Into the big blue

Lynn Roberts - 

The cyclone swept the post office away. Divers managed to locate it and we watched them put it back in place and anchor it with bags of cement. 

This is the underwater post office at Hideaway Island Resort, Efate, Vanuatu, where you mail your waterproof postcards, written in pencil, and a scuba-diving postman collects them daily.

Hideaway is just minutes away from capital Port Vila and attracts day-trippers by the score to snorkel on its coral reef in warm, clear, shallow waters.

Hideaway was our second destination on our seven-day trip. Espiritu Santo, an island in the north, tempted us away for five days.

Santo was the setting for Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical South Pacific, based on James Michener's account of his time as a US serviceman stationed there during World War II.

Stories of the Americans' time here live on and the fate of ocean liner-turned-troop carrier SS President Coolidge is a tale worth telling.

Her captain had not been given the location of an extensive US minefield in the island's Segond Channel. Steaming in with 5000 US servicemen on board in 1942, his vessel hit a "friendly" mine and sank. Miraculously, all but two on board were saved.

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