Travel in Vanuatu: one sight to an island and a flight or boat between them

How visitors reach the islands and move between them

Britannica names three major airports, near Port Vila on Efate, near Luganville on Espiritu Santo and on the north-west side of Tanna, with many smaller airstrips scattered through the group. Travel between islands is by plane or by boat. On most islands an unpaved road runs between the coastal settlements and few roads cross the interior.

Cruise tourism grew after a deep-sea wharf was built, and annual cruise arrivals reached 40,000 by 1977. Visitor numbers rose from 57,000 in 2000, of whom 37,000 came from Australia and 8,000 from New Zealand, to 196,134 in 2008.

Domestic air links were disrupted in 2024. Air Vanuatu, the national carrier, went into liquidation in May 2024, and the earthquake of December 2024 damaged Port Vila. In its review of September 2025 the International Monetary Fund recorded only a partial resumption of domestic air services and expected tourism capacity to return to normal only in 2026.

Which months suit a visit

The year has two seasons. Britannica describes a hot, wet season from November to April and a cooler, drier one from May to October, when the south-east trade winds blow. Daily temperatures run from about 20 to 32 °C through the year, and the sea is around 22 °C in the southern winter and 28 °C in summer. Rain increases northward, from about 2,000 millimetres a year in the southern islands to about 4,000 in the north.

December to April is the cyclone season, the wettest and hottest part of the year. Cyclone Pam crossed Efate, Erromango and Tanna between 12 and 14 March 2015 and destroyed about 17,000 buildings, and Cyclone Harold damaged Luganville in April 2020. The cooler months are also the season of the land dive on Pentecost, which falls between April and June.

What Port Vila and Efate offer

Port Vila, on Efate, is the capital. Britannica notes that it had just finished rebuilding from an earthquake in 2002 when Cyclone Pam struck in 2015. The earthquake of December 2024, of magnitude 7.3, reportedly damaged almost every house on the island and killed 19 people, and the IMF described the recovery as under way in September 2025.

Sites on Efate and on the small islands of Lelepa and Eretoka are associated with Roi Mata, the chief remembered in oral tradition for uniting the clans and keeping the peace, and the mound where the last chief of that title was buried with his retainers is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Near Port Vila is Teouma, where the cemetery of the first Lapita settlers was found in 2003 during work on a shrimp farm.

In the town itself the artist Aloi Pilioko made the coloured relief on the post office, and a second wall painting covers the administration building opposite the market hall. The University of the South Pacific has its Emalus Campus in Port Vila, opened in 1989, with the university's law school. The tourism office notes that the capital has the densest public programme of concerts and festivals in the country, among them Fest'Napuan and the Fête de la Musique.

What lies under the water off Espiritu Santo

Espiritu Santo held one of the two American bases of the Second World War, and its waters hold what the war left behind. The troop carrier SS President Coolidge, a converted liner sunk during the war, lies off the island within reach of recreational divers. When the Americans left in 1945 they dumped surplus equipment into the sea at a place now called Million Dollar Point. Divers also come to Vanuatu for its coral reefs, and the surrounding waters hold more than 4,000 species of marine molluscs. Cone snails and stonefish among them carry venom that can kill.

Santo is also where the country's European history begins. Pedro Fernandes de Queirós landed at Big Bay on the north side of the island in 1606 and founded a settlement there that lasted a month. Mount Tabwemasana, at 1,879 metres the island's highest point, rises in the interior. Luganville, the second town, ships most of the country's domestic exports.

The war shaped the island visitors see. From May 1942 American forces built airstrips and bases on Santo and Efate, and at the peak some 50,000 Americans were stationed on the two bases, more than the islands' own population of roughly 40,000. James Michener set Tales of the South Pacific in wartime Vanuatu. An Australian force of 2,000 men was stationed on Malakula during the war.

Where the country's past can be seen

The sites of Vanuatu's history are spread as widely as its sights. Big Bay on the north of Santo is where Queirós founded Nueva Jerusalén in 1606, and the name he gave the island, Espiritu Santo, is still in use. Port Vila stands on the ground of Franceville, the settlers' commune declared on 9 August 1889, and later became the seat of the two resident commissioners of the Anglo-French condominium, each with his own administration, from 1906 to 1980.

Santo also carries the memory of the Coconut War. In 1980 Jimmy Stevens's Nagriamel movement declared the island independent as the State of Vemerana, blockaded the Santo-Pekoa International Airport and destroyed two bridges, until soldiers from Papua New Guinea ended the revolt after independence on 30 July. On Tanna the John Frum movement dates from the Second World War, and Million Dollar Point on Santo is where the Americans dumped their surplus equipment in 1945.

