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Marquesas and Tuamotus (Cathy)
October 8, 2003
Many weeks have passed since our last log, because we have had action-packed days and social nights. We last checked in from the Marquesan island of Tahuata, so here's an attempt to catch up on our reports.
Ua Pou
Ua Pou was the next island we visited. This island has a dramatic skyline, with 12 jagged basalt spires piercing the clouds at about 3,600 feet. The anchorage has a dramatic view and the residents are friendly, engaging, and generous. We spent many hours sitting on the beach watching the locals play petanque, or French boules, a game played with metal balls kind of like lawn bowling. We spent several nights drinking beer and socializing with the local French residents at the grocery store. We also met the Marquesan famous for writing the theme song for Survivor Marquesas, who lent Marc his personal pirogue (outrigger canoe) to give it a try. Marc soon discovered the wet way that pirogues are quite different from the whitewater kayaks he is used to.
We also found ourselves in Ua Pou the week of the biggest pirogue festival in Polynesia). Contestants came by boat from as far as Tahiti to compete in the contest. The race course went right through the anchorage and feet from our boat, so we had ringside seats to the competition. This festival weekend turned out to be an authentic local festival, complete with local artisans displaying their works, and a banquet spectacle to crown the newest Miss Marquesas. Having attended the Miss Universe pageant festivities in Panama City when we were there, we considered ourselves pageant experts and felt compelled to attend. Tickets included a dinner and a show, including dancing, singing, and the pageant itself. A fantastic way to meet the locals and see the local culture.
See photos of the pirogue races and the Miss Marquesas pageant.
The food continues to be interesting in French Polynesia, and we are constantly surprised at the huge Chinese influence. Every grocery store has Chinese sauces, and every restaurant serves chao mein, a stir fry of chow mein noodles, vegetables, and meat or fish. We also enjoy casse-croutes, the $2 sandwiches made from a half loaf of French bread stuffed with vegetables, meat, and even French fries or chow mein. Beer is light and drinkable, although at $2.50 to $4 a can, we have felt the need to ration our beer intake. However, French bread is $.40 a loaf. We have also been surprised at the cost and low quality of wine in a French territory. We had heard that wine was cheap and good, but the only wine we have found that is less than $20 a bottle is sour wine from Chile and Spain in aseptic boxes.
Cathy befriended the dreaded no-no's we mentioned in the last log, and ended up with more than 100 itchy, red welts all over her body. They were so uncomfortable that I was confined to the boat for two days doped up on Benadryl to stop the itching.
Nuku Hiva
Our next visit was the island of Nuku Hiva, which is the largest island and the administrative center for the Marquesas. Nuku Hiva was formed by two volcanoes, and is essentially two calderas stacked on eachother. We sailed into the broad and beautiful Taiohae Bay, which was described in Herman Melville's Typee as the point where he was picked up by a ship after spending three weeks on Nuku Hiva amongst the warriors. Nuku Hiva is mountainous, lush, and green, with high mountains and seeping with dramatic waterfalls. We didn't see as much as we would have liked to see due to our upcoming engine fiasco.
Engine Woes
We were motoring along, when all of a sudden the motor started coughing and sputtering and just died, not to be resurrected. This, of course, is our worst fear realized, not to mention the fact that we now have to sail into the bay and drop anchor under sail. Luckily, Taiohae Bay is wide and broad and safe, an old volcanic caldera filled with water, so we had no problems.
The next three days, we didn't even get off the boat due to non-stop troubleshooting and boat repairs. The problem was with the engine fuel system, and the engine was not getting enough fuel. Troubleshooting including checking for clogs, rebuilding a new fuel feed system from the tank to the engine, and replacing all fuel lines. Still no engine; it would start, but there was so much air in the system that it would die immediately. All evidence points to the fuel pump, which seems to be working a little bit, but evidently not enough. Luckily, French efficiency prevails and our good luck begins. We called a marine supply store in Papeete, Tahiti and ordered a part for our 27-year old Volvo engine in French. Miraculously, they have it in stock, and we are on a populated island with three flights a day. They send it out by airplane within an hour of receiving our order, and the part arrives by airplane within 24 hours. Luckily, it's the right part despite ordering the part with my high school French. Five days later after lots of sweat, hours spent wrapped around the engine (Marc), and a few obscenities, the engine is fixed and now purrs like a kitten. Another lesson to always carry spare parts. Unfortunately, all the parts we have spares for have never gone out; it's always the ones you expect to fail that hang on forever.
Historical Sites
Once we got off the boat, we did a bit of exploring in the area. The town of Taiohae is pretty and stretches along the Bay. The waterfront has a restored pae pae (house site) and modern tikis carved for the 1989 Marquesas Islands festival by local residents and Easter Island artisans.
Another interesting site was the Tohua Koueva outside of town. This terraced communal living site was built into a valley and seems to be the perfect defensible site against invaders. The Koueva was owned by a war chief Pakoko. During a confrontration with French soldiers in 1845, Pakoko killed five soldiers, and was subsequently executed.
Take a look at our tiki photos.
Music and Dance
In our brief experience, the Marquesan style of music and dance seems to be much different from the rest of Polynesia. The men's dancing in the Marquesas seems to reenact combat and war, and is comprised of loud and warlike drums, deep and gutteral grunting tones, and a lot of thrusting and parrying of invisible weapons from the dancers, with high-pitched singing from the women. In contrast, the Tahitian style of dancing and singing is higher, smoother, and more melodious. It sounds sweet and pretty, while the Marquesan style is awesome and powerful. One night, we had a few drinks at the luxury hotel and were walking home through the dark. Suddenly, through a clearing, we heard the drumbeats of 5-foot tall drums and spotted 20 men, clothed in grass skirts, with their faces painted red. They were dancing and singing in the Marquesan style. Of course this was the one night we didn't have a camera. It was a small show put on for some tourists, but it was an awesome sight and made a huge impression on us. I can only imagine the first Europeans who viewed such a spectacle; it would be awesome and even frightening, especially since the Marquesan warriors had a reputation as fierce cannibals.
