The Santo Kia Morning Muster
Denton Wilde
Tuesday, 16 December 2025
Espiritu Santo has always possessed a certain mischief in its bones — a sly, knowing charm wrapped in jungle green and coral blue. It’s the sort of island that pretends to be asleep while quietly studying you from behind a palm frond. The largest in the Vanuatu archipelago, Santo is a place where myths aren’t told as stories but as explanations. Things simply are because someone’s ancestor did something heroic, foolish, or both, generations ago.
But none of those myths could explain the strangest contagion to infect the island in years:
The rise of the Kia Morning.
Now, mind you, Santo isn’t exactly a motoring metropolis. There are perhaps a handful of private vehicles — most of them utes held together by habit and rust — along with the predictable government fleets, NGO Hiluxes, and a scattering of tourist “box” buses painted in optimistic but fading colours.
And then there are the Kia Mornings.
Hordes of them.
Cockroach cars, the locals shrug — because once one appears, a hundred follow. Cheap to run, cheap to fix, easy to abuse. They multiply like gossip, and in Santo gossip spreads faster than electricity.
Yet automobiles are only half the absurdity. The other half is how spectacularly difficult it is to reach Santo in the first place.
You would think an island only two-and-a-half hours from Australia might be accessible. Logical, even. But logic is a foreigner in these parts. Santo is arguably the hardest tropical paradise on earth to get to — serviced by a single foreign airline that pops in once a week like a guilty relative visiting a nursing home, while the national carrier, Air Vanuatu, continues its interpretive dance between insolvency and delusion, flying borrowed planes with borrowed money and borrowed time.
Unsurprisingly, tourism on Santo is… how shall I put it?
Dead.
Not quiet, peaceful dead.
Cold, forgotten, bureaucratically deceased.
Which is ridiculous, because Santo is stunning. It’s Vila that’s the chaotic capital with the cruise-ship clutter. Santo is the Cinderella island — barefoot, underappreciated, sweeping volcanic ash off the hearth while her flashier sister plays hostess to tourists who never realise they’re missing the real magic.
And so we arrive at the great gambit — the Santo Kia Morning Muster.
It was the brainchild of Rayman Leung, chairman of the Espiritu Santo Tourism Association and owner of the venerable but eternally perplexing Espiritu Hotel. Rayman is one of those rare souls who walks the tightrope between dreamer and practical man without falling into the shark-infested lagoon below. He understands two things deeply:
- Santo is in trouble.
- The world pays attention only when you do something so bizarre it can’t be ignored.
Thus the idea:
Fill the entire Pekoa Airport runway — all 2,200 metres of it — with Kia Mornings.
A shimmering, multicoloured, sunrise-lit river of cockroach cars stretching from the threshold of Runway 12 to the disappearing point where the tarmac kisses the mountains and the sea.
A muster.
A statement.
A cry for help disguised as a spectacle.
Rayman reasoned (and he wasn’t wrong) that if anything could get Santo into the Guinness Book of Records — or even just back onto a travel journalist’s radar — it was the largest single congregation of Kia Mornings anywhere on the planet. A feat both magnificent and absurd, perfectly capturing the island’s predicament: too many taxis, not enough tourists, and a landscape too beautiful to ignore yet too inconvenient to reach.
But in Santo, absurdity is not a flaw — it’s a strategy. And on that particular morning, as the sun climbed over the water and lit the long line of cars like beads on a giant necklace, something shifted. You could feel it. A ripple in the malaise. A moment when the island said, “Look at me. I’m still here. I still matter.”
Whether the world listens is irrelevant.
Santo has spoken.
And honestly?
I’ve seen revolutions built on less.