Love Boat meets Dirty Dancing

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 seed-pod 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, 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,

Beating bark to make tapa cloth is a slow and tiring process.

At Ua Pou, Aranui 5 doubles as a playground, as local kids walk the lines between ship and pier.

The Aranui 5 is part-passenger, part-cargo ship.