The lost world
An adventure into Tahiti’s hinterland.
“If you fall, you drop a kilometre straight down to the valley floor below,” guide Arnaud Luccioni warns me as I walk just a few metres from the narrow muddy track we’re on.
But then, you should tread very, very carefully in Tahiti’s hinterland: on an island barely 45 kilometres across at its widest point, there are mountains in here over two kilometres high, jutting out of an interior that’s almost entirely uninhabited.
There are no sealed roads, either: just a handful of dirt tracks that weave their way through rainforest and across soaring ridgelines where the temperature – famously tropical on Tahiti’s iconic coastline – can drop five degrees in five minutes.
The blue lagoons make Tahiti one of the world’s most romanticised island holiday destinations but it’s Tahiti’s mysterious and barely publicised hinterland that’s long intrigued me. This time around I’m foregoing the coastline for the mountains, determined to see another side of Tahiti.
The good news is there’s never too far to travel … and when you get there, it’s yours to enjoy alone. In Tahiti, it’s possible to walk beside ancient archaeological sites, hike through 60 valleys (only one of which you can reach by car), jump from waterfalls and abseil through pitch-black lava tube tunnels of ancient volcanoes – all just minutes from the more populated coastline.