Champagne Beach

Champagne Beach is on the eastern coast of Espiritu Santo, the largest island in Vanuatu, about an hour north of Luganville over a road that has improved recently and is still slow. It is a crescent of very white coral sand in a sheltered bay.

The name is literal. Volcanic gas escapes through the seabed at points near the shore, producing streams of small bubbles that rise through the water at low tide — an ordinary consequence of sitting on the Ring of Fire, and a genuinely odd thing to swim through. Vanuatu has active volcanoes on several islands, one of which, Mount Yasur on Tanna, can be walked up to the crater rim.

The bay is sheltered, the water calm, warm and exceptionally clear, and the sand is among the whitest in the Pacific. Snorkelling is modest at the beach and better at the blue holes inland — freshwater springs of extraordinary clarity fed by underground rivers, which are the island's other attraction. Espiritu Santo was the site of a major American base during the Pacific war, and the island's infrastructure — the airstrip, the roads — largely dates from it.

The land is village-owned and a small fee is collected at a gate. There are no facilities beyond huts and sometimes a stall. Cruise ships call at Luganville occasionally and the beach is busy when they do, and empty otherwise. Million Dollar Point nearby is where the US military bulldozed its surplus equipment into the sea in 1945 rather than ship it home, and divers still swim over jeeps and bulldozers.

Volcanic gas comes up through the sand and the bubbles rise past you as you swim, which is a strange thing to experience and the reason for the name. A village collects a small fee at the gate. On a cruise day the bay is full; on any other it is close to empty.