Where the earth breathes fire — Vanuatu's Tanna Island holds the world's most accessible active volcano, the John Frum cargo cult, and some of Melanesia's most intact traditional culture
Tanna is an island of 30,000 people in Vanuatu's Tafea Province, 200km south of the capital Port Vila. It is home to Mount Yasur — one of the world's most continuously active volcanoes, accessible by vehicle to within 100m of its rim, where visitors stand above explosive lava eruptions that occur every few minutes. Beyond the volcano, Tanna preserves some of the most intact traditional Melanesian kastom (custom) culture in Vanuatu: the John Frum and Prince Philip cargo cult movements (based around the belief that spirit beings — or in Philip's case, an actual person — will one day bring mater…
Tanna was first contacted by European explorers in 1774 when Captain Cook anchored here and named the island from the local word for 'earth'. Missionaries arrived from the 1840s but encountered fierce resistance — the most famous early missionary attempt ended with the killing of John Williams on Erromango (adjacent island) in 1839. Tanna's conversion to Christianity was patchy and contested; the kastom movement of the late 20th century was a deliberate reassertion of pre-Christian indigenous practice, reinforced by Vanuatu's post-independence cultural policy. The John Frum cargo cult — which…