It's not every day you have the opportunity to stand atop the crater of an active volcano and look down into a sea of spurting lava. I'm really glad we took advantage of this amazing (albeit expensive) opportunity - it was even better than I had imagined.
We were lucky enough to only have four in our tour group. From reading reviews, it seems like you normally caravan to the foot of the crater with lots of other groups, but we were lucky enough to only see one other small group (3 people only) when we arrived. Getting there though was an expedition indeed.
I've spent the past couple days compiling a video of photos and footage from the journey, so I won't say too much and will let the video speak for itself. I just want to point out a few things that are hard to capture in a five minute video:
* Our home for the week- we could see our place on Efate from the plane as we flew off to Tanna, see if you can figure out which one it is in the video!
* The cyclone's destruction- note the high number of trees that have fallen during Cyclone Pam. You can see this from the ground but I remember it being remarkably noticeable from the air, even more so on Tanna than Efate.
* It's bumpy- while making this video and when uploading it, I was asked multiple times if I wanted to stabilize the footage. I didn't think it was nearly as bad as I remember the journey itself being, so chose not to employ the stabilization. Hopefully it doesn't make you sick (I managed to avoid the car-sickness, only just).
* The smell- of course, being on top of an active volcano smells strongly of sulfur and whatever other mysterious things are erupting from the center of the earth.
* The heat- when I showed photos to my coworkers, they all asked if we could feel the heat. I must say, it wasn't noticeably hot whilst we were standing on the crater edge- in fact one of the guides was shivering. However, once we started climbing back down toward the car you could feel the air getting cooler and realized that you were just standing on top of a massive fire ball.
* The sound- the video captures some of it, but at times I thought the earth was going to open up to a big dinosaur and swallow us whole (lucky it didn't!).
We were lucky enough to only have four in our tour group. From reading reviews, it seems like you normally caravan to the foot of the crater with lots of other groups, but we were lucky enough to only see one other small group (3 people only) when we arrived. Getting there though was an expedition indeed.
I've spent the past couple days compiling a video of photos and footage from the journey, so I won't say too much and will let the video speak for itself. I just want to point out a few things that are hard to capture in a five minute video:
* Our home for the week- we could see our place on Efate from the plane as we flew off to Tanna, see if you can figure out which one it is in the video!
* The cyclone's destruction- note the high number of trees that have fallen during Cyclone Pam. You can see this from the ground but I remember it being remarkably noticeable from the air, even more so on Tanna than Efate.
* It's bumpy- while making this video and when uploading it, I was asked multiple times if I wanted to stabilize the footage. I didn't think it was nearly as bad as I remember the journey itself being, so chose not to employ the stabilization. Hopefully it doesn't make you sick (I managed to avoid the car-sickness, only just).
* The smell- of course, being on top of an active volcano smells strongly of sulfur and whatever other mysterious things are erupting from the center of the earth.
* The heat- when I showed photos to my coworkers, they all asked if we could feel the heat. I must say, it wasn't noticeably hot whilst we were standing on the crater edge- in fact one of the guides was shivering. However, once we started climbing back down toward the car you could feel the air getting cooler and realized that you were just standing on top of a massive fire ball.
* The sound- the video captures some of it, but at times I thought the earth was going to open up to a big dinosaur and swallow us whole (lucky it didn't!).
