In August 2016 we visited Efate, Santo and Tanna in Vanuatu.
We had trouble finding up to date information about Vanuatu and Vanuatu on a budget, so we have created this in case someone is wondering the same things as we were before going.
Your budget
Vanuatu isn’t a cheap place to travel.
We travelled very low budget and we spent €41 per day, exclusive of the flights to Tanna and Santo.
Air Vanuatu had a great deal before we left. 110 AUD for a return to Santo and 110 AUD for Tanna.
Port Vila was the most expensive place for us. There are cheaper options too but in general we thought the price-quality balance is a bit gone. You pay a lot of money for something that isn’t even so nice… Port Vila is a good place as your base to go exploring, but we would recommend going to other places instead of hanging around PV.
Food
In the cities and sometimes villages are markets where you can eat. Restaurants (dish from 1000-2000 vuv) and cafés are for tourists thus expensive. You can save yourself a lot of money by eating at the markets (dish 350-450 vuv). However, in a lot of places you probably don’t have much choice in going somewhere else for dinner because it will be too far away, for example on Tanna. Count on paying 1000 vuv for a vegetarian dish and at least 1500 vuv for a meat/fish dish if you eat at your hotel/bungalow.
The supermarkets aren’t cheap. It’s an island, so everything has to be shipped in…
Where to stay
General costs:
Camping: 1000 per tent or per person (always make sure you ask which one)
Bungalow: cheap price 4000, regular price 5000
Homestay: 2500-3500 pp including 3 meals
Efate
There are a lot of day trips that you can do from Port Vila.
Buses (mini buses, vans with a ‘B’ on the number plate) go trough town and pick anyone up who needs a ride and drop off the people where they need to go in the order they got in the car, or what’s on the way. Price is 150 vuv pp no matter where you go. Apparently they can ask for something for your backpack/luggage to and from the airport but they never did with us.
If we would go again we wouldn’t stay for more than 1 or 2 nights in Port Vila. Of course this very much depends on your interests. On the North Coast of Efate are the islands Lelepa, Nguna and Pele. Here you can do wonderful homestays (usually a basic bungalow in the garden of a family) for 2500-3500 pp including 3 meals. For us, it was the perfect experience. You have your own beach, it’s not touristy at all, the snorkling is supposed to be amazing around these islands and it’s an experience you won’t get so easily anywhere else, we found.
In the Tourist Information Center in Port Vila ask for the ‘homestay folder’. It’s a folder in which you find all the options. For every island there are about 4-8 places you can choose from. Every page describes the place, the people and where it is. The people in the office can book it for you (which is very helpful as it’s sometimes difficult to communicate).
Some transport prices that we paid:
Bus Port Vila – Emua (where the boats to Pele and Nguna leave from): 500 vuv pp
Boat Emua – Pele/Nguna: 500 vuv pp if there are more people on the boat, 2500 for the boat if you want your own
(The buses to Emua/the north of Efate leave from the big ‘Au bon marché’ at the gas station in the north of Port Vila.)
Santo
Santo was our personal favourite because it’s so easy to get around on your own without too much hassle. (Note: you can only really visit the east coast. I write about the center of the island and the west coast in ‘Multiple day hikes’.)
Same as on Efate you can stay in Luganville and use it as your base to go exploring from there. We didn’t and we enjoyed staying in other places than the main city.
In Santo there is a bus that goes from Luganville to Port Olry, all the way in the north, passing by Oyster Island and Champagne Beach. We had trouble catching that bus from Luganville as it isn’t on one particular time. We think it goes 2 times a day (as different people said different things) and you just wait for it to show up at the Pacific gas station in the north of town.
While you wait dozens of guys in pick-ups will come and ask where you’re going. You pay the same as on the bus so you can hop on these.
Local people don’t ask for a price before they get on, they know the price and they just pay that price when they get off. We, as tourists, tried both negotiating a price beforehand and just getting on and paying the price we know it is by bus. The latter only works if you’re confident in what the bus price is. Some of them (on all 3 islands) will try to get more out of you, so it’s up to you which way you prefer.
