Outside of town we find the other inhabitants of the atoll: the wildlife.
Bored with getting schooled by 9 year old island ping-pong champions? Well then, your new playmate can be as close as the nearest coconut crab hole:
Some of you may not remember Greg’s previous encounters with the avian species but he has extensive diplomatic experience in “aggressive negations” with:
We would be remiss to mention the creatures of Rangiroa and omit the diving. Like Fakarava, Rangiroa is world-renown for its dive areas and the water is crystal clear. The difference is that Rangiroa is far more accessible (remember the daily flights) and also far more developed. As a result, there are a lot more divers that swim in Rangiroa’s lagoon and the fish are actually very accustomed to humans in the water. The fish actually swim towards the dingy instead of away from it and when we tied up and jumped into the water we found ourselves immediately swarmed by a cloud of butterfly fish!
Greg has been told by his shipmates that by learning to dive in French Polynesia he is “spoiled for life” on diving. Wait, there are places in the world where you don’t see at least 10 sharks per dive and have to beat off the cornucopia of rainbow fish with a stick?
Look closely, there’s a spider in this plumeria (frangipani) flower!
There’s a winery on Rangiroa! We’ve been told that it’s the only winery on a coral atoll. The amazing thing is that they’re able to grow anything here at all. Back in the day, the islanders struggled to grow their crops. Plants had to be constantly fed with other food scraps and compost in the hopes that they would grow. Why? There’s no topsoil out here! When you walk around in the “brush” of the island, you’re crunching on shells and coral. Dirt is not native. Sand is, but sand doesn’t contain minerals. Only the extremely hardy plants can survive out here without help, and since when have you heard of grape vines as being extremely hardy? Never, that’s when. Even in California wine country they baby the grapes and make sure they get enough water and protection from the bugs and frost.
**20100527 – photo – Rangiroa (106).JPG**
We’d heard about this place quite a way back in our travels. As we’ve been going, we’re specifically looking for wineries, because, um, we like wine 🙂 The guidebook for French Polynesia mentions it briefly, but we had a hard time believing that there would only be one winery in the entire country of French Polynesia. I mean, come on… they’re FRENCH! And usually where there’s one winery, there are about 50 more. There’s bound to be more, so we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled!
Unfortunately the winery, Vin de Tahiti, was closed for the season when we arrived on Rangiroa (closed for the season!?! We arrived in the middle of the tourist season!?!). We did manage to get a nice guy to open the door for us and to answer a few questions. Here’s their story:
The wine wasn’t spectacular, but it was pretty solid. Definitely drinkable, but not something we’d go out of my way to find. (oh, wait, too late 😉 The most awesome thing about it is that it’s the only Tahitian wine you can get.
The funniest thing about our wine tasting experience was the chicken that kept wandering into the bar. Now, you would think we’d be used to it by now. After months in Mexico hanging around a cat that would steal your drink when you weren’t looking and sailing around a bunch of small islands with free range chicken working the copra industry, we shouldn’t be surprised where they end up! Maybe if the chicken had stayed outside the bar, we wouldn’t have thought it unusual. Heck, the chicken could even have just gone inside the door and we probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it, even though we’re talking lagoon view, individual bungalows, high end hotel here! No, we probably wouldn’t have been too excited about it. But when you’re sitting in the bar of a high end hotel, and a scraggly chicken jumps up onto a table near you and basically orders a cold one, well… you notice it…
Did you see that? A paved road! We’ve seen paved roads before in the islands but now we start putting this information together. How do you make a paved road on a remote desert island…well concrete requires sand, rocks, fresh water and cement. Cement you have to import on the boat, no surprise there. Fresh water can be harvested from the rain; take a while but do-able. Sand can come from the beaches but rocks…rocks are a bit of stumbling point. In the Marquesas they had mountains of rocks (literally) to turn into roads but in the Tuamotu, their land is not made up of rock anymore and shipping in tons of rocks can get expensive. So what is an islander to do except improvise?
And while we’re on the topic of logistics, Greg ran into something that seems out of place in the islands: a graveyard. Yes, we understand that people die (heck, they did a lot of dying not so long ago) but it’s where they go when they die that concerns me, and not in the spiritual sense either.
