I have been stranded on remote islands before thanks to bad weather and mechanical issues. This, however, is a first.
A volcano has upset my carefully laid-out plans.
The airport in Vanuatu was shut down because of increased volcanic activity. Ironically, just a couple of days ago I had tried to get to the nearby island of Tanna to see an active volcano. I could not make the trip because the volcano there had become a little too active.
Apparently, it had other plans for me.
The next six hours were spent trying to untangle travel arrangements. First, I had to convince Fiji Airways that my flight had, in fact, been canceled. One interesting observation from my travels is that FlightAware almost always seems to know about cancellations long before the airline call centers do. Second, you know you are in a remote island when the first option to a call center call is “Is this regarding a medical emergency?”
Then things got even more interesting.
The entire island lost cellular connectivity.
Shortly after that, the WiFi disappeared too. Rumor had it that someone had dug through the city’s fiber optic cable.
There are days when I think I should have been a travel agent. Just twenty-four hours earlier, my older daughter had been stranded in Cancun after her flight to New York was canceled. I managed to reroute her through Mexico City on a different airline with only a six-hour delay.
Turns out all your travel expertise goes out the window when your internet connection does.
My biggest worry was not even the flights. It was that my family back home would see complete radio silence from me and naturally conclude that I had been swallowed by a volcano.
Eventually, the WiFi sputtered back to life. I sent a quick message assuring everyone that I was still very much above ground and, as far as I could tell, not covered in lava. I also managed to sort out my flights.
I think.
Regardless, I found myself with an unexpected free evening.
The lady at the resort bar mentioned that a nearby village was putting on a traditional fire show. I settled my tab, grabbed my laptop backpack, picked up my umbrella because it had been raining, and hurried over.
What followed was absolutely magical.
The pictures cannot possibly do it justice.
I stood there completely mesmerized as the performers danced and played with fire with astonishing skill. Forget protective clothing. None of them were even wearing shoes.
It struck me that, had everything gone according to plan, I would have been sitting in an airport instead of witnessing something I will probably remember for the rest of my life.
Sometimes our greatest frustrations become the doorway to our greatest surprises.
We spend so much of our lives trying to make everything go according to schedule that we forget how generous the world can be when it interrupts us. Hidden behind canceled flights, broken internet connections, and carefully ruined itineraries are experiences we would never have planned for ourselves.
So here’s to getting stuck because of a volcano.
Every once in a while, life deserves to win the argument against our calendar.
