There was nothing wrong with my first night's accommodation. It had a palm-thatch roof with woven walls painted blue and white - but it wasn't a tree house.
There are plenty of tree houses on Tanna. Some are little more than huts on stilts or houses surrounded by trees, but some are the real thing.
I spotted "my" tree house while exploring Tanna on foot. It was poking above the bush, about 15m above the ground in the crown of a banyan tree.
The house itself was made with woven walls and a thatch roof; inside was just enough room for a double bed with the obligatory mosquito net and a tiny bedside table.
But it was the balcony that really sold me.
It sagged alarmingly in one corner but looked straight out over the world's most reliably active volcano just a few kilometres away. Mt Yasur smokes and rumbles all day; by night it spits glowing lumps of lava that fall from the sky in slow arcs like a never-ending fireworks show.
It has been erupting without interruption for about 800 years.
My only immediate problem was finding the owner of the tree house. It took a bit of bush-crashing to reach the banyan tree with the dodgy staircase; a little more blundering in the forest led me to nearby Tree Tops Lodge, where I found the tree house owner's mother.
It appeared the island was not exactly over-run with visitors because, after consulting her son, she set a price of 1000 Vatu (about $14) per night including breakfast and dinner.
Despite the challenges posed by regular dustings of volcanic ash, making drinking water scarce and crops hard to grow, meals were tasty and generously portioned. Most nights, dinner was some kind of vegetable curry, and breakfast was heavy on papaya, fresh bread and homemade jam.
A generator powered lights in the dining room for a few hours every evening but my torch provided the only lighting in the tree house.
It was surprisingly cool at night and stars peeking through the thatch roof suggested it wouldn't have provided much protection from rain. The tree houses of Tanna are hopelessly impractical and potentially hazardous. They are not recommended to anyone prone to vertigo or needing regular night-time trips to the toilet.
However, they are also one of the few places in the world you can sit on a balcony above the treetops and watch a volcano launch red-hot lava into the sky for little more than $10 a night. I wouldn't have traded mine for any five-star hotel.
CHECKLIST
Getting there: Air Vanuatu flies twice weekly between Auckland and Vanuatu.