We’ve already made it clear that there isn’t a whole heck of a lot of real estate out here. Also, Catholic doctrine is pretty clear on the matter: no cremation. So how long will it be before these people are deciding between housing for the living and housing for the dead?
Speaking of the Catholic Church, they have one here and it’s gorgeous.
Did you see that tabernacle? It was the tiny little castle up on the altar at the beginning of the video. (For the uninitiated: Tabernacle is the little box they keep the blessed bread in. So in the minds of us Catholics this is the place where the physical presence of Jesus resides.) In the states, you find a lot of tabernacles made out of precious materials like gold & silver. Here they don’t have stuff like that so what they lack in metal they make up for in expert craftsmanship & skill.
The largest of these stores is Magazin (French for “store”) Daniel, which is so important as to be noted in our guidebooks as “the best supermarket on the island”. So this, according to our printed guidebooks mind you, is the best supermarket in the main city of the largest, most developed, most populous island of the 78 atolls of the Tuamotu chain. Here’s the tour:
And as a special treat for all of Greg’s fellow sci-fi nerd friends out there, look what he found!
If you don’t get it, it’s ok, he forgives you. If you do get it, you know why he put it up here… so awesome!
Oh the third place stuff from the boats go? Like we mentioned before, some stuff is custom ordered. Which is why this video is so amazing:
Greg getting his butt handed to him by an island kid in a game of ping pong is not remarkable. It’s the cultural significance of the thing! (no, not of me getting power slammed by a 10 year old, why are you fixated on that!?) It was the ping pong table, focus on his table! (I might note I scored some points.) What is remarkable is that the table was there in the first place. This most assuredly overshadows any *cough* – minor – *cough* point spread difference there may have been.
In the United States, if we want some lettuce, we go to the fridge and get some lettuce
(what does this have to do with Polynesian life? Stay with me a sec.)
Fridge empty? Fine, we go to the grocery store. But what would we do if the grocery store had no lettuce? What if all the grocery stores had no lettuce because there was none to be had? What if we couldn’t go to the farm, organic or otherwise, to get our lettuce because it was literally impossible to get to one via land?
Well then I’d guess we’d just have to sit on our happy hands and wait a few weeks / months for the next delivery, now wouldn’t we?
Alright, take that paragraph above and replace “lettuce” with everything from “milk” to “vegetables” to “paint” to “beer” to “wheels for my car” to “computer monitor” to “gas for my stove” to anything you use in your daily life.
You can now understand what we mean when we say the supply ship plays a very critical part in the lives of Polynesians.
The M/V ARANUI 3 makes 16 trips a year to resupply many of the Marquesan islands and a couple of the Tuamotu islands. “Oh, that’s a lot of trips.” No, no it is not. Imagine that only 16 times a year, basically once a month, you could get fresh vegetables or a new TV or your favorite book series or just about anything over the size of an airmail package. Think of the mindset shift for a purchasing consumer. First off, you’d better be darn sure you want whatever you’re ordering, because it isn’t $5.95 shipping and handing, we can tell you that. After having to deal with the Polynesian internet “service”.These people have to order things far enough in advance to get it delivered to Tahiti (which is not exactly on the beaten path to start with) early enough for it to get onto this ship so it can get delivered. The boat only comes by 16 times a year and if your package isn’t onboard when the ship leaves Tahiti, well, guess you’ll just have to wait another month then, won’t you? So that new bike you want to get your kid for Christmas? Might want to think about ordering that around September or so. Just in case there’s a delay somewhere along the delivery chain (sure that never happens) or just in case the weather’s bad on the day the delivery ship shows up and it can’t make any deliveries so it leaves to make it’s next appointment (because we’ve be told that does happen).
Sure stores stock stuff and here on Rangiroa there are more stores than on most islands (about 3) but they each don’t carry much, and by “not much” I mean “not much beyond basic living necessities like clothes, food and cookware” and none of them are specialty stores. You want your XBOX 360 video games or a replacement laptop because yours broke? That you special order and wait for the boat.
