Nuku Hiva

Baie D’Hatiheu. Quiet nice anchorage. Met up with our friends on Nexus here. Which is good because here you need to ride share to get ashore. The swells run across the dock and make egress quite interesting. I should gopro a video of us getting out or back into the dingy. It’s like jumping into or out of the bed of a truck into another truck. We have been watching the locals for better ways to do it. They tie up their small boats (of which there are 4) to mooring balls then swim for it. They time the swells and get literally ejected onto the rocks. And it is rugged. They know where to land. I think we would be head to toe abrasions if we tried that route. One guy paddles out in a truck inertube. One guy had a kayak but he wiped out on the approach.  Maybe we provide them with as much entertainment as they provide us.

Went in for dinner the first night. Very nice. The only restaurant in town is owned by the mayor. And we were its only customers. Next day we went looking for the three archaeological sites that the book notes are in the area. No secret map this time. But we have our secret weapon. Iris. She asks around and yes, they are here, here, and here. Take you about an hour to walk there. Will drive you up there for 2000 fpf. 20 bucks. So we load into his pickup and head off. He drops us and gives us some local info. There is a sacred Banyon tree there. Huge. Said to be 600 years old. It looks ancient. And a very large ruins of a Polynesian community. It went on and on. Couple thousand people lived there at one time he told us. Now there are only 300 people who live along the shore of the bay we are in. We hiked all over the place. And were the only ones there. No trails or park rangers here. I know we didn’t even see all of it. It just kept going and going.

Today we head to Baie D’Taiohea for the rendezvous that is a couple of days from now. Get some laundry done. Hopefully. Get some wifi. Hopefully. Get ready for the roughly 600 mile passage to the Tuamotus.  Heck 600 miles! When we were 600 miles from here we figured we were there already. Looking forward to it.

Not a whole lot here. The dinghy dock is not life threatening so that’s nice. On the backside the fishermen clean their catch and toss the guts out into the bay. Schools of sharks gather and feed. I guess we will not be cleaning the bottom anytime to soon here.  We did get a chance to dive the bottom and do some cleaning in the previous anchorage. Iris leaned how to replace drive shaft zincs. A task I don’t mind delegating at all. On shore there is a small town and a couple of dock side establishments. One place has become the ARC hangout. Great wifi. Simple menu. Fruit juices and something we had not seen before. Seems if you have a stem of bananas that is getting ripe and you will not be able to use them all you bring them here and hang them on the guide wires that keep the awnings up. So there are hundreds of free bananas hanging there. Can’t be good for business but maybe everyone is as tired of bananas as we are. We have about ½ dozen varieties on board. Ones you cook. Little thumb sized ones. Ones that look like a yellow zucchini. And most of them were given to us. We are going to fill the freezer with them as they start to go and have smoothies all the way to Tahiti. Or we will be so tired of them they will still be in the freezer a year from now. While we are on that we do need to get better about cleaning out the fridge and freezer. There are two slices of pizza in there, (not mine), from the friggin Galapagos. That is a month and 3,000 miles ago. A biology experiment. Maybe we will take them to Australia and if they ask what it is we can say, don’t know, open it up and see. We hear they do go through everything.

How many bananas can you eat before you actually turn into one.

There was a major earthquake in Chile last night. It initiated a tsunami warning for the pacific. We stayed up till 1:30 in the morning watching for it but as it turned out there never was one. But it was an interesting drill. The fun turned out to be the next day. About mid morning a squall line came through and blew up a heck of a storm. Rain coming down sideways. Boat spinning all over the place. Boats dragging anchor. Did a major rearrangement of the anchorage. Then done and blue sky. The whole thing was maybe an hour. But is was a very powerful little storm.

Yesterday we hooked up with our friends on Nexus and went around to the next bay to hike up to a waterfall. Supposed to be the third highest waterfall in the world. So far on this trip the waterfalls have been, at most, an hour hike. This one is 2 ½ hours. Each way. And it was a bear. We probably only went a couple of miles up a canyon but it was muddy, slippery, very wet and incredibly beautiful. You expected King Kong to jump out of the sheer canyon walls. It looked like Jurassic park. There is a small and very remote village along the way. They do not have any roads going to this village. You get there by boat or horseback. Very few people go there. So we are walking along the trail to the falls and a local couple is coming up the other way with a load of coconuts in bags on the back of a donkey. And Iris knows them! She ate at their house last year when she came through here. She was looking for them but we really didn’t expect to find them. So they invite us back to their home after the hike for coconuts, fried bananas, stories. It was quite an experience. He, Thahitit (sp?) I think, is probably the most animated person I have ever met. Very Marquesian. They talk with huge gestures. He spoke no English but we got all kinds of stories about life on the island. Hunting, with knives only, spear fishing, coconut harvesting. Merc asked if he ever hunted tourists. He laughed and said no no but his grandfather did. And that may actually be true. The practiced cannibalism here until about 50 years ago. Don’t talk about it much but they did. But what a great couple of hours we spent with this young couple in their home. Bought some taro root and oranges. Don’t know what to do with taro root but Iris says she will figure it out.

This fellow was a wonderful host. 

Hard to put into words how incredible this was.

Pretty close to being done here. We have really loved the Marquesas’ and its people. I will come back here some day.

And we welcome Lorenzo to the Vivo crew. He was on another ARC boat that is taking a different route and the owners are going back to Europe for a while. He is from northern Italy near the Alps, speaks three languages, just graduated with a degree in marine biology and is reported to be a heck of a cook. He will be with us through Australia. Also quite a good guitar player. We jammed a bit last night. Should be fun working up a couple of tunes to take to some of the ARC get togethers.

So this afternoon we are off to the Tuamotu Archipelago. Should be quite a change in topography. It is, for the most part, atolls. Sunken rims of volcanoes. First stop Ahe. Should take us about three days. Then Rangiroa where Dawn joins us. No wifi for a while so I am guessing so this might be the last post for a bit.

Take care

M