How to Visit Lelepa Island: Where Vanuatu Stopped Being Cannibals

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Through an unexpected change of attitude on the part of Australia, I found myself in Lelepa Island, Vanuatu’s UNESCO World Heritage Site, soon after international borders re-opened in 2022 following the Covid19 pandemic. The last minute trip changes I had to make led me to remember something interesting an Australian Airbnb guest once told me about Espiritu Santo. I thought to myself, Vanuatu could easily be an onward destination from Brisbane or Sydney, which would allow me to keep my original flight bookings. (Actually no, but that’s a story for another day.) Spontaneously, I changed my vacation destination from Australia to Vanuatu.

Having done so, I looked up UNESCO sites in Vanuatu, on the off chance that the archipelagic country had any. Sure enough, it had one. Fortunately, it was on Efate, Vanuatu’s capital island. So of course, I made a point to see it.

Why you should visit Lelepa Island

Vanuatu’s sole World Heritage Site is called Chief Roi Mata’s Domain. The site is actually comprised of three locations associated with the 17th century chief, Roi Mata. He was unique among the chiefs of Vanuatu because he initiated the social reforms that ended the hunting of people for cannibalism in Vanuatu. The UNESCO site locations are the site of his residence, the site of his death, and the site where he was buried.

Yes, Vanuatu used to practice cannibalism. And it wasn’t related to rituals or war either. They hunted each other just like they might hunt game, which the native people (the Ni-Vanuatu or “Ni-Van”) speak about with surprising frankness. In fact, even though Chief Roi Mata got them to stop hunting each other hundreds of years ago, Vanuatu people only fully stopped eating humans in 1969 (presumably up to then they might still eat people who died of natural causes). One of the guides had a living relative who personally knows what human flesh tastes like.

Chief Roi Mata’s Domain

The three locations of the UNESCO site are close to one another. The first site is on Efate itself. I didn’t visit this site, but we did pass by the sign. Tour packages related to Chief Roi Mata’s Domain seem not to include the first site. The guide said that this was because there isn’t really anything there anymore. However, maybe there are other tours from Port Havannah that cover it.

The second site is a cave on Lelepa Island, which is just across the first site. This is the site that’s normally visited as part of Lelepa Island tours. It was the mourning cave on the death of Chief Roi Mata, but it also has ancient cave drawings. The third site is on Artok Island (a.k.a. Eretoka Island or “Hat Island”). The burial site is also not part of typical Lelepa tours (although that may have changed based on recent TripAdvisor entries).

How to visit Lelepa Island

The easiest way to visit Lelepa Island is through one of the many tour packages. Not all tours of Lelepa Island include the UNESCO site; some are about fishing, for example. So make sure to ask for a tour that includes it.

One thing that I really like about tours in Vanuatu is that they’re generally local-owned and operated. The tour brochures often include this statement, which makes it easy for ethical travellers. I think that a local-owned and operated tour is especially pertinent for sites related to Chief Roi Mata’s Domain. This is because the reason it’s a UNESCO site includes the site’s cultural representation of the continuing Pacific chiefly systems, oral traditions related to the Chief, and respect of associated tabu prohibitions. Therefore, while local commentary is always beneficial for visiting UNESCO sites, a local guide able to tell the stories in this tradition seems to be an inseparable part of visiting Chief Roi Mata’s Domain.

Tour brochures are easily available on Efate, especially if you’re staying at a hotel. Lelepa Island tours are full day tours. The one I took began at 8:30AM and ended at 4:30PM, although you should expect some flexibility for “island time”. The tour cost 10,900vt and included lunch and refreshments. 

Snorkelling off Lelepa Island

We were a bit late setting off from Efate, as there was a tour guest who had just arrived straight into the tour. (He didn’t plan to do this, obviously. But sometimes it happens, due to the vagaries of Pacific air travel.) Lelepa island was ahead of us. It was not a tall island, but still fairly hilly. In fact, Efate itself is a hilly island. Perhaps sea level rise would not threaten these islands as much as others.

Our tour guide and all the boat crew were local Lelepa islanders. And even though I think we rarely hear about Vanuatu in Malaysia, one of the crewmen wore a T-shirt that said ‘Made in Malaysia’! Curious, I eventually told him I am Malaysian, and asked about it. It turned out that his father had been to Malaysia, and got the T-shirt for him. It just goes to show that there are many, many more people ties Malaysia actually has that we ourselves should be more aware of!

