The Lost Lighthouse of Pango Point

Coconut Wireless is the way a lot of news travels here. It is all informal, person to person, and often gossip.  Sometimes the topic is local, as in who is drinking too much or who likes who.  But I'd earlier heard through coconut wireless, which usually begins with, "Did you hear...?" that Trump was going to ban Saturday church services.  Yes, that Donald Trump, the U.S. President, was somehow going to ban Saturday church services.  In Vanuatu.

The most common question in a village is, "Yu go wea?" (Where are you going?)  Knowing what other people are up to is at the core of the community. It isn't nosy or rude, it is just what people do here.  Coconut wireless, accurate or not, is part of that.  It is one of the ways that ensures everyone knows what everyone else is doing.  Sort of.   But because of hyperbole, boredom or miscommunication, sometimes everyone knows something that nobody is actually doing.  And, I'd noticed an inverse relationship between the scope or outlandishness of a coconut wireless news item and its veracity.

So when a fellow volunteer asked me last June if I'd heard that President Lonsdale was dead, I reacted with skepticism.  She'd heard from her host family that he had died the night before, and when she asked me, about 8 hours had passed since his death.  I immediately Googled it, and nothing came up for "vanuatu", "lonsdale", "vanuatu president", "baldwin lonsdale", etc. Wikipedia also hadn't been updated.  I confidently told her that I didn't think that news was true.

Sadly, I was wrong of course. A head of state dies, and eight hours later it wasn't known on Google?  How was that even possible?

I learned later that the story was announced on Vanuatu radio, but otherwise it wasn't being reported yet on local news web sites.  I think that would be interesting to explore.  Was it not reported out of a sense of decorum by the local press?  Or can the government here impose restrictions on when some or all news is disseminated?  Or some other reason?

In any case, my go-to source of Google, the world's Coconut Wireless, had nothing.  That was a reminder to me just how remote it is here, and how different Vanuatu is from the U.S.

On to the far less serious present.  Last Sunday morning I was browsing Efate on maps.me, just looking around for points of interest (aka something to do) when I came across Pango Point lighthouse.  I was using maps.me because it works offline.  You can download maps ahead of time, and still have complete access to them even without an Internet connection.

I Googled the Pango Point lighthouse, and read that it was the tallest lighthouse in Vanuatu.  Cool!  But the last mention of it was in 2014.  I tried Google Maps but found that Pango Point lighthouse isn't on Google Maps at all.  Maps.me uses OpenStreetMap.  Google Maps uses ... Google Maps.  So, they removed it?

Maybe the government of Vanuatu had the lighthouse removed from Google Maps for security reasons.  But then I remembered it is a lighthouse.  A lighthouse.

Cyclone Pam hit in 2015.  Could the lighthouse have been destroyed--although that would have been newsworthy, right?  Wikipedia mentions the lighthouse, but indicates it isn't the tallest.  On the other hand their only image of it is low-res and from when it was under construction, so what do they know?  That it wasn't on Google was probably just a simple mistake of omission.

About a 9km walk was all that lay between me and the lost lighthouse of Pango Point (here is a grammar page explaining when to use lie or lay, which I found of no help at all in this case and ignored)

My entire Sunday was wide open. Maps.me marked the end of the route with a checkered flag, practically challenging me. I had to know, was the lighthouse even there?  What did it look like?  I packed two hard boiled eggs and a Sprite for lunch, and set off for The Lost Lighthouse of Pango Point.  Here are some sights from along the way.

Pig for sale (about $400)

A mural

Look closely and you'll see these signs are painted on old television tubes.  This wasn't in front of a church or anything, just on the side of the road.  Positive vibes, why not?

A lot of the walk looked like this.  While the vegetation was different, long dirt roads surrounded by farms
reminded me of rural South Dakota.

In Vanuatu they use garbage pedestals instead of garbage cans.

Some nice beach along the way, though not all of it is public.  A large swath of it is a marine reserve where sea turtles nest.  Honeymoon Beach is a sandy beach open for tourists and only costs 200vt.

Almost there! A lone pandanus tree on Pango Point.  This tree is common near the shore all over Vanuatu.

AFAIK the cantaloupe-sized fruit of the pandanus tree, pictured here, isn't used for anything.
The leaves of the pandanus tree are woven into durable mats.

When the pandanus fruit is ripe, molar-shaped segments of it fall to the ground as the fruit loses structural integrity.  Pictured here are fresh segments and old segments.

Toward the far end of Pango Point, the coastline is rocky and only occasionally interrupted by narrow troughs

I didn't see or even hear a single seabird on the far shore close to the lighthouse.

Eureka!  Pango Point lighthouse stands about 3 stories tall...and is inaccessible.

Panorama of the wall surrounding the lighthouse

So Wally World was closed.  Going to the lighthouse wasn't a huge adventure, obviously, but was still a good activity for a Sunday afternoon!