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Vanuatu
National Tourism Office. "With a population of
186,678 (from the Statistics Bureau 1999), Vanuatu boasts
113 distinct languages and innumerable dialects. This
makes it one of the most culturally diverse countries on
earth.
This amazing diversity is a result of 3,000 years of sporadic immigration from many Pacific countries. Although most settlers arrive from Melanesia, the larger built, lighter skinned Polynesians also settled in the islands. As with all nations and peoples, over millennia these different groups came into both peaceful and violent contact, sometimes intermarrying and sometimes having losing their cultural identity to a more dominant group.
Each successive wave of immigrants carried with them all the tools needed to live. Food crops, tree seedlings and their most important animal - the pig. This animal is probably the most significant aspect of life in Vanuatu, for it symbolises not simply a source of protein, it is the cornerstone of their ritual life, a token of wealth and power upon which entire societies are founded.
Over the millennia, natural boundaries; large open stretches of water, dense jungle and mountainous terrain, isolated many groups, even from the same ethnic origins, from each other. And isolation bred not just warfare, but quite different, sophisticated societies and political systems.
Unfortunately, when Europeans began trading in Vanuatu, they often used such warfare to their own advantage."
United Kingdom Information Resources
U.S. Government Information Resources
Recommended Reading
- Getting Stoned With Savages by J. Maarten Troost
. Comment: This is Troost's second book about living on islands in the South Pacific. The first was "The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific
." Both books are very funny and informative about island culture. Chances are that you would not voluntarily move to Vauatu after reading the book. Troost is self deprecating in a wry cynical way. He makes fun of his slacker personality and international aid agencies with equal ease. Highly recommended.
Videos
- Vanuatu travel videos from YouTube.com.
- Video of Vanuatu from Google Video.
- Travel videos of Vanuatu
from Amazon.com.
Weather
WiFi Hot Spots
- WiFi Hot Spot Directories. Directories of free and fee-based WiFi hot spots around the world.
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