Our first stop at Lelepa was a little beach. It had plenty of shade, which was welcome as the day quickly grew blazing hot. We were invited to enjoy the beach or snorkel (snorkelling gear is included in the tour) while our tour hosts worked on fixing us some lunch.

Looking for dugong

Supposedly, there’s a chance to spot dugong while out snorkelling around Lelepa. Unfortunately, I was not that lucky. Still, there were lots of coral fish, though none were very big. It didn’t surprise me to learn later that villagers fish from the coral reef.

The tide was fairly high. The nearshore coral was not in great shape, although there were some good parts where it was deeper. However, I saw blue sea cucumber for the first time, and even though I couldn’t get a good photo, that was cool.

Visiting Chief Roi Mata’s Cave

After lunch, we got in the boat again. The boat went some distance around the island, for the hike to the cave of Chief Roi Mata began on a different beach.

The Lelepa coastline is fairly rocky, broken by the occasional sandy cove. In parts, the rocky slopes were sheer drops. Along the way, our guide drew our attention to Eretoka island in the distance. It really does look like a hat, hence its nickname.

We disembarked at a beautiful little beach. From here, the cave was a short hike along a trail through the island jungle.

The social reforms that ended cannibalism

The cave on Lelepa island is significant because it was where the people mourned Chief Roi Mata, when he passed. It was also where the milestone moment happened, when Chief Roi Mata brokered peace among the tribes and introduced social reforms that ended cannibalism hunting.

According to the oral history, Chief Roi Mata took authority over the peoples of the surrounding islands. Back then, people from different tribes used to hunt each other. No one ventured out of their villages alone, since they could be hunted by another tribe.

But Chief Roi Mata had a vision. He asked all of the villages to come to Lelepa for a meeting. Each village must bring one contribution, which is whatever is the most abundant in their village. It could be anything – coconut, clam shell, banana, octopus, breadfruit. So all the tribes came, each bringing something from their villages.

At the meeting, the Chief called upon all the villages that brought the same thing, and grouped them together. Banana with banana, octopus with octopus, coconut with coconut. He said, because you all came with coconut, from now on you are one tribe – the coconut tribe. He did the same for the other groups. Thus it was that the different villages became joined and mixed around.

As the tribes intermarried, each village could contain members of other villages and other tribes. So you could never be sure that someone from another village might not be of your own tribe. Thus, they stopped hunting and eating one another.

I thought it was interesting that the way he made peace was to do the polar opposite of ‘racial purity’. And that his method required maintaining tribal distinction, not erasing them.

Matrilineal tribal lineage

Chief Roi Mata’s reforms led to further social change. The creation of new tribes led to a decision on how to allocate tribal lineage. Land in the villages are held by the men, so they decided that women would determine tribal descent. Thus, if a Coconut man married an Octopus woman, the Octopus woman would move to the Coconut man’s village. But their children would belong to the Octopus tribe.

The matrilineal lineage also affects the chiefly succession. Chiefs belong to a different, royal tribe. However, matrilineal succession means that the current chief’s son does not succeed him, since he would belong to the tribe of his mother, not his father. So the successor might be his sister’s son, as he would be of the royal tribe.

Ancient cave drawings

The cave of Chief Roi Mata was dry, and while it wasn’t very large, the cave ceiling was high. Aside from its significance in relation to the great chief, there were also ancient cave drawings. These indicate the ancient people’s calendar measurements, which were based on the phases of the moon.

The problem of burying Chief Roi Mata

When Chief Roi Mata passed on, his burial was an issue. The chief ‘had some spirits’*, said our guide, so they couldn’t bury him in his own village on Efate. So they asked the people of Lelepa, whether the chief could be buried there. But ‘his spirits was too strong’, so they said no. They could mourn him on Lelepa, but as there was also a village on Lelepa, the chief should be buried on Eretoka island, which was not inhabited. So they buried him there, and legend has it, along with his 50 wives who were buried alive.

It is a reminder that a person in history with a great vision on one matter, was usually just a person of his time on other things. We are all just on a long journey of pooling together our best visions to get progressively more humane.

