Marquesas – Sea People

Farewell aux Marquises

It turns out we hadn’t really hadn’t got the full Marquesan flying experience until we landed on Hiva Oa (last resting place of Paul Gauguin). The airport is up on a plateau surrounded by mountains and the runway is, well, I would call it short. You kind of dive down onto it; and taking off you don’t get any of that long slow revving business. The engines roar into life and, whoosh, you’re in the air. Very exciting! Our pictures of the airport (where we waited about a half hour so they could refuel before flying back to Tahiti) seem to have vanished, but here’s one of the bigger (!) airport on Nuku Hiva:

Nuku Hiva Airport

And here is a look at one of the planes:

Air Taihiti

We’ve now made a number of flights in these interisland beauties and I’m actually getting quite used to them. It always gets a little choppy right after they serve the pineapple juice, but the Air Tahiti flight attendants are marvelously adept. One of them managed to balance an entire tray of hot coffee and pineapple juice while extracting Seven’s tray table from the armrest. Extremely impressive.

We are now returning to the heart of French Polynesia: Tahiti, Mo’orea, Ra’iatea, and so on. But before we bid adieu to the Marquesas altogether, I thought I should post a few more pictures. I became quite fond of the place in the end, though I’d have to say it’s not for the Intercontinental crowd.

Here’s another look at lovely Anaho from the ridge above:

Looking up from down below….

above Anahoe

Ancient stonework at Kamuihei:

And the four of us at Atuona, Hiva Oa (out of focus, but hey, at this point, who cares)…

Mutiny on the…

Weather, Food, and My Bad French (cont.)

It’s funny about my French. If I say one or two words, even a short sentence, you could be deceived by my accent into thinking that I speak the language. But the minute I try to say something complex – or not even – the sorry truth is revealed.

This morning, for example, I’m quite sure that when I tried to tell the woman who was taking our laundry not to bother ironing it, I actually said that I never overtake (when driving). I can remember how to conjugate the oddest tenses (“I would have liked to have been asked…”) but I don’t know the most basic words for trash or outlet or receipt or anything, really.

My comprehension is a little better, though the Marquesans are sometimes hard for me to follow and the French speak too quickly until they grasp how useless I am. What often seems to happen is that I think I know what someone’s telling me — like that the road I’m looking for is at the end of the concrete — and then it turns it out that what they really said was that it was where the concrete started.

Seven, I should add, does not speak a word of French and cannot understand Marquesan, which is quite different from Maori. Still, he’s good value when we get off the beaten path. Everyone here is interested in where he comes from. He’s obviously not Tahitian (since he doesn’t speak French) and New Zealand, if you have a look at the map, is pretty darn far from here.

As for food, some of it is great, some of it is strange, some of it is really expensive, but the main issue is that for Dani virtually all of it is unrecognizable. I knew this would be a challenge for him. A Tongan acquaintance of mine recommends traveling with a jar of peanut butter (a death food from Matiu’s point of view, but perhaps we could just keep it away from his luggage…) and if Dani doesn’t start to experiment soon that may be where we end up. Our best find so far is a casse-croute from the truck on the side of the road: ham and some kind of soft cheese in a baguette for about $2. Everyone likes that.

A few more pictures from Nuku Hiva.

The view from a lookout on the way to Hatiheu:

on the road to Taipivai

Matiu at Anaho:

Me, resting, on the hike back up:

Seven, frolicking in the wave:

Seven swimming

No wonder people are nicer to us when they see him….

Farewell aux Marquises

Weather, Food, and My Bad French

Kaoha from the sometimes sunny Marquesas!

So, that turboprop I was worried about was actually remarkably smooth until we came in to land. I never mind coming back to earth but Seven was looking a little anxious as we bounced our way down through the last 1000 feet onto what appeared to be not a tropical island at all but a kind of desert.

The airport at Nuku Hiva is basically an open-air A-frame shed with counter, a couple of benches, a large shelf where you pick up your baggage, and a couple of bathrooms with signs on the doors that said: “Fermé: pas de l’eau.”

“Quite dry here,” I said to the woman was there to pick us up.

“Il pleut de l’autre côté,” she said.

For those of you who do not yet have a complete grasp of the geography, this is where we are:

The Marquesas, which are part of French Polynesia, lie northeast of Tahiti about 3 hours by plane. The islands are volcanic in origin and have no fringeing reef and very little coastal plain. Except for the bays, most of the coastline consists of sheer black and reddish cliffs that plunge straight into the sea. The mountains are extremely rugged, at least on Nuku Hiva, and the people live in deep valleys separated from one another by razor-sharp mountain ridges. The valleys each have a different character depending upon which way they face, drier, wetter, brighter, darker. Taipivai, for instance, Melville’s Typee Valley, runs east-west and has longer slanting afternoon (and presumably morning) light, whereas the sun is already high in the sky by the time it reaches the north-south running valleys.

Taiohae, where we have been staying, faces south, and for the first couple of days we had a southerly wind which brought rain, and that meant, in turn, a copious amount of slippery red mud on the roads and pathways. The tropics can be pretty challenging when it’s wet, an there’s something about this place—it’s the hills, I think, and the feeling one has of being closed in—that is daunting even when the rain is not pouring down in sheets.

But then the wind swings round, the sun shines, the water changes color completely—from slate to turquoise—and if you’re smart you rent a car and make the wild drive north to Hatiheu and then walk an hour or so over another ridge to Anaho, which is one of the most beautiful bays I have ever seen.

Here is Matiu on his balcony at our hotel in Taiohae:

Maitu on his deck