Did we mention that the supply ship also has to enter the port via the the aforementioned narrow pass of tidal death? It comes inside the lagoon and anchors off the pass and deploys small boats, since it’s too big to tie up at the shallow pier. Then it uses its crane to put things into the small boat. You know the video arcade grabby claw? Ok, play that game, except if you screw up, you lose the island’s ration of potatoes for the month, retail value several hundred to several thousand dollars. We did mention this game is being played on a fluid maritime environment where nothing is stable, right?
We have heard stories of new cars and trucks being dumped overboard during transfer…oops!
When the stars do align and the delivery ship can drop anchor, release its tender boat and actually make deliveries, it’s a big deal that a good part of the whole village turns out for.
These people get their supplies from outboard motorboats. The Port of Oakland or New York, this is not.
People buying and selling, right there on the dock. Why? Because if there are 50 wheels of cheese to be delivered to Rangiroa this month, you want to make sure you get your cheese before it’s all gone.
Oh you want the zoomed out picture? Being as on that Google map we showed you before the scale was 1 pixel = somewhere around 500 miles or something, I don’t think it would change very much. We’re still in the middle of the blue stuff. 😉
With about 2400 permanent inhabitants (this is a HUGE number by the way, we haven’t seen cities so populous since Nuku Hiva) being only a paltry 220 miles from Tahiti (laughable distance really) and with an airport with actual daily flights (*gasp!*) Rangiroa is the de facto capital of the Tuamotu. Its coral reef is made up of 415 motu (islands) and it has only 2 passes in or out. This is where our story begins:
We had gotten a little cocky about the whole “sailing though a dangerous coral reef” thing but don’t you worry, Rangiroa was kind enough to re-humble us. Her lagoon is big: about 50 miles long and 20 miles wide. This atoll actually has its own horizon and generates its own localized micro weather patterns. Land’s still about 300 yards across though, so no help there. 50 miles long, 20 miles wide and a lagoon about 100 feet deep. That’s a lot of water and there are only two skinny little passes (say about 100 yards across) in or out. Perhaps you can see where we’re going here.
Rangiroa has a tidal current.
Those weren’t jumping fish; they were 5 foot long dolphins surfing in the standing waves. Rangiroa is famous for them. Also, some genius French entrepreneur (they did invent the word, after all) built a channel-side bar with an observation deck to watch the struggling boats…it’s like the nautical version of celebrity death match with dolphin cheerleaders & umbrella drinks!
A 6 – 7 knot tidal current shifts back and forth throughout the day, creating 5 foot standing waves in addition to the coral on both sides of the channel just waiting to snack on your fiberglass hull. If you don’t know anything about tides and currents, let us give you a visual. We watched one boat who thought that the reports of the rip tide were exaggerated and decided to just push though. For a full hour we watched this cruising boat, at all ahead full, pedal to the metal, going though gas like a drunken sailor though vodka, transit this 300 yard long pass. 300 yards! At sea – calm. In the lagoon – calm. In the pass, one little boat struggled to get in while 2.09×1013 gallons of water wanted to get out…all at once. Oh yes, we just broke out the scientific numbering system. The same system they use to measure the distance to other galaxies. Do we have your attention?
“Oh but that isn’t so bad”, you say. “Just go in while the current is pushing you into the lagoon.” Bad idea for two reasons:
1) For the non-sailors out there, the way a rudder works is that it’s a board sticking out of the bottom of your boat that turns you by pushing against the water. Turn the rudder, the water flowing past it hits it at an angle, which pushes the board and the boat attached to it, in a new direction. If water isn’t flowing past the rudder, the boat won’t turn. When a boat is in a following current (aka being pushed) in a narrow channel where the speed of the water is equal to the speed of the boat, then no water is flowing over the rudder and your half million dollar floating condo just became the world’s biggest pinball.
2) You know that desert island with the one palm tree that people get shipwrecked on in the movies? Found it. It’s at the end of the fast flowing channel of Rangiroa, right there in the smack dab middle of where all the really fast water lets out.
It’s cute, when the current isn’t pushing you right into it – then it’s scary!