Reflections on Quality of Life
We have seen four Marquesan islands, which have been incredible, but also somewhat different than we expected. The people on each island have been different; in general, the islands with the most French population and the most tourists have locals who are less friendly. We experienced the most wonderful and friendly people in the more remote islands of Hiva Oa, and Ua Pou, and the locals were more stand-offish in the more populated Nuku Hiva. We have also been extremely surprised that the people who once voyaged thousands of miles across the ocean have essentially been reduced to a land-based civilization. In our Marquesan travels, we have not seen much local fishing or boating activity. In Central America, we constantly saw local fishermen leaving and coming from the harbors in small boats. Our experience in the Marquesas has been the opposite. We find frozen seafood in the grocery stores, can't buy fresh fish anywhere, and most food and supplies arrive twice monthly on the Aranui freighter. In our limited experience, it seems the local subsistence economy has been replaced by a dependence upon imported, processed, and non-local goods.
We have been very surprised at the high standard of living enjoyed by the locals of this incredibly expensive region. Every person either has a brand new truck, or a Land Rover Discovery ATV. Others have told us that the people don't have to fish, can afford new cars and the high prices of groceries due to the large subsidies provided by the French government for living and as compensation for the nuclear testing performed in the Tuamotus in the 1970s. We were also told that the French retirement pension is so good that a retirement salary can easily support a family of 10 people for the rest of their lives. We don't know the truth of these claims, but it does seem evident that the people here are living well and don't have to work too hard to enjoy their wealth.
Another influx of money to the islands is the newest cash crop of noni, a stinky fruit that has existed in Polynesia as a medicinal for centuries. It smells like the most pungent stinky French cheese, and is an ugly green fruit with pimples. However, since 1995, noni has been touted in the United States as the newest miracle drug, possibly a cure for cancer, with anti-aging properties. Noni is very easy to plant and cultivate, and fetches approximately $8 to $10 per kilo. Farmers pick the fruit in the Marquesas, load it on the freighter Aranui, which brings the noni to Tahiti for processing and fermenting. The juice is then shipped to the Morinda company in Salt Lake City, USA for bottling and sale around the world.
Passage to the Atolls
After a month in the Marquesas, there remain many unexplored islands and anchorages, but we need to start moving west. We prepare for a six-day passage across open ocean, Cathy's first major passage, to the Tuamotus. Weather reports looked favorable, although almost too good as there were a few days that we didn't see a puff of wind. A fantastic and easy passage, with calm seas, light winds, and fantastic night skies with more stars than you ever imagined existed. Our last day, we caught a 25-pound mahi-mahi so we gorged ourselves on fresh fish. We pulled into the Tuamotus five and a half days later, after reading many books.
Different Splendor
Entering the Tuamotu atolls is a completely different experience than approaching a Marquesan Island. The Marquesan Islands are visible from 40 miles away, with lushly forested cliffs plunging straight into the open ocean. The Tuamotus are low and flat coral banks hovering just 10 feet above the sea, barely visible from 8 miles away. Because they present navigational challenges and have swift currents, the Tuamotus were historically named "The Dangerous Archipelago" and were rarely visited until the advent of GPS. We were surprised at the vegetation of coconut palms and growing in the sun-baked coral.
The Tuamotus include 77 coral atolls that are all that remain of ancient volcanic eruptions. The volcanic islands in the interior have since sunk, leaving the remains of outer fringes of coral reefs. We made landfall on the atoll of Rangiroa, the second largest atoll in the world. It is a ring of coral made up of 240 islets arranged in a giant circle with a placid turquoise lagoon in the center. The lagoon is more like an inland sea, as it is actually 1640 square kilometers (about 400 square miles). The atoll is so large that we are anchored on one side and we can't see to the other side. However, we can walk across the motu, from the lagoon side to the ocean side in 300 meters or less than 1,000 feet.
Take a look at our Tuamotus photos.
Boats enter the lagoon from the ocean through one of two passes, Avatoru and Tiputa. The main industries on Rangiroa are tourism, including famous dives with sharks, and the cultivation of world-famous black pearls. The water here is three different shades of turquoise, with clear visibility to the bottom of at least 50 feet. The snorkeling here is fantastic, and we have spent most of our time in the water. One of the most exciting experiences is drift snorkeling; when the tides come rushing through the passes from the ocean, the passes are like a highway for tuna, dolphins, sharks, and other huge pelagic fish. We drive the dingy to the head of the pass, jump out, and drift with the 5 knot current above this fish superhighway. We have swum with white tip reef sharks, black tip reef sharks, tuna, and a 400 pound giant fish called the Napoleon. The drift ends up at a shallow reef called the Aquarium, where we see thousands of vibrant colored tropical fish. We are typically doing three to four drifts through the pass a day, and see new animals every time. The fish here are not timid, and will come within inches of your mask or your legs. We were surrounded at one point by hundreds of small fish, and one of them felt curious enough to take a nip out of Marc's back. He has tiny teeth marks from an unknown guppy, but we got him out of the sharky waters before the bleeding began!
We are loving Rangiroa, but probably will not spend more time in the atolls and will proceed to Tahiti for some boat fixes and parts. It's a two-day sail to Tahiti. We will spend our last month in French Polynesia in Moorea, Bora Bora, and Huahine.
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