The oldest layer is the Lapita one. The cemetery at Teouma near Port Vila, excavated between 2004 and 2010, held about a hundred people buried some 3,000 years ago, and more than one hundred of its pots and plates were recovered, six of them complete. According to the Australian Academy of the Humanities, more than a hundred researchers in fifteen countries analysed the finds, local people including school students took part in the digging, and reconstructed pots have been exhibited in Vanuatu and overseas.

How close visitors can get to Yasur

Yasur on Tanna has been erupting since at least 1774, when its glow drew James Cook to the island, and the Global Volcanism Program describes it as a major tourist attraction because a road gives access to an overlook point. The cone is 361 metres high, with a crater about 400 metres across, and explosions often come several times an hour. Its name comes from iasur, the word for volcano in Kwamera, a language of south-east Tanna.

The Vanuatu Meteorology and Geohazards Department sets the rules of approach. Yasur has been at alert level 2, major unrest, since 18 October 2016, and the department's bulletin of 27 March 2025 kept the danger zone at a radius of 600 metres from the vents inside the crater. It warned that visitors approaching the crater should expect volcanic bombs, gas and ash, that bombs may fall on and around the rim and that eruptions can come with little or no warning. Villages around the caldera that lie downwind receive ash and acid rain whenever the plume rises several kilometres. Access can be closed: in January 2002, after an earthquake of magnitude 7.2, the government restricted access to the crater for fear of a larger eruption. On 3 November 2013 explosions threw bombs up to 4 metres across as far as 250 metres from the vent.

The volcano is also sacred ground. The John Frum movement holds that its prophet lives inside it, and the village of Sulphur Bay, the movement's centre, claims the volcano as its territory.

What the outer islands hold

Beyond Efate, Santo, Tanna and Pentecost, travel means smaller airstrips, boats and more planning. Ambrym, in the centre of the chain, is known for the dances of spirit impersonation, the Rom, performed in masks and cloaks of dried banana leaves, and for the twin volcanoes Benbow and Marum, which stood at alert level 2 in October 2026. It is mainly there that the slit gongs, the carved drums that have become a symbol of the country, stand upright. Gaua holds Mount Garet and the crater lake Letas, and Mount Garet also stood at level 2.

The southern islands carry the mission history. John Williams and James Harris of the London Missionary Society were killed on Erromango in 1839, and the Presbyterian John Geddie settled on Aneityum in 1848 and spent the rest of his life there. Futuna and Aniwa in the far south have Polynesian populations. On Tanna, beside the John Frum villages around Sulphur Bay, the people of Yaohnanen revere Prince Philip, who visited the island with Queen Elizabeth II.

Food on every island comes mostly from gardens and the sea. Aelan kakae, island food, is built on fish, taro and yams, with coconut milk and cream, and most of it is cooked on hot stones, boiled or steamed. Laplap is counted the national dish. Kava is drunk in the evening in the nakamal.

How the land dive season runs on Pentecost

The land dive, gol in the Sa language and nanggol in Bislama, belongs to the villages of south Pentecost and to the yam harvest. Men jump from wooden towers 20 to 30 metres high with two vines tied to their ankles. It was once an annual rite; because it now earns money it takes place weekly from April to June, according to Wikipedia's article on the dive. The Vanuatu Tourism Office listed dives every Saturday from 4 April to 27 June 2026 at Ratap.

The chiefs formed a tourism council to manage visitors and the presentation of the dive, working with the tourism office and the tour companies, and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre banned commercial filming of the ritual in 2006. Visitors are spectators: requests to jump are usually refused for safety.

What customs visitors meet in the villages

Most of the country is rural, and under the constitution all land belongs to its indigenous custom owners. The Vanuatu Tourism Office advises that village ceremonies may need an invitation, a guide or a custom fee, that their dates can shift with the village seasons, and that a private ceremony is not attended unannounced. Advertised festivals and town events in Port Vila and Luganville are open in the ordinary way.

In many villages men gather in the evening at the nakamal, the men's house, to drink kava, and villages keep separate spaces for men and for women. Bislama is the common language; English and French are official beside it and are the languages of the schools. Britannica records that health care centres on the main hospital in Port Vila, with smaller hospitals, clinics and dispensaries on the other islands, and names malaria, tuberculosis, hookworm and gastroenteritis as the most common diseases.

The volcano on Ambae, Manaro Voui, stood at alert level 3 in October 2026, and boats are told to stay 2 kilometres from the active submarine vents east of Epi, where floating pumice may be met at sea.