Vanuatu is one place I've been thinking about visiting. Then on Friday my friend Mike told me that they would go to Vanuatu for a holiday next week. We talked about a 7-year old NZ girl who had been killed by a shark on Thursday.
What makes us so sad is the sheer absurdity of the accident. The girl was swimming from her parents yacht off the coast. A local school teacher took a canoe and went out to their yacht telling them not to swim in the area because of the danger of sharks. The kind man repeated the warning twice. Then ten minutes after the second warning, the girl's left leg was bitten off.
In most cases just about everything, local knowledge helps. There was no reason that the shark should attack the child. From the newspaper article, I learned another thing. Don't swim near the black-sand beach, which seems to attract sharks. I think of Kalapana on the big island of Hawai'i. And the little hammerhead shark I once saw just near Magic Island in Honolulu, across the street from Ala Moana Shopping Center.
Whatever we may feel toward them, perhaps sharks don't even recognize that humans are humans.