I have significantly improved my German vocabulary on this trip. I used to know all of one German word – “nein!” which means “no!” And then we discovered in Alameda THE German restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area – Speisekammer (also know as Spice-en-whatsit) and then my German vocabulary grew by leaps and bounds! Speisekammer means “pantry” and they have the most awesome vegetarian strudel (which is a pastry-like thing) and they have TO DIE FOR Macaroni and cheese (or, as the Germans call it Gratinierte Kasespatzle. I only ever remember the spätzle part of it… So tasty, with caramelized onions, asiago and parmesan cheese… Mmmmmm….).
So by my count, we’re up to three words – Nein, Speisekammer, and Spätzle. Have you ever heard that traveling can expand your horizons or teach you language skills? Well it can! In Mexico, Tiffany’s Spanish got a lot better, and in the Tuamotu of French Polynesia, our German got a lot better!
“Wait a minute…” you’re probably asking yourselves. “I thought French Polynesian people spoke French or Tahitian or Marquesan? I didn’t know they spoke German too!” And you’d be right, they don’t. But there are tons of travelers who pass through that do! One thing you must understand about travel: there are Germans everywhere. Which is really cool, because Germans are the nicest freaking people you will ever meet. Greg has literally never met a German that he did not like. Elizabeth from our Pacific Puddle Jump buddy boat PROXIMITY is German, and at one point we had 4 boats headed toward the same island, all within about a day or so of each other and on every boat at least one person spoke German! How crazy is that?
We had BOREE, STERNCHEN, PAIKEA MIST and us on FLY AWEIGH. Burt and Ingie on BOREE are Germans who have been living in Australia for a number of years, the owners of STERNCHEN (which means “little star” – ha! Another one!) are Germans who speak some English, Michael on PAIKEA MIST is a German-Canadian, and Allan on FLY AWEIGH took classes for his degree in Germany. At one point, STERNCHEN called BOREE on the VHF radio to ask for some technical assistance, and I learned new German! We heard them call on the VHF radio to switch channels to “acht” (which means “eight”) and followed them over to channel eight, so Allan could listen in and keep up with his German and his long standing underway technical assistance skills 🙂
While we were listening, I learned 2 new German words – “computer” and “easy-peasy”. Now, you may be saying to yourself, “hey, those aren’t German!” But I counter – if you walked up to four Germans having a conversation in German, then the words they use MUST be German! Ha!
We have now over doubled our German vocabulary! Sternchen, Acht, Computer and Easy-Peasy!
Once we all got into port we actually got to meet the crews of BOREE and STERNCHEN and spend some time with them. We had some wonderful conversations. Greg is a huge fan of the German language, he just loves the way it sounds. (Greg – Actually, I believe my EXACT words were “someone discovered the sound of awesome and just decided to make an entire language out of it!”) Greg was such a big fan that Ingie even gave him REAL German Bread!
You do not appreciate how awesome this is. First off, it’s hot as heck here (80 F is the average temp) and no one has air-conditioning. She turned on her gas stove in her boat and heated the whole thing up, for several hours mind you, to make us bread.
Also, do you understand that we are 6,435 kilometers, oh sorry, 4,000+ miles *flying!* from Spice-en-whatsit! 9,655 miles flying from Germany! Need I remind you that those flights don’t even exist, so add in mileage for stops in Tahiti and Hong Kong. Do you know how much a flight like that would cost!? And. We. Have. FRESH German bread.
Do you have fresh, hand-baked German Bread right now? No, no you do not…and ours will be eaten before you get here so don’t try it.
During our discussions, we got to talking about the happy birthday song, and how the Germans don’t really sing happy birthday. Here’s why:
Which lead to Burt telling us about how Germans like to smash words together to make new words. His example: the soccer world cup. In German it’s one word: Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft.
So awesome…
How many languages can you speak?
Oh PS: Greg can curse in German too. Who says you don’t learn useful skills in the Boy Scouts? 😉
We arrived in Toau to find two really nice guys in an outboard who guided us into the 10 boat anchorage they had set up near the “village.”
Why is “village” in quotations?
Just wait for it.
