A dog chases a thrown coconut through the spray of water, our guide runs past barefoot, and we’re clinging to a rope, eyes wild and smiles big.

It’s our last day in Port Vila, Vanuatu and we didn’t expect this. We’d settled on a picnic lunch, a quiet afternoon of snorkelling and then dinner on our balcony but now, here we are, climbing through the Mele Cascades and literally (and punnily) gushing with happiness.

Our guide grabs our camera and the camera of an elderly couple that can’t make the climb. As we’re gingerly finding footholds and trying to stay upright as the cascades force us down, he leaps about taking our picture whenever we’re able to stand.

I’m bugging him because I want to go swimming and he just smiles.

Suddenly we reach a wall. He gestures for us to climb around it. “There,” he says as the rain starts to fall, “Swim there.”

This pool is just for us. We swim behind the falls, grinning like madmen.

“Jump,” he says.

There’s a bigger pool beneath us and we jump into it as he tries to photograph the attempt. He failed (or so he says) so we have to do it again.

These days, for many, exercise is rarely incidental. It’s booked and paid for in hourly slots.

Not so when I was young. There was a creek that ran through the suburb I grew up in. The local kids would spend the precious light hours after school acting out adventures, scrabbling over fallen logs, covered in mud. These afternoons were golden.

And Mele Cascades brought it all back.

We are picked up at our hotel by Evergreen Tours and taken on a tour through Mele village (the biggest in Vanuatu). A group of local girls wave at us wildly. The local sow doesn’t (but is the unwitting model for many pictures).

On arrival at the base of the Cascades we meet our guide who walks us past mango and avocado trees. He fashions a hat for me out of leaves and laughs because I’m so excited.