Splendor at Mystery Island
The first time we had a cruise with a scheduled port stop at Mystery Island, Vanuatu we missed the port due to bad weather so for us the island remained a mystery. Finally years later on our South Pacific cruise on Carnival Splendor we made a stop at that port. The weather wasn’t perfect. It was windy and there was some chop in the water, but it wasn’t bad enough to cancel the port stop. For cruise ship passengers the biggest mystery is whether the ship will actually stop at the island since it is a port stop that is often missed due to the weather.
pathway between rustic shops on Mystery Island
Mystery Island is a small uninhabited island near much larger Aneityum Island. Locals believe that ghosts haunt Mystery Island at night so nobody lives there. They come to the island during daylight, but will leave by dusk.
tender pier on Mystery Island
One explanation for the name is from a visit by the Queen of England. It used to be called Inyeug, which means small island. During Queen Elizabeth II’s visit in 1974, a reporter got confused trying to figure out which small island she went to. He called it Mystery Island in the news headlines and the name stuck.
first thing you see off the tender dock
Another possible explanation for the name stems from the military installments built during WW2 when US troops made a runway for the air force. The mystery is said to come from the fact that the air strip was impossible to see from the sea and therefore it took a long time for the Japanese to figure out where all the planes came from.
row of shopping booths
Locals come over from the nearby island when there are cruise ships in port. They set up a large market with many stalls selling colorful clothing, handmade jewelry, and other items. There are quite a lot of booths offering services like massages and hair braiding. The massages there are way cheaper than what the ship charges for them. Some of the stalls sell food, from random snacks to full lunches. There are also booths selling beer.
just a few of many signs offering things to do
Last-minute excursions are available in abundance. Locals offer all sorts of tours including snorkeling, glass bottom boats, village tours on the neighboring island, and many more. Rentals of snorkel gear, beach chairs, and cabanas are also available on the island. Come prepared with cash to do any of those things. They generally accept Australian dollars or Vanuatu vatu. At our port stop some of the locals had signs with prices in American dollars too because there were a lot of Americans on that cruise and they were happy to take American dollars that day.
Zayaks for rent
One of the places rented something they called Zayaks, which were kind of like little floating mats with a clear window where people could put their face to see what’s under the water. Sort of like snorkeling for people who don’t actually want to snorkel.
welcome to Mystery Island
There are also photo ops where visitors can pose with iguanas, pose in a big pot labeled cannibal soup that comes complete with cannibals, or pose with a welcome to Mystery Island sign. Any of these will have a cost for the local photographer stationed there to take the photo with your camera or phone – you can’t just use their props to take your own..
cannibal soup
We went over on the first tender of the day. When we went back to the ship several hours later there were still people waiting for their turn to take a tender over to the island. If you have to get a tender ticket and don’t want to wait half the day to get to the island, be sure to get to the line where you get the tender tickets quite early so you can get a ticket for an early tender – or water shuttle as Carnival for some unknown reason called them on both our recent cruises, though they used to call them tenders like everyone else back when we regularly sailed on that line. The little boats even had the word tender painted on them. This was the first cruise where we had heard that term, but on subsequent cruises on other lines they had also started calling tenders water shuttles even though tender is a lot shorter and easier to say – and the ports using them were still referred to as tender ports.
one of Splendor’s tenders
The Splendor’s tenders were not like the normal closed top ship’s tenders. These had outdoor seating on top with stairways inside the boat leading up to the outside seating. The ship’s info said it took half an hour to tender from the ship to the island, but they must have been including time spent loading and unloading the tender since the actual ride across wasn’t very long.
one of many little outhouses on the island
The island has a bathroom with flush toilets and a handwashing sink near the tender dock. Interspersed frequently along the pathways going around the island it also has quite a lot of little rustic outhouses.
pathway
There are pathways going around the island as well as across it and through the middle. Walking all the way around wouldn’t take long just for the walk, but with frequent stops to look at things or take photos it can take awhile. The island is quite small, just 1.5 kilometers (slightly under a mile) long and 200 meters (nearly 219 yards) wide. They manage to fit a lot into that space while still having lots of room for plants and trees.
island trail
The paths are mainly sand. Most people wear sandals or flip flops or just walk around barefoot, though there were some with closed toed shoes. I walked around the whole island barefoot because that’s better than sand in the shoes even if they are sandals.
beach swing
When we first got to the island we looked briefly at what was near the tender dock. John decided he wanted a massage while Sheri and I walked around the island. We started out in sandals, which we both took off when we started walking along a beach. The beaches are soft sand near the top, but broken coral closer to the water. When we went up from the beach through some trees with a bit of rough ground she put hers back on, but I just kept mine off since it was only a step or two before getting back to sand.
airport building
Most of the infrastructure is rustic huts, but there is a small airport building of sturdy construction left over from WW2 that is still in use with a grass airstrip and a couple weekly tourist flights.
grass runway
Several sources said the island’s best snorkeling was found at the end of the airstrip, but the water there was very rough with a strong current on the day of out visit. A sign on the side closest to our ship said the snorkeling was better on the other side of the island, but the water was a lot smoother on that side so we snorkeled there anyway.
little fish
Although forewarned that it was not the island’s best snorkeling spot, it was still a bit disappointing that most of the coral in that area looked dead. There were some small live corals, but not many live big ones. There were a few fish, but not many. In spite of warnings not to even touch the coral we saw someone standing on it, which was also in the don’ts. No wonder it was mainly all dead and broken. One inconsiderate or careless person can destroy in minutes what took years or even decades to grow. Probably also people out there using chemical sunscreen rather than a reef-safe mineral type. I have only once seen a cruise ship with any reef-safe sunscreen for sale onboard. They always have the harmful chemical kind even though so many of them bring thousands of people to sensitive reefs every day. None of them ever say anything about using reef-safe sunscreen either.
little bar before it opened
On the tender ride over a guy who said he had been there many times before said Survivor Vanuatu was filmed on that island, but he was either misinformed or full of crap and trying to lead us on because it was really filmed on the island of Efate about 200 miles away.
view of Mystery Island from the Splendor
Mystery Island is the sort of port where people could spend nothing and still have fun, or spend a lot and support the locals, or somewhere in between. I’d guess most probably fall into the somewhere in between category like we did.
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