After helping us get anchored the nice guys invited us over for dinner that evening. It’s a pretty common practice for the locals to prepare dinner for cruisers for a price and then “invite” you to dinner. Remember in Fatu Hiva where the terms “restaurant” and “living room” were synonymous? Yeah, pretty normal and to be fair, they take good care of you:
Those would be fresh lobsters. Paired with baguette and fresh fried parrot fish and by “fresh” I mean the two guys who guided us in? They are also the fishermen; brought the fish in that afternoon and cooked them up alongside one of their wives. Same with the lobsters.
Also, they have a dog
Cute little guy, kinda scraggly. Not really worth noting until…hey wait a second…how the heck did a dog get way out here?! It’s not like he evolved from the freaking fish! Did you ship him in? How much would that cost? Is he some sorta descendent from dogs brought over by Capt. Cook? Seriously, where did you get a dog!? (see, like I said, sometimes it’s the little things that make you remember where you are).
We had a great time at dinner and then the 2 nice guys and the lady invited us to come to church tomorrow. Well, we’ve all heard legends of the Polynesian church singing and it’s also when the whole “village” would typically turn out, what a great opportunity to meet people! …and truthfully, it’s been a while since we were able to get to an actual church, so heck why not?
Here’s the church:
And here’s what the service was like:
Not exactly what we were expecting. Ok, so all the white people? Sailors. That leaves the lady at the front and the two men in the seats…
…noticing a trend here?
You know that joke where the town’s so small that the mayor is the sectary while moonlighting as the pastor and city garbage collector?
Yeah, that’s here.
Greg played bocce ball with the two guys on the beach with their bocce set. Won one game, lost the other. In other words, he beat half the bocce ball playing population of this island in one go.
…Hey wait, where the heck did they get a bocce ball set?!
When we look at those words up there and realize that we could be putting those letters together at random for all the good it does describing our location to you. We can tell you exactly where we are and at the same time tell you nothing at all. We’re working on getting a map up. Here, we’ll give you a little orientation. How about a satellite photograph of the atoll:
That help? Still no, huh? Let’s zoom out a bit:
Just in case you didn’t know, the blue stuff is water. We would like to point out that if you put the entire landmass of our planet into this one ocean, there would be STILL be room for a second Africa, give or take. Like we said, the scale of things out here is massive. “Needle in a haystack”? From now on we’ll be saying “it’s like trying to find an island in the Pacific.” People live on them. Granted, not a lot of people, but still.
And yet, here we are. It’s amazing that these places are REAL. There are places on the map that almost no one has ever heard of and these places are actually a lot closer than most of us realize… yet drastically separated by water, language, culture and a lack of regular air transport (you saw the major / only airport of the area). Coming from the States, it’s actually easier, cheaper and WAY faster to get to Sydney, which is still several thousand miles from us, than to get to this little atoll. The Pacific islands are weird that way.
The fact that you are way off in the middle of nowhere is always right there, right in your face. You get used to over time and you stop thinking about it. It’s amusing to think back on how we called Nuku Hiva “the big city” but it is the largest settlement we’ve encountered since leaving Mexico a few months ago. It wouldn’t even count as a village in the San Francisco Bay.
Greg has long been a proponent of the philosophy that humans can normalize just about anything, along as they are exposed to it enough. Isolation is the status quo out here, after all. Polynesians don’t wander around in a state of shock at their removal from the regular world; to them, this is the regular world. Over time, it becomes regular to us as well and we stop thinking about the fact that there are places in the world where it takes more than 20 minutes to walk from one coast to another. Then something little makes you think of it, like zooming out on the navigation computer while planning a route. Then it all comes rushing back, “Holy heck we’re over 1000 miles from the nearest continent!” It actually scares you a little bit as you think to yourself “how the heck did we get here on a sailboat!?”
Underway, transiting in the Tuamotu, French Polynesia
So we left the natural splendor of Fakarava and headed over to Toau, which was a day’s trip away, and also finally got some video of the mouth-wateringly delectable pamplemousse.