They always ask a bit more for tourists than for locals, but these were the prices we think are ok:
Luganville – Port Olry: 800-1000 vuv pp
Luganville – Champagne Beach: 500 vuv pp (local price, we think)
The road from Champagne Beach to Port Olry is an expensive one because it’s a direction not many people have to go to. Only when you live in Port Olry, you will go that direction.
Port Olry:
This was one of our highlights. It’s a beautiful place, with gorgeous sea right in front of where you stay.
There are a few bungalow places all next to each other, so you can go check them out and choose the one you want. They are all immediately to the right when you enter Port Olry.
On all of them they are also happy to host you if you want to camp. We had trouble finding information about that before going, but we took our tent and it worked out great. There are at least 4 places where you can put up your tent. We did at the Port Harbour Restaurant, with Marie-Joe.
Champagne Beach:
You have to pay to access the beach, 1000 vuv pp.
We think it’s better value for money if you stay the night with them because then you can access it for free. They have bungalows and you can camp there.
Make sure you go when there is no cruise ship!! We passed it on a day the cruise ship was in the bay and it was like a busy beach on the Spanish Costa del Sol in the middle of summer.
Oyster Island:
Oyster Island has it’s own resort. We went their for a day visit which was a lot of fun. The little pund takes you there for free. From the island you can snorkle in several places and/or rent a kayak to kayak to the Matevula blue hole. (It’s the same blue hole as you can visit by car from the road, so it’s not actually on Oyster Island.)
Kayak rental for 1: 1000 vuv
Kayak rental for 2: 1500 vuv
Matevula blue hole entrance: 500 vuv pp
Snorkling around Oyster Island is free (unless you need to rent equipment), so is staying on the beaches. On some of the resort islands around Efate you have to pay to be able to get on the island. That’s not the case on this one.
Millenium cave and Vunaspef:
Millenium cave is a highlight on Santo. We didn’t do it because we thought it was too expensive, but we regret it. We spent the night in a homestay in a village called Vunaspef. It’s the village where the cave tour starts and ends. We saw the people going and coming back and all of them seemed to have had a great time.
You can combine the tour with the homestay but it’s not cheap.
You can book both the tour and village stay at the Millenium cave office (right before the bridge in the west of Luganville) or at ‘Wrecks to Rainforest’ (center of Luganville).
Multiple day hikes:
To get to the part of Santo where not many people come (center of the island and west) you need to book yourself a multiple day hike.
We tried to do this from Vanuatu and it seemed impossible. Our advice: START ORGANISING THIS WAY IN ADVANCE! Tour organisers need a lot of time to even reply to your message, then they need a lot of time to get in touch with a guide and the people where you are going to stay. To us they said they need at least a few weeks, but our experience is that they need even more because we are still awaiting replies from most of the places we contacted with this quiestion.
It seems like a great way to explore a part of the island that’s little explored but you always need a guide (as there are no tracks in many places) and you’ll do homestays so it won’t be a cheap experience.
Tanna
We were looking forward the most to Tanna as it seemed like such a different world with all the different villages with their kastom cultures and the volcano. In the end we enjoyed it the least. Travelling on a budget on Tanna is not easy. It requires a lot of time, determination, patience and frustrations.
Places to stay are expensive or extremely basic (and not clean).
You can stay on the west, along the main road from the airport where the places are nice, but not cheap.
You can stay around the volcano where the places are not very nice at all. We advise bringing a tent so you don’t have to stay in the very basic, not so clean and expensive bungalows or tree top lodges.
You can stay in Middle Bush, basically the center of the island, probably in a homestay as there aren’t any bungalows there yet. (If you do a homestay in Middle Bush keep in mind you’ll be rather dependent on the people there to get you to places. In our experience that means they will ask quite some money for transport.)