Eretoka is still uninhabited. You can visit, but you have to observe the taboos as the chief’s spirit is still there. While on the island, you should not be noisy. Otherwise, you would find that the sea turns rough and the wind rises, and you wouldn’t be able to leave.

However, if you should find yourself in this situation, there is a way to get out of it. You’d have to ask the chief’s permission to leave, and leave an offering at his burial site. A fish, for example, as a sign of contrition. And the sea would become calm again.

Bushwalk on Lelepa Island

From the cave, we went on a bushwalk to Lelepa village. Along the way, our guide introduced us to the native shrubs and herbs that they use for medicines. He knew many of them by their own names for it, and only some of them by their English names as well. For example, there was a wild hibiscus that they call ngkas.

Of course, where there are medicines, there are poisons. He also showed us a root which is used as a way to catch fish by poisoning. A solution is extracted from the root, and thrown in the water. While not toxic, any fish in the vicinity would become ‘sleepy’ and rise to the surface, making them easy to collect. The method has now been banned, since it could crash the ecosystem. I wondered whether this was the same as tuba, which is also used in the same way in Southeast Asia.

Circling back to the topic of Chief Roi Mata’s legacy, our guide told us that there were five tribes in Lelepa village itself: coconut, octopus, breadfruit, clamshell, and yam.

Lelepa Village

We ended our tour in Lelepa village. The trails grew gradually neater, turning into gravelly paths. We began to pass by shrubs that seemed wild but were too orderly and productive to be random. And finally, we came upon the village itself.

The main area of the village had a wide gravel yard separating the homes and the coastline. The houses were simple, uniformly painted a cheerful sky blue, with low zinc roofs, and often sided with zinc sheets. There were more than 500 people living in the village, said the guide. They were self sufficient, he asserted with pride, living off the land and sea.

Despite the obviously simple lifestyle, it didn’t lack modern basics. There was a school at the end of the village, as well as a clinic for medicines. There were two churches, for the village is Presbyterian and Seventh Day Adventist today. And while there was no electricity save for some solar panels, there was nonetheless surprisingly good 3G data service.

The village children held a performance for us, which was participatory! There were handicrafts for sale as well, ranging from woven bags and baskets, homewares and Pacific accessories. Some of them are nicer than the souvenirs in the Port Vila Handicraft Market, so I advise holding off on souvenir shopping until after visiting Lelepa village.

Lelepa village culture

One of the first things our guide told us about the village, was how the land was owned by the villagers themselves. Not by the chief, and not by the government, he emphasised. But although the villagers have their own lands, they still live communally. Resources are shared with everyone, and they look after each other.

He pointed out the extent of the lands owned by village people, describing it as their freedom. Within your own lands, he said, you could do whatever you liked, build anything, grow anything, without paying any fees or needing any permits. As such, he marvelled at his brother, who has married an Australian and decided to go live there instead of on his own lands where he doesn’t have to pay for anything.

As someone from a country suffering significant brain drain, and primarily to Australia, I couldn’t help but smile and admire the self-esteem of the Vanuatu people who are still in Vanuatu.

Notes:

* I thought our guide struggled a bit here, and wondered if there was a word in his language that could only be unsatisfactorily translated as “spirits”. I wondered whether the chief kept what Malays would call penunggu or jin. I was 90% sure that the chief’s burial site causing a place to have “spirits that are too strong” is exactly what we would call keras (literally “hard”, but in this paranormal context it means something more like “haunted”, but not quite).

Carbon offset information to Vanuatu

My actual flights for this trip were slightly more convoluted. However, the best way to do this trip from Kuala Lumpur in the present day with the benefit of hindsight, is via Singapore and Sydney. This is because a direct flight from Kuala Lumpur to Sydney or Brisbane is more likely to result in layover time in Australia that might exceed the 8 hour visa free transit period, requiring an eTA submission which has arbitrary results nowadays. This itinerary produces carbon emissions of approximately 4,605 lbs CO2e. It costs about $37 to offset this.

An alternative itinerary is to fly to Port Vila via Auckland, which is less risky since New Zealand allows visa free transit times that are more commensurate to Pacific flight connection schedules. This route produces slightly more emissions, approximately 5,462 lbs CO2e. It costs about $44 to offset this.

I think Lelepa Island is a must-visit Vanuatu destination, for the UNESCO World Heritage Site. If you agree, pin this article for your future trip!