We’ve all heard of beach bungalows before and until now, we really had no idea what to expect from this iconic South Pacific icon of the good life. We had no preconceived notions here except waterside and a bed. Which leaves a lot of variables shrouded in mystery when you stop to think about it. Is it like a normal hotel room? is there a kitchen? Outhouse or running water bathroom? Does it come with one of those dancing hula-girl statues you see on people’s car dashboards? What’s it really like to live in a classy hotel’s overwater bungalow in French Polynesia? Well, it’s like this: Continue reading “Bungalow living”
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…
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!?”
Random uninhabited beach, central Fakarava, Tuamotu, French Polynesia
Figuring out that US $67.25 doesn’t even buy a single dinner out for Tiffany and myself at any restaurant on the island (seriously, crazy expensive here), my career as a professional dare taker comes to sudden, if not awesome, end.
Not that I won’t take dares. Please, by all means.
We hauled anchor and headed up the Coast, well, the coast on the inside of the island, which isn’t very far from the other coast on the outside of the island. Here let me show you what I mean:
Yeah, that’s really it. Think about that for a second, they live on an island no wider than a few football fields in the middle of the Pacific. There is a certain reassurance that large land mass provides, a reassurance that until now I had not ever noticed before. It is something very disconcerting about being able to see both coasts at the same time of the only land for about 100 + miles. Something in the back of your mind that says: hey, if there’s a tidal wave buddy, or maybe a hurricane, this island ain’t gonna do much more than trip it up a bit. You’re basically screwed…
…it gives one pause.
Dropping anchor for the night, we went ashore and decided to have a “genuine natural Polynesian island beach experience.” What does this mean? More coconuts!
Few points here:
1) What did Tiffany and Greg learn from their last coconut experience? Not a DARN thing, thank-you very much!
2) Actual Polynesians are not in any way interested in “genuine natural Polynesian experiences.” I met this dude a few days later:
Huh, a fire axe. Don’t see that in too many beach movies eh? Just in case you are wondering, they cut open the coconuts and let them dry because the milk is worthless. It’s the coconut oil that is the cash crop.
The evening culminated with a perfect sunset barbecue, though more ended up being on the menu than was originally scheduled:
Did you know that when Sharks get into large groups (say like 50 plus) they school, like fish?
So we learned something new today.
More of that in a minute, let’s get down to brass taxes: Brad Kellogg owes us $67.25.
For those of you who are not friends with us on Facebook, you should be. Mainly because that’s where most of the commentary for the blog happens each week. Why is this? Probably because thanks to the miracle of the friend finder, all our old smart aleck friends from our previous lives have connected with us and form some form of hybrid “metamind / advice giving / peanut gallery” thing.
So enters Brad, good friend from high school and expert at egging Greg on. Actually, good at egging anyone on. The guy’s got a gift. If he ends up a senator, I called it.
After my last post about the sharks, Brad comments to Greg: “5 bucks float with the sharks for 5 minutes, and I’ll toss in an extra quarter for each shark ya can count, double dog dare ya!”
Ok, I’m a worshipper of A Christmas story. I’ll even spot you the Triple Dog Dare.
(If you don’t understand the Christmas story reference, you OBVIOUSLY don’t watch TBS on Christmas…and your life is poorer for it 😉
Now, you may be saying to yourself, “Wait Greg, there was a MAX of 7 sharks in that video, assuming every new cut was with new sharks.” So that’s $6.50.
Yes, that. Here’s the rest of the 250 sharks we went swimming with (dive masters best estimate, not mine.) Oh, and the highly lethal stonefish which doesn’t count for an extra quarter but could kill you just as dead.
Now we were in the water for about 45 minutes but since there was no repeating stipulation on the bet, I won’t advocate for the $605.25 I could potentially claim. 😉
The South Pass was not all just highly lethal sea creatures. I mean really, 250 sharks aren’t just going to hang around unless there’s food nearby and wow, was there. A smorgasbord of every color and type of tropical reef fish, coral, you name it. Amazing does not describe what we saw: this video hardly gives you a taste of the varied and beautiful sea life that surrounded us every time we got in the water.
(PS – thanks to Serge & the guys from Fatu Hiva for the awesome music!)
