrocious, that is until we hit the Chinese road, still under construction, it felt so luxurious on the smooth tar road. So sad that the Chinese are taking over here too, with big infrastructure projects. It was just over an hour to get to the Volcano Park gates, there we paid our entrance fee – £62 each! The taxi fare was an additional £30 each. We had been warned it was really expensive to do any of the activities here. Luckily it was really worth it.

From the park gates we drove another bumpy half hour into the lava flow, and from there walked up to the rim of the volcano. A good steep climb to the top and a flimsy railing holding us back from the drop into the volcano. We got up there about 4:30pm, the crater was full of billowing steam and ash cloud. We had about an hour of watching this one spot of red lava, which came in and out of view through the cloud, sometimes giving a low rumble that got louder and louder until it produced a belch of cloud. The clouds varied in colour, white, grey, blue and red. The blue one is the sulphur apparently. We were feeling a little underwhelmed when a little Chinese tourist girl said we should wait until dark, she had come yesterday, and that is when the fireworks start. She was so right, it wan’t long before there was a brilliant display of red lava being shot up into the air. We couldn’t quite work out if it was just that you could see the red at night or whether the cooler evening temperature made it more active. It was really quite amazing, the videos will give it far more credit than I can describe.

We left just after 6pm in the dark, and got back to PolePole around 8pm. We felt knackered again, after such an exhilarating day, we crashed into bed.