First pass

On a map, the distances look so small. Marquesas to Tuamotus.  Just a small hop. It took us four nights.

Four beautiful nights though.  It’s not often you’ll get me enthusing about night sailing. I miss my sleep too much. But there was something so smooth, so soft and pacific about the ocean, something that said, ‘you will never again be at sea on a night quite this perfect’.

The gentle night en route to the Tuamotus

We left the Marquesas from Ua Pou which remains for us an unknown island. The first time we couldn’t get the anchor to set; this time we couldn’t get ashore.  Perhaps we could have tried harder, but cruising is meant to be fun.  Bringing the dinghy into the village of Hakatehau looked as though it might involve crushed limbs and/or shoulders torn out of armpits.  It was enough to watch the clouds tangle with Ua Pou’s monumental rock obelisks from the anchorage, and then watch the sun set.

Hakatehau bay on the northwest corner of Ua Pou

 After 24 hours, we told ourselves that it couldn’t be rollier at sea. We might as well get going towards the Tuamotus. The east wind was fresh. The sea outside the anchorage looked flat. In fact, it was.

From the Marquesas to the Tuamotus

Good bye Ua Pou - and the Marquesas

The moon rose late, so for many black hours the stars  were…well, stars. No haze, no cloud.  Just great handfuls of cosmic brilliance flung across the vastness.

The clouds caught up with us, of course. They always do.  The weather is the weather.  Restless.

By the time we were approaching our first-ever coral reef pass, we were dodging rain squalls. Plus the sun was just rising which isn’t such a smart time to come through a pass, but it was a trade off between visibility and state of the tide. We entered Kauehi atoll, where the current runs very strongly out of the lagoon, at low water slack. It was ok for a first pass.  Nothing to bump into if you kept to your course.  No trauma, in other words – this is important, I think, when you have half an ocean of coral atolls still in front of you.

A lagoon is a wondrous thing. It blocks the ocean swell. When we dropped anchor off the village, increasing the crowd of yachts from three to four, the boat was finally still, for the first time since we left Panama. The day the motion stopped I could feel tension escaping out of my body.  I hadn’t known it was there. We slept so well that first night in the lagoon inside Kauehi atoll.

Our dinghy and the anchorage of the village on Kauehi

The church is made from coral, and coral limestone

The exodus to Fakarava - in relays

Kauehi is a very quiet place all round, and even quieter this week because last Sunday a  50-strong contingent of dancers and singers, footballers, paddlers and bowlers, left for Fakarava to compete and perform in July festivities.  We saw them board the ferry, one-third of the island’s population. That same day the supply ship Mareva-nui called in, as it does once a fortnight. The rest of the population came down to the wharf to snap up carton-loads of food – nearly 100% junk , as far as I could tell. The ship took away sacks of their copra. The movement of their other crop, black pearls, is not so easy to track.

The copra shed at the dock

Waiting for supplies

Pissing on junk

The people swarm the landed supplies on the dock (and below)

Martha (right) from Silver Fern compares product notes

A barge transports goods between ship and shore

We’ve come to Fakarava for the festivities too.  It’s just five hours sail to the west of Kauehi, and who can resist consecutive evenings of traditional dance and singing,  competitive coconut  spearing and fruit throwing,  another Miss/Mister/Mama island contest, not to mention takeaway mahimahi frites?

La fete de Heiva - July festivities (and below)

Fakarava is the second largest atoll in the Tuamotus. It has an airport. Its village, called Rotorava, has a post office, and several shops. You can get internet here. There’s no internet service on Kauehi.

Kauehi pearl fishers live on the lagoon (and below)

If we’d just wanted to stay still, snorkel/dive in  stunningly clear water, watch the palms wave in the breeze, and a very small world go by slowly, there would have been no reason at all to leave Kauehi.  For a first South Seas atoll, the one which will be most strongly imprinted on our memories, we couldn’t have chosen better.

This is how you grow a Tahitian pearl

Silver Fern's water crew - Bryce and Martha, Alisdair and Vivienne (and Diana)

New Zealand-flagged yacht Silver Fern

Dive (and snorkelling trip) with Kauehi divers Gary and Sabine

Not that we chose exactly, but that’s another story. Something about the wind shifting further and further into the south, and the currents bending up, and the time of the tides. But you don’t need to know all that.  Just that Kauehi is there, and unless the oceans rise, probably won’t change much if you don’t get there for another decade or several.

Finding the rhythm

I’ve hauled my kayak up onto the beach and am trying to pick my way through the underwater rocks to get out beyond the small breakers for a swim.  A couple of young guys shout for my attention. “Over here, madam, it’s clear over here.”

