Mount Yasur

Mount Yasur is the most accessible active volcano on Earth: three hundred and sixty-one metres of cinder cone on the island of Tanna, in the south of Vanuatu, that has been erupting continuously for at least eight hundred years — Cook saw its glow from the sea in 1774 and steered by it into the bay he named Port Resolution — and whose rim a traveller can stand on, an hour's drive from the airstrip and a ten-minute walk from the 4×4, to watch the magma throw itself into the dusk from a hundred and fifty metres away. Below it lies the ash plain, grey and lunar, where the lake of Siwi drained itself in 2000; on the coast to the east, Port Resolution has hot springs in the sand of the bay and a village that hosts the yachts; north of it, at Sulphur Bay, the followers of John Frum — the cargo movement born in the war years — raise the American flag on Fridays and dance through the night; on the west coast, Lenakel is the town, the port and the market, with Whitegrass airport a little north; and in the bush of the interior the custom villages, Yakel above all, live by the old ways in nambas and grass skirts among the largest banyan trees in the world, and receive visitors with a dance and a courtesy that are not a show.

The traveller flies from Port Vila to Whitegrass in forty-five minutes, sleeps two or three nights in a bungalow near the volcano or at Port Resolution, and goes up to Yasur at four in the afternoon for the sunset and the first hour of dark, when every explosion lights the cloud red — the drive across the island, the walk up the ash to the rim, the ranger's word on where to stand; comes back for the ash plain in daylight, or a run down the dune; spends a morning at Yakel or another custom village, arranged through the guesthouse, with the chief's welcome and the dance; a Friday evening at Sulphur Bay if the calendar allows; the hot springs and the black-sand bay of Port Resolution; the Blue Cave by boat from the west coast; and the market at Lenakel on the way back to the plane.

The Guide's honesty: Yasur is a live volcano and the rim is open only when the alert level says so — zero to two, the traveller goes; three, the gate closes and no argument moves it — and the traveller checks the level the day before and again on the day, wears closed shoes and something for the ash, and stands where the guides say, because the bombs are real; the island's roads are earth and the drive across is an hour of holding on; the accommodation is bungalows and bucket showers, and the price of the volcano is set by the landowners; the cyclones come between November and March, and Tanna took Pam in 2015 and rebuilt; the customs of Yakel and Sulphur Bay are theirs, and the traveller who comes as a guest and not a spectator is received as one; and the rim of Yasur at dusk, with the earth breathing fire a hundred and fifty metres below and the sea and the stars beyond, is one of the great elemental sights on this planet.