Luganville has a famous atraction called "Million Dolar Point" where at the end of WWII the americans drove all their surplus equipment into the sea. Unvortunatly there's not much of it left. Either that or I was snorkeling in the wrong place. The rusted metal moulded into the coral was quite cool however. It now looks like million Lira point where the Italian army of WWII threw one small fiat into the sea after surrendering to the Luganville High School under 16 football team.

Milion Dollar Point

The whole area is littered with broken coke bottles. We found several, I say we. I search and snorleled till I got hypothermia. I found none. Christian and Jackie got loads. Rather nattily coke used to put hte manufacture date on the bottles. Mine nabbed of Christain is from 1941. Cool.

I'm not entirely certain why I'm blogging this, since my server apears to be down. Its at Dave's house, who's mains electrisity is supplied by a generator parked in a layby down the road rather than propper mains. Maybe he's had another power cut.

My site may be down but Matthew, and auzzie who's bought a sizable estate at the end of Aore isalnd's wifi network now works fine. Thanks to my intervention. Numerious telephone calls, maniacal pinging to locate ip addresses and a new BTU, what ever that is, for his rather cool 3m satelight dish and its all working much better. To the point he actually has a phone now. Digicel, sans Shaggy this time, thank god, is launching a mobile net in Vanuatu. Aore isalnd is across the channel from Luganville, possesing non of the folowing:

Electrisity
Water
Telephone Lines
Mobile Phone coverage (before saturday)

At the time I arrived his old mobile only worked on a small portion of the veranda, and the dodgy satelight multi natted wifi link across a field of steak (still with horns on) and a coconut tree plantation needed tweeking before his voce over IP had a hope.

Using his internet was pure vanilla. Once we'd illimanated the packet loss from the satelite link. 512k of pure REAL broadband. Morse code exceeds most internet connections round here. Granted cos the sat provider's in Hong Kong it diverts you to the Chinese hompage of yahoo, google etc. which is irritating. Bloody bbc, I get the chance to listen to "the Now show", and their websites not making it available, bastards.

In the end the "tech Support" asked me if I could drop in on him on my way back through villa and talk to him about some stuff. Me best WiFi guru in Vanuatu or wot?

Non members of PierToPier.net should probably not have read the previous few paragraphs.