The tiny museum at Taiohae 

They’re bobbing about in the warm water, chatting like women, with a chubby girl child propped up between them. The shy one is a tattooist by trade (they puff out their chests and lift their legs to show me their tattoos,  and  I tell them that for the first time in my life I’m tempted. … Marquesan tattoos are so fine). The talkative one is a grower.  Coconuts,  animals.  We’ve taken Enki right around Nuku Hiva by now, and are back Taiohae Bay for the weekend so I can picture the terrain he’s farming in the northwest.  It’s drier, and far less mountainous that the rest of the island.  That’s where the tiny airport is.  So much of Nuku Hiva is covered in thick vegetation, and the mountains are close to vertical.

Hatiheu bay on the north coast of Nuku Hiva

The north coast of Nuku Hiva from the water (and below)

Once were warrios

We talk about rugby, and how the French didn’t bring the game with the oval ball to the Marquesas.  More’s the pity, they say.  Here they play soccer. They also compete fiercely in pirogues (outrigger canoes).  And they dance. The dance competition begins that night.  July is a month of festivities, when the would-be warriors put on their foliage and boar’s teeth necklaces, the girls let their hair down and roll their hips, and the big drums pound out a beat to make your blood run – or freeze, depending on which way your imagination leans.

Saturday night dance competition at Taiohae Bay (and below)

 

They’re anything but scary on a sunny Saturday afternnon at the beach, these Marquesan boys, and they warn me in all seriousness to be careful in Papeete, that it’s full of thieves, and dangerous at night. Tahiti is the big French Polynesian smoke. It’s where kids from the Marquesas have to go if they want to finish their high school years.  It’s where people get into trouble, if they’re going to get into trouble. Here, in the metropolis of Taiohae with its 2800 inhabitants,  there’s always someone who knows someone watching you.

Foreshore of Taiohae Bay

Hanging out on the dock  (and below)

Vege stall outside a general store

Snack Vaeaki on the dock is the cruisers' hangout 

 Last night at the dancing, we bumped into Monette, who had fed us lunch after the Daniel’s Bay waterfall walk. She was eating at the “restaurant” built especially for July,  on the side of the dance hall – her daughter’s restaurant, her grand-daughter was our waitress, and another grand-daughter had won the Miss July contest we’d sat through the previous evening. She kept pointing out more of  her family  to me.

 

Taiohae Bay anchorage

Before we came back “in” to Taiohae, we’d anchored off the village of Taipivai in Controller’s Bay (whoever – French or English - had control of the heights of this three-fingered bay could wipe out their enemy in the battle between the colonizing powers for these islands. The French obviously won). 

Controller's Bay from the heights

Enki enters Controller's Bay in less than optimal conditions

The modern marae at Taipivae - the thatch is plastic

When there was enough water to clear the sandbar,  we took the dinghy up the river to Taipivai, through the lagoon which dries at low tide and under a 240 volt power line slung breathtakingly low from the village side of the river to the plantation side. Houses, school, church,  clinic, marae, soccer field, general stores are strung out along a concrete road which runs up into the valley. Off the road and high above the river,  are some ancient tikis, the only ones left on Nuku Hiva. 

Wood carving in the church at Taipivae (and below)

The Marquesan cross

We asked the way of a group of women sitting outside their house near where we thought the track might start.  They pointed in its general direction. They couldn’t tell us how long it might take, because they’d never been “up there”.

Up the valley from Taipivae village (and below)

The old tikis up the Taipivae valley (and below)

 

This is how he spent his birthday

On the way down, we thanked them.  They weren’t curious about us or the old stone gods.

Coming back down the Taipivae river on the high tide (and below)

After my swim with the young men, I walked along the beach where families were picknicking. At the end of the beach, a mother and her teenage daughter were sitting in the shade,  making a couronne (crown) out of a bag of fresh flowers and herbs. The girl. Elora, was to wear it to the festivities that night.  The mother and I talked a bit, and when I left them, Elora shyly offered me two firm mangoes from a plastic bag. I had nothing with me to offer her in return.  They waved me away with smiles.

Breadfruit

I looked out for Elora at the dancing but couldn’t see her. I looked again at the cathedral this morning. There was a big crowd there for an 8 am sung service. The drums and conch shell of the previous night – the instrumentation of a pagan religion – had no place here. Four acoustic guitarists seat amongst the congregation provided the only accompaniament. The music wasn’t complicated – mostly sung in unison –and as our new friend Martha, from the NZ-flagged yacht Silver Fern, pointed out, everyone had perfect pitch. 

Cathedral at Taiohae during the week (below)

The cathedral on Sunday morning after the service (and below)

The liturgy was in Marquesan, not French.  I don’t know why I was surprised.  Only the sermon was delivered entirely in French, and though I followed the words coming out of the little French bishop’s mouth, the sense of them went in one ear and out the other.  The transvestite sitting to my left squeezed past me to take communion, so perhaps the bishop found his target.