Here’s the sad truth about Niue: there are more dead people here than living residents of the island. Like we said, Air New Zealand runs a weekly flight out to Niue year round and it wouldn’t surprise me if they made that flight at a loss. So this is good right? Niue is connected to the world! Not exactly as all around good as you might think. You see, the advent of regular air travel decimated the Niuean population and not through disease but by mass exodus. Remember how we said there were more Niueans living in Auckland than on Niue and that all Niueans have dual citizenship? Well, most young people want the quality education and job opportunities that Niue’s sponsor country of New Zealand provides and really, can you blame them? Since there is now a weekly flight out, a lot of people leave and only return to visit families on holidays or just to occasionally check up on the family house. Speaking of homes, the majority of residences in the villages & businesses are abandoned or at least not lived in and squatting tourists are a big problem for the local law enforcement.
For some other Polynesian countries, like the Cooks and The Society Islands, air travel may take some of their youth but it also gives back in the form of tourism. This has not happened on Niue and the island remains mostly unvisited.
Ok, nothing to do with anything but come on, it’s awesome. You stop, there are coconuts, what more could you possibly want?!
So the thing about Niue is that the entire structure of the island is so very different from the other islands we’ve seen so far. It doesn’t fit into the mold of Darwin’s Theory of Atoll formation (which if you remember from this entrythe island forms from a volcano and then as it slowly sinks and erodes, it is surrounded by a coral reef until there’s nothing left except for a lagoon in the middle of a coral reef). As we mentioned earlier, this particular island is an elevated atoll. So it used to be a lagoon surrounded by coral, but the lagoon is now more than 30 feet above sea level and a narrow skirt of coral creates tide pools around the island.
The locals have adapted to this by finding various paths down to the coral shallows, using natural chasms and caves to lead them out to the open water.
And being as lugging your canoe straight up a massive wall of coral would not be the ideal end to a long day of fishing they also had to find ways to store their canoes.
And yes, in case you were wondering – those rocks are very sharp. They’re made from dead coral, and are very jagged. Think razor blades. Great for defense, suck for sea access. As the ocean crashed over them, they don’t get worn down, they break off into new jagged peaks.
Tiffany managed to scrape herself pretty badly on one of them…
This was a smaller example of the Niuean coconut crab which all reports point to being delicious. Take a giant Polynesian crab. Feed it coconut for its entire life. Cook and eat. Mind the vorpal blades on its hands. The gastronomic rapture should be rather obvious. Continue reading “Free WiFi!!!”
Look, it’s not like we don’t think this trip has profoundly affected us or something but when multiple people come up to you and say that within hours of arriving, it begs the response:
Us: “Yes we did. Um, how did you know?”
Local: “Because you’re new here and it’s not Friday.”
This answer mystified us until one Friday we came ashore and everything was closed. Literally the entire capital village…er…city of Alofi was a ghost town. Then two hours later everyone showed back up. We later found out that on Fridays the one Air New Zealand flight that services Niue, The…One…Flight… arrives on Fridays at about 1pm local time and everyone goes up to meet the new tourists.
Anyone else just flash on a little short guy shouting “de plane! de plane!”? Glad we’re not the only ones.
Funny fact: Niueans love KFC. They love it so much that locals have their family members who are flying home pick up KFC in Auckland. We are told it is extremely common to have a couple of buckets of the Colonel’s special recipe onboard the 4 hour flight.
So we’re off the boat and into the “big city” (cough, hack, giggle).
First stop, the bank. We need currency and this is where we run into our first problem. See again to remind you, there are about 1300 people total on this island. Now these 1300 people have exactly 1 bank and that one bank only accepts exactly 1 type of card: Visa. Which we don’t have. We are actually saying to you that MasterCard is not accepted in this country. At all. So when Greg walks up to the bank teller and hands her his ATM card to make a withdrawal, she hands it back and says “sorry, we don’t accept MasterCard.”
Greg: “It’s an ATM card not a credit card.”
Teller: “Sorry, we can only process Visa cards for anything.”
Greg: “Ok, no problem, is there another bank in town where I can use this card?”
Teller: Sorry, we’re the only bank in the country. (emphasis added by us)
…
Holy cow we’re in Visa commercial! Where’s the voice over guy!?
It ended up being OK because luckily, we carry some cash for emergencies. But the emergencies we were thinking of were more like “abandoned in a foreign country and need airfare” vice, “hey I’d like some local currency to buy lunch.”
But an emergency it was and we were very grateful to have the cash. So lesson learned – always carry some extra cash because you never know when the one and only bank in the country won’t take your ATM card. Because not everyone takes MasterCard, but it seems greenbacks are still universally accepted.
