Love Boat meets Dirty Dancing
Cruising the mighty Pacific on the Aranui 5 is not a holiday for the sedentary or slovenly, writes Nikki Macdonald.
The stage is set for a diplomatic incident. Team NZ sits high on the water, its tippy coconut shell hull balanced by a stone adze-weighted keel. Across the pool, the French craft – beautifully constructed as it is with tapa-cloth sail and seedpod double hulls – is taking on water.
‘‘It’s sinking,’’ shouts Maria – one of Team NZ’s builders. Too bad – the prizes have already been awarded. France is King.
An angry woman strides across cruise deck 7 from the French camp to silence the Kiwi protest. ‘‘He’s only a kid,’’ she growls, of the French boat’s 10-year-old creator, who watches forlornly poolside.
This was supposed to be a celebratory Polynesian evening – one of the Pacific cruise’s two outdoor buffet dinners. Instead, the crowd cranes to see if there’ll be a fist fight between two women over a boat.
The tension is broken by Maria’s husband petulantly bombing the pool to retrieve his creation. The crowning irony? First, second and third place all earned the same prize – two free cocktails from the bar.
It’s Love Boat meets Dirty Dancing.
A cruise ship, 200-odd passengers and two weeks of shared mealtimes and mai tais, shore excursions, dance lessons and karaoke.
The ship is the passenger/ cargo hybrid Aranui 5, which every three weeks gathers in the 1400 kilometres of open ocean between Tahiti and the dramatic Marquesas Islands – Pacific paradise of choice for Kon-Tiki adventurer Thor Heyerdahl and painter Paul Gauguin.
The passengers are mostly Kiwis, Aussies and French. Mostly older, adventurous types keen to look beyond Tahiti’s palms-and-white-sand atolls to one of the world’s most remote island clusters. A landscape of volcanic peaks and misty spires; of bird and pig dances and traditional tattoos.
The two-week round trip is long enough to make friends and enemies; to make and break stereotypes. There’s the guy in the Aston Martin T-shirt who drives a Porsche. The Belgian boy who doesn’t eat chocolate. The bignoting Kiwi who dispenses property advice while scrolling his phone for selfies with important people. And ‘‘captain leary’’, whose roving eyes fix on legs leaving dinner.
No doubt our motley crew of four have also earned nicknames – the blond man-magnet; the Samoan Michael Jackson; the high priestess of cool and me, the hapless hanger-on.
We’re the rowdy bunch always cackling at dinner, drinking and dancing with the crew, rocking to Just an Illusion – the cheesy tune that’s become our theme song since an awkward first-night serenade by the bare-chested entertainment director.
But that’s part of Aranui 5’s charm. Owned by a Tahitian family, this ship and its predecessors have been delivering passengers and cargo to the far reaches of French Polynesia for 33 years. Unlike the united nations of mega cruise ships, the crew is predominantly Marquesan or Tahitian, meaning you don’t have to leave the ship to get an insight into the culture.
Somewhere in the vast roll of ocean between Tahiti and the Marquesas, you lose half an hour – and about 50 years. Marquesas time is 30 minutes ahead, but its culture is rooted in the Polynesian migration that ended with Ma¯ori arriving in New Zealand. The languages have similarities, too. ‘‘Ka Oha,’’ Marquesans call in greeting.
The island group has a combined land mass similar to Corsica, but is scattered across an ocean expanse the size of Europe.
Nuku Hiva is the first to sharpen into focus, a lineup of Toyota Hiluxes waiting to take us on an island tour. While we watch the violent pig dance beneath a 500-year-old sacred Banyan tree at the Tohua Kamuihei archaeological site, the crew unloads the islanders’ precious cargo. Crates of Coke and Heineken are swapped for a shrink-wrapped scooter. The ship’s dual passenger-cargo function makes our arrival feel less parasitic.
The arrival of settlers and traders brought with it guns and alcohol, syphilis and smallpox, which decimated the population, from 75,000 in 1774, to just 2000 in 1920. Religion brought other perils – a ban on singing, dancing and tattooing nearly destroyed the islands’ cultural identity.