OK, the UN was right (really, how often do you here THAT on a daily basis? 😉
This place rocks.
Did you see that coral!? Did you see that water!? It all looks like that. All of it.
We headed into the south pass village & dive shop because everyone wants to do dives here, obviously. Upon reaching the dive center we were greeted by what for Fakarava must pass for the overly friendly pet dog…
It was hard to believe that this was an actual fish and not some animatronic robot designed to impress the locals. No, really, it was a fish. A really big fish. That will swim up and boink you on the shin.
At the dive shop they also crack and gut coconuts. Here, despite their primitive appearance, the inhabitants show that they know a heck of a lot more about coconutting than some gringo and his dull machete.
(and if you don’t know what the gringo & machete comment was about, go back to entry called “gringos & coconuts”. One of my more amusing moments…)
An interesting point: the south pass is an old village but you can probably hear the hammers in the background. About 5 – 20 people are here from outside French Polynesia building the dive shop for the South Pass and serving as dive masters. The UN giving your island a super stamp of approval is good for business.
Also, they have sharks here. They have a lot of sharks here. No, you don’t seem to understand, they have A LOT of sharks right here, on the reef.
We haven’t even gotten in the water yet! And for some strange reason most of them still want to.
I don’t feel like I am giving a fair scope for the distance between these islands. I could tell you about each voyage of about 100 miles from remote isolated desert island to remote even more desolate island but really, that would get boring. If you want to know what it’s like sailing the high seas, look at the blog entries about us crossing the Pacific Ocean to the Marquesas. It’s like that. FYI, my ukulele and French continue to improve and I’m learning stuff about Solomon I never knew before.
I do not wish to bore you with the details while I also do not want to deceive you that these transits are just afternoon “hops” from one island to the next. Typically, a trip between islands typically takes a day and can take as many as 5.
The trip to Fakarava took 1 day but during that day we broke into another can of butter.
You see, Polynesians and cruisers have a similar problem: we both don’t have a ton of refrigerator space so we both minimize what needs to be put in there as much as possible. Did you know that as long as you never refrigerate your eggs in the first place that they actually don’t require refrigeration? Neither did I. How about butter can be preserved for long periods of time in a can? And that certain kinds of milk don’t need to be refrigerated until the carton is opened? I have learned on this trip that Americans refrigerate way too much stuff.
The coral reef of Fakarava was very exciting for all of us because it the only Tuamotu to be designated a UNESCO world heritage site. Tiffany knows more about this than me but the short of it is that the UN thinks that this place is awesome and should be preserved for it’s natural significance. Translation: Awesome stuff here, come check it out without destroying it.
(Again, I got this off a picture of the visitor center’s map. Don’t use this to navigate. Buy a chart.)
The voyage in was another hair raising experience where we were stationed on the bow watching for coral heads in the perfect crystal clear blue water. Just to add a little spice to the mix, we had currents flowing around the pass to make our lives extra interesting. Now maybe you think after our Kauehi adventure we had relaxed about the whole sailing over a coral reef thing. Let me point something out to you:
Narrow channel + Sharp coral reefs on both sides + lateral currents going every direction = nervous crew.
Upon completing our transit of the channel we discovered the “south pass village” that would be our home for the next few days as we indulged ourselves in figuring out just exactly what the UN thought rated this place international recognition and protection.
Also, we got invited over by one of our fellow cruising boats to experience one final taste of the Marquesas: a goat dinner.
The Marquesians raise goats to eat and they are very good at this particular skill. A fact I learned regrettably after I had left the Marquesas…
Now that hopefully you are hidden from the cold somewhere up there, hunkered down with the family against the rage of old man winter, let’s set the proper Christmas tone for down here. It may be freezing where you are but here in the Southern Hemisphere, it just happens to be the peak of summer. Christmas is bit more of 4th of July picnic and cold beers than hot coco time around the family hearth. It leads to situations that can are very unusual to our Northern hemisphere Christmas expectations.
Oh, and these people have never eaten pumpkin pie (much less Key Lime pie). Seriously, how do they live?
And as a final Christmas treat for you all, my favorite video of the previous entry: the out takes. You’d be surprised how much goes on when you’re trying to record Christmas songs.
