Club Narcosis may not be easily noticeable as you walk into the dining area of Deco Stop Lodge in Luganville, Espiritu Santo, in Vanuatu.

It is tucked away at the corner of the dinning hall. And if your stomach is doing the thinking for you as you step into the dinning area, you won’t really notice it until after you’ve sat down to have your meal.

Although small, the bar, which has a very homely feel, has attracted many visitors to Luganville who are mostly divers. And they have come from Australia, New Zealand and as far away as France.

Most of them have described the bar as “heavenly”, especially after a hard day’s diving outing.

The bar’s speciality? According to bar attendant Clara, their speciality are their cocktails. “The divers love our cocktails. We have quite a few,” she says.

One in particular which is a hit amongst the divers is Lava Flow. It is a blended concoction comprising bananas, coconut cream, pineapple juice and Malibu.

“At 850 vatu, this is the most popular amongst our cocktails. Divers just love it,” Clara says.

Deco Stop Lodge, owned by Cathie de Koeyer, is situated on an acre hillside, overlooking the Segond Canal. It is a five-minute walk from the centre of Luganville town.

Many of Espiritu Santo’s great dive spots are readily accessible from Deco Stop, including the 33,000-tonne converted luxury liner, the S.S. President Coolidge, which sank during WWII after hitting a mine. It now rests in depths of 21—70 metres. The impressive wreck is one of the most exciting and accessible to sport divers worldwide.

As divers will recognise, Deco Stop is a word associated with diving. It is short for decompression stop and the Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia defines it as a period of time a diver must spend at a constant depth in shallow waters at the end of a dive to eliminate absorbed inert gases from the diver’s body to avoid decompression sickness.

Espiritu Santo is only an hour’s flight from Port Vila and is serviced by Vanair. Solomon Airlines also flies to Espiritu Santo, commonly known as Santo. It launched the Santo service last month after it acquired a plane from a Spanish outfit.

Santo is over 4000 square kilometres in size. When Spanish explorer, Captain Pedro Ferdinand De Quiros discovered the Vanuatu islands in 1605, he named them “Tierra Australis del Espiritu Santo”, mistakenly believing he discovered Australia.

The island where he landed, Santo, thus still bears the name—Espiritu Santo. The island is also known as the inspiration for James A. Michener’s classic “Tales of the South Pacific”, from which the musical South Pacific was born. Michener was a lieutenant in the American Army during WWII and he was stationed in Santo. Luganville, Vanuatu’s second urban centre, was an important operations base during World War II. The American army left behind airfields and bomber wrecks, and sank their military equipment after the war, providing the famous dive sight Million Dollar Point, now inhabited by colourful fish and corals.

There are another 20 or so good dive sites in the area, including the destroyer USS Tucker.

Santo also boasts Vanuatu’s first National Park, the recently opened Vatthe Conservation Area. This spectacular natural wonderland is set over 2300 hectares of protected jungle, the Jordan River and 15 kilometres of sandy beach. It is home to native birds, coconut crabs, flying foxes, boa snakes and turtles.

Santo has one of the finest beaches in the South Pacific, Champagne Beach, and is famous for Oyster Island and the Blue Hole.