Over the hill, at Hatiheu, dirt is shovelled from the umu earth oven at Chez Yvonne restaurant. What does it mean to be Marquesan, I ask its owner, Yvonne Katupa. ‘‘Pride,’’ she says. Mayor and co-organiser of the four-yearly Marquesas Art & Culture Festival, Katupa has spearheaded the 30-year fight to revive the region’s unique traditions.
The battle continues. On tiny Tahuata island, past the guy walking his pig on the beach, kids play football on a mini waterfront pitch. Trend vies with tradition. A girl in a pink Hollister T-shirt plays with a tiare flower tucked behind her ear. Her braided hair falls to her waist and a traditional tattooed cuff curls around her left arm – Marquesan girls begin getting tattooed from puberty. A barefoot teenage boy also wears a flower, alongside his gold earring and gold-top mohawk. But they bark instructions in French, not Marquesan. One even calls ‘‘Shoot, shoot’’.
Fatu Hiva is the farthest outpost of these islands of isolation – the spot Thor Heyerdahl chose for his anthropological experiment, living for a year in deepest nature.
The island pulses to the tac, PHOTOS: NIKKI MACDONALD/STUFF tac, tac of tapa making. Women beat the ribbons of bark, thinning and stretching it into papery canvases to sell to the few tourists who still come here.
The island’s pre-European population was about 8000. Now about 650 people congregate in two villages – Omoa and Hanavave Bay. At Omoa, the post office has just 50 post boxes and its opening hours are so erratic they’re listed each week on the community noticeboard.
Today is hike day – an optional 16km walk in the heat across the island to Hanavave Bay. This is not a cruise for the slovenly. To greet the angular black hulk that will be your destination for the day, you have to be on deck by 6.30am. Where the ship disgorges to barges and the sea is heaving, you get a free bucking bronco thrill ride – trusting your safety to the bear mitts of the cargo handlers. And most island visits offer an optional hike. With daily three-course meals at both lunch and dinner, there’s more than one reason to opt in.
Packed off with an egg and orange snack pack, we climb gradually up, a cooling breeze whipping red dirt off the four-
FACT FILE
More information aranuicruises.com.au. Getting there Air Tahiti Nui flies from Auckland to Papeete, return from $1050. Staying there A 17-night package including a 13-night Aranui 5 cruise in Ocean View Stateroom with all meals, shore excursions and wine with lunch and dinner onboard, return economy flights from Auckland with Air Tahiti Nui, four nights’ accommodation at Manava Suite Resort with continental breakfast, all transfers in Tahiti, and a luxury car transfer to and from Wellington, Christchurch or Auckland airport (valid up to 35km), is priced from NZ$9299* a person, twin share, for departures on May 3, 2018, or June 28, 2018. Add $300pp for trips originating in Wellington and Christchurch. To book, contact Ultimate Cruising on 0800 485 846 or ultimatecruising.co.nz. wheel-drive track. The distant ridgeline is like a jaw full of crooked canine teeth and the hills are pleated in endless shades of green. At the summit, a picnic awaits: baguette, prosciutto, cheese, salad, mustard.
The road down is quad-burning concrete. Past the backyard horses and beehives; the beat-up Suzuki and tin dinghy called Jack; the piglets rooting around by the stream; the dead rooster floating by. Then the Hanavave shop, with its welcome mat of chucked jandals.
At the pier, the crew unload Heinz tomato sauce, cans of French cassoulet and bags and bags of Sunrise long grain rice. It’s nothing if not a simple existence.
On the long reach back to Tahiti, a storm kicks up. Sixmetre swells from one direction, 4m from another. I skip dinner but the reports spill over as quickly as the lurching contents of the swimming pool. The crew valiantly continued with their soup and salmon menu, subbing in plastic cutlery and paper plates. A rogue wave upended a row of chairs, complete with their occupants. The hardy kept drinking the free wine.
It’s a sobering reminder that this mostly well-behaved stretch of sea is still the mighty Pacific.
On board, though, the diplomatic storm has died. Goodbye hugs are meted out to new friends made over cocktails on the pool deck, at ukulele class or weaving flower crowns. I file away birthday memories, of dinner-table serenades, and wine on the beach, smuggled out from lunch.
Nahau – that bare-chested entertainer – wants to party in Tahiti. We politely decline. Instead, he gifts us a jar of his grandmother’s jam. ● The writer travelled courtesy of Aranui and Air Tahiti Nui.