Well, now that we got the whole troublesome sailing bit out of the way, let’s get to the partying…
…by getting in an even smaller boat, but this time with no means of automated propulsion and in the rain!
(We don’t get it either dude…)
The first thing we did was participate in the national sport of French Polynesia by competing in 4-man Polynesian canoe races. As we had actually sailed to Tahiti with our friends Allan and Alison, they cross-recruited us into their canoe and coconut shucking team.
There is something you need to understand about sailors: they really need very little excuse to do two things:
1) Sail
2) Party
So any occasion where an actual legitimate reason exists to do both at the same time is guaranteed to draw a crowd. Enter the Tahiti Rendezvous, an annual celebration put on by the Tahitian government to celebrate those insane people who are both crazy enough to think that traveling thousands of miles by sail is a good idea and ingenious enough to actually pull it off.
The short of it is that basically everyone who sailed to Tahiti gets together to have a race to Moorea (her neighboring island) and celebrate the fact that we have actually made it to Tahiti. Which if you’ve ever spent 3 months traveling to a place, trust us, arriving is something worth celebrating.
And what better way to start off celebrating arriving at your destination, after sailing for weeks with no land in sight, than to immediately leave land and have a sailing race?
…It’s not like we said, or even really implied, that sailors made any logical sense.
Being as our current ride was unable to participate in the sailing race because, you know, due to the lack of the sails and all, we were nominated to be the committee boat and carry the band that would provide the soundtrack to our adventure. Continue reading “Any excuse for a party!”
Continuing our exploration of the heritage site we found the ruins of a marae (altar/temple) and evidence that perhaps Mr. Morse was a bit premature in taking credit for his code…also perhaps Greg is better at “tourist-ing” than he first let on…
Our final stop on the tour was a series of scenic viewpoints in the mountains. The roads were very, very steep. While this was something we had previously experienced, the truck added a new twist. Namely, the road was too narrow to allow us to turn around at the top. So the driver had to decide: was he going backwards on the way up or the way down? Continue reading “Further experiments in tourism”
We prepare to leave this little island paradise and head for the Society Islands with a little hesitation. Not only is Papeete, Tahiti the capital and ONLY major city in this “colony” the size of Europe and consisting of a conglomeration of over 100 islandsit is also a known location. Translation: Tourist town and more importantly, normal tourists. Unlike us. We’re different.
No, seriously, we are. The nature of cruising on a sailboat makes us a significantly different “type” of tourist than the typical one. For example, we live on our boat so we don’t worry about living in a hotel. Which means we don’t have to make every day worth the daily hotel rate. It actually relieves a great deal of stress from the traveling equation. Instead of telling you about tourist attractions for gringos in Mexico, I can actually tell you what it means to really live in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle for over a month. I can tell you about a city that when we arrived there, most of the tourists were actually other Mexicans!
We don’t have a flight home to catch and that alleviates the rush of most travelers. Met a new friend and want to stay an extra few days to have them over for dinner? Heck, why not? We even have a “home” to invite them to! Fall in love with a place and don’t want to leave yet? Sure, we can tack on a few days. The main concern we have is the expiration of our tourist visas.
Also, since leaving Mexico we have pretty much been in places where the locals outnumber the tourists. If you have never been a tourist in a non-tourism location let us tell you, it makes a HUGE difference in the way people treat you and your overall experience. We actually got to meet real Polynesians, not just the smiling people at the fancy hotel and we found out how genuinely friendly most of them are. Also, because there were so few travelers in their towns, we were a novelty to the local people instead of a constant nuisance or just a source of income.
We are exaggerating to a small degree because we are subject to the movements of our ship & the desires of our captain & co-captain (when airline pilots run ships they have funny names for things…) but that really doesn’t interfere as most of us are ready to move on each time that we do.
We also experienced lots of other “non-tourist” things, like grocery shopping in a foreign language, and buying spare parts. Fortunately for us, in both Mexico and French Polynesia we had the use of specialized-for-traveling-sailors Spanish and French dictionaries, for things like the port side of the boat and the head gasket of your engine. Try to explain those with a basic high school or even university level language class!
We’re not saying that we are somehow “better” than the typical tourist; just that what we are looking for and our overall experiences are vastly different. We also put up with more headaches. Like a lack of air conditioning, slow travel and small living conditions. Our movements are restricted by weather windows and if our boat breaks or we lose something overboard we can’t just call someone like for a rental car; we have to deal with it. (There are no boat yards and shipping parts out here is not cheap.)
We also don’t get the benefits of personal service, which means we mostly do our own dishes. Oh yes, and we are sailing a 44 foot boat though the middle of the ocean hundreds of miles from any form of rescue…but to us that’s kind of awesome 😉
We prefer this style of travel. It’s cheaper, more self-reliant and you get to see what we think are the “cool” stuff. You get to connect with people…and get your butt handed to you in ping-pong.
