Another aspect of friendship is the joint lexicon a group develops over time. Shared experiences become stories, stories become jokes, jokes become catchphrases and so on until it gets to the point where simply mentioning the last name of a high school teacher will bring smirks, smiles or groans of anguish from the right circle of people while making absolutely no sense to anyone else.
The longer one stays with a given group, the more detailed this secret language becomes. By extrapolation, one can easily concede that in 11+ years of exclusive relationship (8+ of actual marriage) quite an expansive vocabulary would develop. We bring this up, dear friends, to issue you fair warning:
If either of us ever describe an activity you are about to join us on as “Kiwi moderate” run away quickly.
We have no other way to describe it. “gods” seems too presumptuous for monotheists and “demi-gods” too second-rate. “Champions” too sporty and “giants” too dependent on physical proportions.
These are not people who we hope to someday become, or observe in awe from a distance and pray might deem us good enough to network with. These are the people with whom we drink beer and play Dungeons and Dragons. (Well, some of them. The rest are more into video games. We mix it up.)
Of course, they aren’t all those things to us. Usually they have first names and are, in general, rather humble about it all. Nonetheless when we stop to think about it the people around us are quite the collection. If we are indeed the product of those that surround us then we are grateful for the excellence of those we call friends. (That would be you all, in case you were checking.)
So as you might guess when we get an invite from one of these exceptional people for an amazing adventure, we do our best to make good…
Being people who grew up in cities, we got used to the smells that are a normal part of urban life: car exhaust, cleaning chemicals, in San Francisco the smell of cable car brakes is fairly common. Millions upon millions of people living closely together are going to generate smells. Most of them are not overly pleasant.
Auckland hasn’t yet hit that people to landmass ratio and there is an abundance of vegetation throughout the city. So as we walked around it was not unusual to stop suddenly, look at each other while sniffing the air and say, “wow, that smells amazing!”
Like we said, it was early spring when we arrived and while it was way too cold for Tiffany to think anything it its right mind would grow, apparently no one had told the Kiwi plants that.
And unlike their fellow Polynesian countries, corrupted as they are by European influences, Tonga actually uses their pigs for their highest truest purpose:
Tonga has bacon!
No, not euro/Canadian inferior bacon. Real bacon. Bacon bacon. The only actual freaking pig product that deserves the title of bacon and that’s freaking bacon!
The absolute best place we went to was Togo Chasm. On the opposite side of the island from Alofi, the chasm is reached by hiking through a forest. Which as we mentioned before is not a normal sight on an island made of coral.
In fact, no one is really sure how these trees arrived. Unlike Rarotonga which had a thriving forest, Niue no longer has volcanic soil. It’s just coral with a thin layer of sand and organic debris. Not much for a tree to thrive in, but somehow these do. The trees are related to mahogany, but we never did figure it out (hey, we’re sailors not botanists!).
We took a driving tour around Niue with a few of our cruising friends in order to better see all that Niue had to offer us. The car let us reach a few really amazing places: Limu Pools, the Talava Arch, the King’s Bathing Chamber and Togo Chasm.
The most striking thing about the flora of Niue is the massive amount of diversity contained in such a tiny island. It took us less than a full day to drive all the way around the island while making several stops and during this time we saw tropical rainforests, mahogany forests, went spelunking and climbed over ancient coral mountains to find soft sandy beaches at the bottom of a 30 foot gorge. Niue does a lot of nature and it does it all ridiculously well.
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…
The Needle track is an all day hike through the heart of Rarotonga and over one of its largest peaks. Now as many of you have already learned with us, Polynesian islands are formed by volcanoes and island volcanoes do not generate gently rolling hills. How steep is it? Well it’s a 7 km hike (so say 3.5 miles) and they recommend at least four hours. So your travel speed is estimated at under a mile an hour. Oh and yeah, tropics remember so it’s a tad warm to boot.
Having gained experience with this type of hiking in the Marquesas a while back, we were fairly confident that we had a good amount of experience with this kind of trekking and we were right…
Yep, still in the middle of the blue stuff. Oh but hey, now we’re in the left-middle.
The Cook Islands are a lot different than what we’ve come to expect from the South Pacific.
First off, everyone speaks English! That’s right, the Cook Islands are a protectorate of New Zealand, a member of the British Commonwealth, so therefore they are English-speakers! Which means Greg’s months of struggling to order burgers with fries on the side instead of in the bun are finally over.
But like their neighbors over in Tahiti, there are just some parts of Polynesian culture that simply persist despite all foreign influence. Why these parts revolve around sex remains a mystery to us, but these Cook Islanders ain’t letting go of their freedom of expression anytime soon!
Ok so the dude on their dollar? That’s Tangaroa, their EXTREMELY well endowed god of fertility and fishing. No, seriously, if you want to get fish or get laid apparently this is the guy to see. And it’s no real big secret why; brother-man always has his fishing rod!
He is not only a god in their pantheon, he was also selected, in all his well-endowed glory as it were, to be the international representative of the Cook Island tourism department! As a result, he is on everything: the money, the maps, the government buildings. Everything! If it has to do with tourism baby, the naked tripod guy is prominently featured. If this doesn’t finally prove that Polynesian culture’s perception on sexuality are superior to our own, then you’re just not paying attention!
Oh and just in case you were worried about sexism in their exploitation / utilization of nudity in the monetary documents; put your mind at ease. The naked chick riding a shark is on their 3 dollar bill:
Like this article? Check out our series on “Sex and Jesus” for more on the Polynesian perception on acceptable sexuality in normal society.
If either of us ever describe an activity you are about to join us on as “Kiwi moderate” run away quickly.
