Long before we reached Imaio, Tanna announced itself through fire.
The journey began in a very small plane out of Port Vila. At the airport our bags were weighed, then each of us was weighed, and the ticket was handwritten. Inside the aircraft there was almost no separation between passenger and machine. The pilot sat only a few feet ahead, close enough that every movement of his hands became part of the journey.
Then Tanna rose from the Pacific.
Somewhere on that island was Mount Yasur, a volcano whose eruptions have been recorded since Captain James Cook saw ash and fire there in 1774. Smithsonian records describe essentially continuous Strombolian and Vulcanian activity since at least that time, with evidence that this eruptive style may have persisted for around eight centuries.
Eight centuries becomes easier to understand if you stop thinking geologically and start thinking in generations.
Children have been born beneath Yasur, grown old and died while the mountain continued throwing incandescent rock into the sky. Gardens have been planted, houses built, marriages made, songs learned and ordinary lives lived beside a volcano that never truly becomes ordinary.
Crossing the ash plain changed the atmosphere of the island. Green fell away. The landscape became ash, wind, stone and a cone rising ahead of us. It felt less like arriving at a destination than entering a place where the forces that built the island were still visibly at work.
At the crater rim, sound became as important as sight. The explosions came from below in deep rolling pulses, at times more like enormous waves breaking beneath the Earth than anything I associated with a volcano. A lull would come, pressure seemed to gather somewhere out of sight, and then the crater would answer.
After dark, molten rock rose against the sky. The eruptions were beautiful, but beauty did not make them benign. Lava bombs fell back towards the crater and one flew close enough overhead to change the feeling of the night immediately.
That night we slept in a treehouse nearby, or at least tried to. Yasur kept working through the darkness. Some concussions were distant enough to ignore; others seemed to pass through the timber structure and into the body.
The volcano expressed itself through explosions. The village answered the landscape with voices, rhythm, food, family and ordinary human warmth.
ORIGINAL EXPEDITION FOOTAGE
Almost immediately, the emotional temperature of the journey changed.
Yasur had been scale, danger and geological force. Imaio was people.
The mountain was still there, often visible behind the village, but it no longer controlled every frame. There were children moving around us, people talking and laughing, gardens to tend, food to prepare and visitors to receive.
The chief's wife placed a flower garland around my neck. What could have felt ceremonial and distant instead felt personal.
Then the women sang. Their voices rose across the open ground while they moved together, keeping rhythm with small woven bags in their hands. Plant fibre, handwork, sound and movement became part of the same scene. Behind them stood Yasur.
One of my favourite moments came when somebody sat down and made fire by hand.
The day before, we had watched the Earth make fire on a scale no person could control. At Imaio, fire emerged from dry material, friction, pressure, timing and practised movement.
Smoke appeared, an ember formed, and something almost microscopic became enough to cook with.
We showed them our bow-drill method. They watched, appreciated it, and gave us the strong impression that they were perfectly happy with their own. After seeing how efficiently their method worked, that seemed entirely reasonable.
Tanna's gardens can look informal to an outsider. The knowledge inside them is anything but.
Indigenous co-authored ethnobotanical research records decisions shaped by sunlight, rainfall, moisture, wind, slope and the vulnerabilities of particular crops; garden placement itself can spread risk, while yams are trained and positioned with close attention to exposure.
On an island exposed to cyclones, volcanic ash, drought and heavy rain, a garden is more than productive ground.
It is a system for reading place.
Indigenous knowledge recorded by ethnobotanical researchers describes flowers opening progressively through the afternoon, bird calls and cicadas signalling changes in the day, and the setting Sun being read against fixed points in the landscape. In some accounts, these cues help mark the shift from garden work towards evening and kava.
Time is not only read from a clock face; it is read from living things.
A recorded Tannese nagé gives Yasur an even more extraordinary place within this living landscape.
In an account shared by Indigenous knowledge holder Kaha Iahwa, a child associated with the Sun and Moon returns into Iasur, Yasur, and becomes an original tupunus, connected with the fertility and wellbeing of gardens.
The Sun gives light, the Moon rain, and the being associated with the volcano belongs inside the same world as the food people grow.
The story is not geology in another form.
It is a map of relationship: mountain, weather, food, ancestry and human obligation occupying one living world.
At the crater rim Yasur can appear to a visitor as pure spectacle. Tannese knowledge makes room for something larger.
Kava, Piper methysticum, belongs to this architecture of land and time.
Across Tanna, linked hamlets, gardens and kava drinking and dancing grounds form part of the cultural landscape. In southern Tanna these grounds are known as imwarim.
Published ethnographic accounts describe men gathering there in the evening, then moving into quieter reflection after drinking.
That is the ethnobotanical question that interests me most: not only what a plant does chemically, but what relationships it helps organise.
Nothing at Imaio suggested a community frozen in the past.
Kastom on Tanna is not simply an old thing preserved against change; it reaches through land, food, authority, exchange, ceremony and family.
The chief of Imaio, his sons and his grandson made that continuity visible across three generations.
By the time we left Imaio, Yasur was still extraordinary. I can still remember the explosions, glowing rock climbing into the night and the physical sensation of standing beside a force no person could control.
But Yasur is no longer the first thing I think of when I remember Tanna.
I think of women singing with the volcano behind them. I think of Mia and Jaxson being drawn into the life of the village. I think of hands bringing a small ember into existence and of gardens whose logic is written in sunlight, moisture, wind and season.
Imaio means My Home.
Perhaps that is the most useful fact in the whole story.
We travelled to Tanna to see one of the world's most persistently active volcanoes. The people living beneath it showed us that the mountain is only one force among many.
Someone still tends a garden, teaches a child, prepares food, remembers a song, welcomes a stranger and watches the day turn towards evening.
Geological context was checked against the Smithsonian Institution Global Volcanism Program profile for Yasur. The garden, time-reckoning and nagé material is grounded in Indigenous co-authored research by Balick and colleagues, published in PLOS ONE in 2024. The local translation of Imaio as “My Home” is also used by the Vanuatu Tourism Office.
The Mount Yasur, Imaio song, Imaio fire-making and family material on this page comes from the Sacred Plants Australia field archive. The two Tanna ethnobotanical research figures are reproduced from Balick et al. under CC BY 4.0, with figure-level attribution in their captions.