Transport prices on Tanna are madness. It seems the people with a pick-up truck have decided together that they ask one same price for tourists which is:
5000 to get to the other side of the island (west Coast to east or other way around)
3000 from Middle Bush to the volcano or other way around
1500 from volcano to Lamakara (which is 6km)
To get from Lenakel to the volcano is a 45 minute drive, it isn’t much. Asking for 5000 vuv means you pay more than 10x the price a local would pay and it means you pay 28x the minimum hour wage of a Ni-Van just for the 45 minute drive to the volcano. On Tanna the people dealing with tourists seemed to have lost the value of money a bit, we think. That’s what made it less enjoyable for us.
If you do not want to pay these prices you can try to stand on the side of the road and hope for a pick-up with lots of locals in there to take you for a more normal price. This is what we did and it worked out well for us, but as described above, it is not easy. A few pick-ups will pass you without stopping because they know you’re probably there because you don’t want to pay the price they want. We were lucky to find a few kind and honest drivers that did take us for a price a lot more normal than the 5000 one way.
For some reference we paid:
Lenakel (a bit outside of Lenakel, otherwise cars won’t pick you up) – volcano: 1500 vuv for two
1 or 2km from ash plains – Lenakel: 1000 vuv for two
We started to walk if we couldn’t find a ride. We also walked from the volcano to Lamakara (John Frum Village) which is definitely doable if you don’t mind the walk with your backpack. It’s a cool walk over the ash plaines.
The volcano:
The price of the volcano used to be 3450 vuv pp until April 2016. The price is now 7500 vuv pp.
It’s a lot of money so keep this in mind when going.
The volcano is absolutely amazing. So is hearing it and feeling/seeing the shockwaves on the way and if you stay the night. But it is a lot of money altogether with transport, etc.
Tours to the volcano from the west coast are 12.000-15.000 pp.
Visits to villages:
On Tanna there are a few villages you can visit (Black Magic, Yakel, Lowinio, etc.). The entrance to the village seemed almost always 1500 vuv pp.
Tours from our bungalow/hotel were around 4500-5000 pp.
We went to one on our own, found our own transport and just paid the village upon arrival. That came to around 2800 pp.
How to organise things for Tanna:
Organising things on/for Tanna is difficult. It’s hard to find information beforehand and even when you’re in Vanuatu they can’t do anything for you. They will all say: ‘Just go to your hotel, they can arrange it all for you’.
Our advice if you want to travel on a budget:
– Call places and ask for the cheapest bungalow price or camp prices. Often a discount is possible if staying for more than one night.
– Transport for more normal prices is possible, but not if you have the hotel arrange it for you. Stand by the side of the road, there were always people taking us, sometimes it just took longer than other times.
– Take food into Tanna. There aren’t a lot of shops and they were quite often closed when we were in Lenakel. Because transport is expensive, going to Lenakel for some shopping isn’t what you want. Take some stuff from Efate so you’re not only depending on meals from the hotel/bungalow.
In the end we didn’t enjoy Tanna on a budget very much, unfortunately. But maybe this information makes it a bit easier for others.
A few ending notes
Vanuatu was a great experience for us. We’ve only seen a fraction of the 86 islands so we certainly haven’t seen much but it’s an expensive place to travel so we are happy we didn’t stay longer than the 2,5 weeks.
Our best experiences were Port Olry on Santo and the homestay on Pele.
If we would go again we would spend more time on the islands on the North Coast of Efate.
You will read in several guide books that Vanuatu doesn’t have a bargain culture. That’s probably true and people definitely don’t like to talk about prices. Between locals this works perfectly as everybody knows what things are supposed to cost and there’s no need for negotations. As most locals ask significantly higher prices from tourists for any kind of service, the non-bargaining doesn’t work well between tourists and Ni-Vans. We started to always check prices up front and also made good experiences with proposing a price ourselves.
One last note: we slept somewhere where there were bed bugs. You only find out a few days later when it’s already too late. We’d recommend checking the beds before putting all your stuff on the beds. It ruined our last part of the trip and we had to cancel Nguna, unfortunately.
Vanuatu on a budget 