Vanuatu's largest island — the Blue Hole, WWII wrecks, and a freshwater swimming pool that defies belief
Espiritu Santo (usually called just 'Santo') is the largest island in Vanuatu and one of the Pacific's most underrated destinations. The Champagne Beach — a long white-sand beach on the east coast — and the Riri Blue Hole (a freshwater spring of impossibly vivid blue-turquoise, swimming-pool clear, jungle-fringed) are the photograph destinations. But Santo's real appeal for divers is the SS President Coolidge — a 200m luxury liner converted to a troopship and sunk accidentally in 1942 while entering the harbour at Luganville, still carrying its full complement of military cargo. It is one of…
Espiritu Santo was the largest US military base in the South Pacific during WWII — a base of 100,000 troops, hospitals, airstrips, and the full apparatus of a Pacific campaign, all of which was rapidly dismantled at the war's end. In a famous act called 'Million Dollar Point,' the US military drove millions of dollars worth of equipment (trucks, jeeps, bulldozers, refrigerators) into the ocean rather than sell it to the French and British colonial authorities at their requested steep discounts. The equipment still lies on the shallows and is snorkeled today.