For a little over the past month now we have pretty much sustained ourselves on French baguettes and Polynesian grapefruit. Greg will only feel deprived by the situation when this is no longer possible. Tiffany is already dreading the day… 🙂
Also, many of you ask what happens to trash when you’re at sea. Here’s what everyone does:
Shocking, isn’t it? What’s nuts is that this is the norm for all ships, commercial and recreational, the world over. Greg remembers the first time he saw trash going overboard. It was his first cruise on a Coast Guard ship and they just tossed bags of garbage over the side while at sea. He was dumbstruck until another sailor explained it all. There is some logic to it. You may not agree with the logic, but at least now you’ll understand it. Since all the popular exposure we’re aware of is primarily focused on tossing garbage overboard as a bad thing, here we’ll take the role of explaining it. As for our own opinions, we’ll give it to you at the end.
First off, there isn’t anywhere to really put garbage on a boat long term that is sanitary for the crew. Also you’d have to deal with the smell, the bugs, attracting rodents in port, leaking etc. Now there are some cruisers that “pack their trash out” by only throwing out garbage when they get to port but we will look into that idea in a minute. Also, these cruisers are typically shorter range cruisers who will pull into an established port with garbage facilities once a week. In Polynesia, most of the locals literally burn their trash (including plastics) because they, like us, have nowhere to put it.
As long as what you throw overboard is bio-degradable, the sea does a heck of a faster job breaking it down than anything on land. Also, you’re not allowed to throw stuff within miles of land, so likely you’re tossing the biodegradable trash into the 80% of the ocean that is barren desert (except for the salt water). That’s why we had so many cans in the video; we hadn’t been far enough from shore while inside Fakarava’s lagoon. To get an idea of what is legally allowed to be tossed over where, here is a handy diagram from Greg’s Coast Guard boarding officer days (yes, we are currently talking about maritime law enforcement, don’t mind Greg while he geeks out, hey maybe you’ll learn something!)
Note the one thing you are never allowed to throw overboard: Plastic. Plastic never degrades. Sailors do their best to avoid having it onboard because they can’t throw it overboard, ever. When they do use plastic they store it. Plastic is a major problem for the ocean and is the primary focus of the whole “Pacific Garbage Patch” dilemma.
Finally, stuff falls into the sea all the time, especially organic waste. Whales poop in the ocean – about 3% of their total body mass each day – and they live for a while, you do the math. So do birds and basically every other creature, at some point or another, has had their fecal matter mixed in with the ocean. Animals die in the ocean and their rotting carcasses often sink. Also, many coastal cities use the sea as a garbage site (surprise!). A couple of decades ago the US government was using the waters off the Farallon Islands (near San Francisco) as a radioactive dumping ground. Once they figured out it made the sharks glow though, they cut that out.
Here’s the scary truth. Live by the coast? Throw stuff away? Then it probably ends up in the sea. Where else is it going to go? Sailors are just a little more direct about the process. If an apple gets tossed into the water, is it littering? Ok, so how about a cardboard box that becomes waterlogged and decomposes before your eyes? See, slippery slope.
By the way, anyone want to go swimming?
On the one hand is the unrealistic goal of a perfect world that no one can live (or poop) in and on the other is an ocean so polluted that the plastic outnumbers the plant life (which, by the way, is apparently true right now in some places of the Pacific.) Ultimately, like everything else, it’s a balancing act that we all have to agree on and do. Right after we finish up that world peace bit.
It worries me that one day God is going to show up and ask us to explain why we broke his planet.
Where do we stand? Hard question. As crew, we don’t really have a choice in the matter because as long as our Captain is obeying the law, we really can’t stop them. It’s easy to be hard-over against dumping anything. Garbage is bad! However, all creatures create waste, it’s part of living. Yes, humans create more. Anyone here willing go without their spaghetti sauce? How about your car? Seeing both sides of the issue, actually living with the logistics and having had both sides impact our lives, we would have to say that we agree some things can be tossed overboard as long as we know we aren’t significantly impacting the environment in the area. Right… now define “significant impact”… We could go on…
But not with plastic. Plastic kills baby turtles and that makes Jesus sad.
What’s your opinion about what is ok and not ok to throw overboard?