Tahiti will be interesting as we will become tourists in a tourist town for the first time in several months.
Would you be willing to take on a few discomforts and a couple of manageable risks in order to sail the world?
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!?”
4) The pearl farm. This is the big business of the Tuamotu islands. Most of the “Tahitian pearls” people buy the world over are actually from the Tuamotu. You expect, with the price of pearls and all, for it to be some big production. Vaulted ceilings, caviar, some champagne perhaps? Classical music on the sound system? Heck, air conditioning? Nope. A shack, 4 guys, couple of planks of wood, some oysters and hell’s dentist’s office. To be fair, what the industry lacks ostentation, it make up for in patience:
If you’re a pearl fan at all (or at least have an appreciation for the fact that pearl necklaces are not cheap), check this out:
They leave bags of this stuff lying around. Open plastic bags chock full of Tahitian black pearls casually placed, completely unprotected, near open windows without even a screen to keep bugs out, much less people. Crime is not a huge concern here. With a population of about 1500 people it’s not like you don’t know you’re neighbor.
Oh wait, you say, perhaps a tourist could steal the pearls and sneak off the island? Not likely, as the only means of escape are rather…limited…in scope:
5) The airport
This airport has 1 flight per day, normally. Saturdays are the big day with a total of 2 flights. Most of the time the airfield is completely abandoned and totally wide open. You can just wander on in, no restricted areas here. At about an hour before the flight is supposed to arrive, a fire truck rolls in, soon followed by an unguarded fuel truck, ticketing agent and 2 baggage handlers. That’s it. No cops, no TSA, no security check points, no body scanners. Heck, no boarding areas. The gate agent? After the ticketing agent finishes selling tickets, they become the gate agent. Well, they become the stairway agent actually, because why would you need a gate for the one plane landing here today? There are some cops on the island (Gendarme, kinda like French colonial police) but they don’t show up for the flights. People get on, people get off. The plane grabs some gas and off it goes. The fire and gas trucks leave, soon followed by the airport’s massive 3 staff people. I think sometimes an extra car shows up to act like a taxi and sometimes the hotel will send a shuttle. Whole process takes about 2 hours. It’s all very anti-climatic.
We should point out that this island is the second largest in the entire 78 island Tuamotu chain. The second largest. Which is weirder, the nonchalant manner in which this airport operates or our American reaction to it?
6) And finally, let’s not forget the aforementioned bar:
You sailed from Mexico to French Polynesia for a margarita? You came all this way, on a boat, powered by wind, at about 7 MPH average speed, for at this point about 2 months of travelling, all this way to pay $15 for drink you could have gotten for 5 pesos back about 3,000+ miles ago? Really?
Welcome to the main town in Fakarava. So what does one do here?
(aside from the diving, we’ve already established that’s amazing. Well, that and suicidal crabs)
1) First off, secure transportation. Preferably, transportation with shock absorption.
What Tiffany fails to mention in the video is that at that point we still had to bike back… And it was a very long trip home, let me tell you!
2) Well, there’s the dive center.
Two notes here:
– Greg can officially now say that he’s had a French tutor. Which is cool, right? The fact that his tutor was male and taught diving vice female and “l’art d’amour”…eh, less cool. He thinks that the fact that he learned to dive in French Polynesia almost makes up for it.
– If you are one of those people looking to jump the puddle, as it is called, get your dive certification in Mexico. Yes, we realize that it is expensive compared to other things in Mexico and you will tell yourself “nah, I won’t dive, I’ll just snorkel.” No you won’t. What you’ll do is snorkel by yourself and be terrified of all the sharks swimming around you while you’re all alone and all your friends are off diving. Remember the part where they school? Like fish? (ask Greg how he knows this!)
Then all your friends will gang up on you and convince you that paying the exorbitant prices for a private French diving instructor is actually very chique (a French word, not coincidentally, I’m sure) and is a really good idea in order for you to fully experience this “once in a lifetime diving opportunity.” They will be right and you will be a fool for not having paid half the price in Mexico to get your certification. The one consolation you will get is that the instructors in French Polynesia are really cool and they use your practice dives as opportunities to actually show you some amazing stuff. Still, it’s WAY cheaper to get your cert in Mexico.
2) The store, where we discovered that your local grocer is actually not only a national brand, but an international one:
For you east coast people, this is like running into a Publix (or in the case of our Texas friends, an H.E.B.) out here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I mean really? Safeway? In FRENCH!? Who knew?
3) The church (which is actually pretty cool)
Click on the photo above to enlarge it. The shell chandeliers and other decorations were amazing!
(to be continued… We had way too many videos for one post!)