Like this article? For more learn more about our varied shopping adventures in Polynesia by clicking on “Haven’t had a pig roast yet…”
About the authors
Greg and Tiffany are traveling around the world on sailing yachts and keep a video blog of their (mis)adventures. If sailing to Tahiti on a 44 ft sailboat, getting pooped on by seagulls, opening coconuts with dull machetes, sailing past tornadoes and ukulele Christmas carols are for you, then check them out at www.CoastGuardCouple.com!
Hey, it’s our anniversary! We got married in Las Vegas 8 years ago today!
It’s been an interesting ride for us over the years, going from Coast Guard officers, to business owners, to around the world sailors, but we’ve enjoyed it all.
This is the second anniversary that we’ve had since we started our trip back in October of 2009, and it’s strange how people think we should celebrate it. “Normal” people go out for dinner, or on a short vacation, but we do that stuff all of the time! One person was stunned to hear that we don’t have any special plans for today. “You’re not going to go out to dinner? Well that’s not very romantic” were her exact words. But my question to you is – what exactly is romance?
Since we’ve been on this trip, we’ve spent more time in each other’s company on a daily basis than we ever have. And I mean EVER. Most “normal” people spend all day with their coworkers, not their spouses. Prior to this trip, the most time we regularly spent together was every evening and weekends. When we were working together we still didn’t spend this much time together because we went to different meetings and worked with other people. So what can be more “romantic” than getting to spend all day, every day, with your chosen spouse?
We thought about today, and talked about making plans to “do something”, but we already have lots of amazing things planned! Any one of them could be a “second honeymoon” or an “anniversary vacation”. Why does it have to happen now, today? We acknowledge between us the significance of this day, but it’s more of a “hey, cool, eight years!”
Like this article? Check out our thoughts on coming home by clicking on Greg’s last birthday entry “So, when are you coming home?“
Like many Americans, 9/11 had a major effect on our lives at the time.
On the morning of September 11th 2001, Greg was an extremely junior officer serving the first months of his first tour of duty on a US Coast Guard cutter patrolling off the coast of Haiti. He was performing counter-migrant and counter-drug operations as a ship driver and a boarding officer. 24 hours later Greg was off the Coast of Louisiana boarding cargo ships looking for bombs. A year later he was recruited into the new field of counter-terrorism operations in the US Coast Guard.
Tiffany was a senior cadet at the Coast Guard Academy getting ready to graduate and take her first tour onboard a cutter stationed in the Pacific Northwest. The Coast Guard missions she had trained for 4 years to accomplish were no longer the primary missions she would perform in that job.
Since then a decade has passed. We received our honorable discharges, Greg started and sold a business and Tiffany became a leading sailing instructor. We sailed across the Pacific Ocean. A few months ago Greg was in New York for 36 hours and he gave up some sleep to see the World Trade Center site. Neither of us had ever been and it seemed a good idea to at least see the location where the event that shaped our military careers happened:
Notice anything different about the description of where we are? Normally we give you the city, the island and the country. In Niue though, the island IS the country. With a total number of 1 island and a total population of approximately 1300 citizens in country at any one time, this island-nation is a very different experience from the other countries we have visited so far. There are more Niueans in the main New Zealand city of Auckland than there are in Niue. It’s actually kind of funny because the Miss Niue beauty pageant is actually held in Auckland and broadcast live over the internet & TV back to the home country.
This isn’t too surprising being as all Niueans are dual citizens of New Zealand, there are only so many jobs a nation of 1300 people can support, and finally, Niue, along with The Cook Islands and quite a few other island chains out here are all protectorates of New Zealand. This basically means that, though the Kiwis play it down a lot, the tiny little country of New Zealand is a major regional power player in the South Pacific. It’s basically France, the USA and NZ that own something like 80% of the islands out here. Which is really impressive that: Continue reading “National Population – 1300”
First off, that little scrap of paper with the photocopied hand drawn chart of the reef? It’s photocopied over and over and passed on from one cruiser to the next. It is literally the best and only chart available for Beveridge Reef. There may not be too many unexplored places left on this globe but there are at least some places less explored than others.
Two, did you hear those numbers? Again to remind you, these islands are both very tiny and extremely far apart in a vast ocean. It’s 120 miles to the next island, 500 back to the one we came from and the nearest land? It’s only 3 miles away…straight down. So a hand drawn map from who knows when Continue reading “3 Miles Straight Down”
As we depart Rarotonga we think we would be remiss if we failed to mention Robyn in more detail.
Remember how we said we found a group of fellow sailors our own age? Well, that wasn’t completely true. We found a group of other sailors and Robyn. See Robyn got here to the Cooks the same way most sane residents of North America (she’s Canadian) would: by plane. When we ran into her she had been living on Rarotonga for several weeks spending her days working in an organic farm part time, her evenings relaxing at her hostel or partying with the locals and her free time enjoying the island paradise she decided to call home for a few months. Yes, you heard us right. Months. Robyn wasn’t a tourist, she was a temporary resident. Continue reading “A Different Breed of Nomad”
