Fact file
Yvonne Katupa. ‘‘Pride,’’ she says. Mayor and co-organiser of the fouryearly 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, 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-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.
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.
On the long reach back to Tahiti, a storm kicks up. Six-metre 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 dinnertable 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.