Turtles and an Abandoned Resort

On Sunday we still had the truck (Ford Ranger) so we played hookie from church and took Nicola and Jai to see turtles. This was a new thing for us, and we found out there are two places on Efate where you can see turtles. We had read bad reviews of one online so we weren't expecting much, but we called into The Reef Vanuatu Zoological first and found the Australian owner, very passionate about conservation, who had just opened his enterprise a month earlier, so it wasn't this place that was getting the bad reviews (except some people were getting it confused with the other place). 

They have hawksbill turtles, 

green turtles (not because of the algae growing on the one that has just been rescued),

and they rear a few hawksbill turtles.

 They also have a couple of coconut crabs (these are becoming endangered due to restaurants cooking and selling them),

 and another iguana.

They have the only butterfly house in Vanuatu,

and they have a small area of reef that you can walk out onto easily.

They are building some bungalows for people to stay in, but funds are limited so it's a long term project.

We carried on around the coast to the abandoned resort La Plage du Pacifique which has not been completed. We suspect a land dispute, or the developer ran out of money. 

We continued on around the loop road and back to Vila. We passed the Blue Water, a nice swimming spot, but did n't have time to stop as we wanted to be back in time for the President's commissioning service at PMC Church. We'll come back another day to check it out 😉