An Australian tourist on a volcano trek in Vanuatu has told of the harrowing experience of being caught in the eye of cyclone Pam – and of the food shortage in its aftermath.
Andrew Brooks had been staying in a grass hut in the remote south of Tanna, near the volcano Yasur, when the island took the full fury of the category five storm.
Brooks, who watched the storm demolish a school building beside the one he and locals were sheltering in, was among a small number of tourists who emerged from the worst hit part of Vanuatu, which temporarily lost communication with the outside world.
Some were desperate to leave Tanna, waiting anxiously at the airport. A French family of four who had been stuck on the island for a week begged a ride back to the capital, Port Vila, on an Australian military aircraft.
Two Japanese women – the only people other than Brooks staying at the Yasur View Lodge – walked 40km with their luggage down tree-blocked dirt roads in a bid to make their scheduled flight out on Monday.
Brooks did not know if they made it, but assumed they got out somehow. “They had no travel insurance, so they walked 40km,” he said.
Remarkably, two Chinese tourists, Jin Pin Lu and Zhen Zhang, flew in to see the volcano on Tuesday, just as the full extent of devastation on Tanna was being revealed to the outside world.
“When I was in Brisbane, I heard there was an active volcano that you can get very close to. As a human being, I found this incredible so that’s why I am here,” Lu said.
“I am from the east coast of China and we have typhoons, so I thought maybe [it was] not serious like this. I never imagined the cyclone is so serious and I was stuck.”
Brooks, a tourist information officer from South Australia, said he had “never seen anything like” cyclone Pam, which he said lasted virtually all day Saturday.
“The noise, the destruction and the wind. You could see the wind was just white with rain and debris, it was horizontal. The wind was screaming, trees were crashing. Sheets of tin and debris were flying,” he said.
“People were just cowering. No one moved outside of the square concrete building we were sheltering in. We had no windows but shutters and they couldn’t latch them, and they were just, ‘bang, bang, bang’ all day.”
By Monday, all but three Australians who had informed the high commission in Vanuatu they wished to leave the country had been put on flights.
Eight Australians were among 19 volunteer teachers with the charity Lattitude who remained unaccounted for on Thursday.
They were based on the north eastern islands of Pentecost and Ambae, where communication lines were still down, but aerial surveys indicated comparatively little damage was caused by the storm.
Vanuatu national disaster management office spokesman Mishael Garaelulu told Guardian Australia a government team on Pentecost reported on Wednesday that a school in the east had sustained damage, but he was not aware of any further detail.
Telecommunications to both Pentecost and Ambae were likely to be re-established in two to three days, he said.
Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs said confirming the safety of the eight Australians was its “highest consular priority”.
Brooks said he was aware of the cyclone warning as he arrived for his “nice eight-day holiday exploring the Yasur volcano” last week.
“But they were saying it was going to go across the ocean towards Fiji, we’re safe in Tanna, so I settled into my bungalow,” he said.
When the next day brought news of a code red warning, Brooks realised there was “nothing that was going to withstand a cyclone, it was just grass huts and there was no substantial shelter at all”.
He joined the evacuation to the local school on Friday night after a single gust of the increasingly wild wind moved his hut.
People finally emerged to survey the destruction on Sunday. “The primary school building next to us completely blew away. Everyone’s lost their huts, their livelihoods and their food. Gardens, palm trees they need to build their huts are gone, coconuts are no good if they’ve been lying on the ground any more than two days,” he said.
Rather than follow the Japanese, Brooks, who had no way to inform friends of family of his safety, decided to “sit it out” until the roads cleared. His flight out was due on Wednesday.
Food ran scarce but Brooks says the locals “went hungry to make sure I didn’t go hungry”, hunting small finches and other more exotic animals to eat.
“I think I ate fruit bat last night, flying fox. They threw a stick and knocked it out of the tree, that’s what we had for dinner. A bit of rice and some basic yams and stuff like that. They really looked after me,” he said.
The volcano admittance booth was trashed but had boxes of bottled water “so I had good drinking water, which was my main concern”, Brooks said.
