91 - Living in Paradise!

Time definitely does fly when you’re having fun.  As I started typing this, I realized that we’ve been French Polynesia more than 4 months and I can honestly say that we’ve loved all of it.  While attempting to immerse ourselves in the local and boating cultures, we’ve made wonderful new friendships with natives and cruisers from many other countries.

When last I left off, we’d just arrived in Taiohae Bay of Nuku Hiva island.  Though it still maintains it’s Polynesian charm and is by most standards very small, compared to the other islands we’ve visited in this area, this town feels like a big city.  Our first wonderful surprise on this island was a local farmer’s market selling fresh fruits and vegetables!!!  Anything fresh that we’d stocked up on in Panama was had been mostly gone in the first week of our crossing.  In previous islands we visited, we managed to find a few items (potatoes, onions, carrots, etc.), but here we found, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, green beans, avocados and much more!  It’s amazing the simple joy a fresh salad brings to your day.  Taking advantage of tomato season, Pedro made his amazing gazpacho.  In fact, it was so wonderful I made him make it every time we found the ingredients.  We had salads, fresh green beans and guacamole!!  As the market is not very big, we quickly learned to visit daily and buy whatever they had - even occasionally asking what it was and how to prepare it.  One of our biggest surprises was how much we loved the pumpkins they sold.  In the past, we’ve had pie and soup and really liked both but we needed another idea. In the end, we decided to treat it exactly like a butternut squash (slice it thin and sauté in a skillet - even saving and toasting the seeds). Delicious!  I think, since discovering it, we’ve gone through 3 or 4 whole pumpkins (in fact there is some in our refrigerator right now).   One day, we even found okra at the market.  As we were checking out, the cashier asked us what it was.  It was fun to be on the other side of knowledge.  The other islands we've visited have small (think convenience store sized) stores that sometimes carry frozen or canned goods but this place is wonderful.  Ok, I’ll stop going on about the market in this bay but we’re still so in awe of it that we’ve left several times and come back mainly because of the food selection.

Now that we were very well fed (did I mention that this island also has a very decent pizza restaurant too?), we decided to explore the rest of the area around the bay - especially the nearby hiking trails that we’d heard about most of which offer amazing views. Deciding to explore the rest of the island, we grabbed Dan and Alison, rented scooter and took off.  This was a great experience and we managed to visit most of the other towns, caught amazing views from the mountaintop, and found a great restaurant for lunch with blue-eyed eels living in the adjacent stream.

Time came for Dan and Alison to fly back to the US for the holidays with kids and grandkids.   After dropping them off at the town dinghy dock and making one last run to the market, we took off to explore another island.  This time we sailed into Ua Pou.  Our first stop was a secluded bay we had almost to ourselves complete with a view of the sunset (we lose that with most of the protected bays around here) and a couple of gorgeous full moon nights. We enjoyed the bay so much that we stayed for a week with Pedro managing to get a couple coats of varnish on the teak and I went up the mast to make a repair.  Our next stop was another bay where we'd been told of a great walk with stops at a waterfall and then the house of a gentleman who makes and sells chocolate.  Talk about the perfect combination.  One could even convince themself that you worked off the chocolate calories with the walk and swim!

Leaving Ua Pou, we decided to sail back to Nuku Hiva.  This time, we sailed into Controller Bay so we could visit the town of Taipi  While this didn’t afford us a sunset, we again had the entire beautiful bay to ourselves.  The dinghy dock for this town is up a very small river and is only accessible at high tide so we mostly landed the dinghy on the beach and had to walk a couple of miles into town which turned out to be a huge blessing in disguise.  On our way to town, we found a cornucopia of fresh fruit and vegetables lying on the ground.  While we felt guilty taking anything from anyone’s trees (we were later told that most people don’t mind if you’re polite), we felt that anything on the ground was fair game for both wayward sailors and wild chickens.  Each time we walked we picked up limes, coconuts, mangoes, avocadoes, breadfruit, passion fruit, and pamplemousse.  A local couple who lives on the beach allowed us to use their hose to rinse off our feet, they also gave us fresh mint from their garden and papaya from their tree.  The town of Taipi gained a bit of fame from novelist Herman Melville (yes, the guy who wrote "Moby Dick") who in 1844 was stranded in the town and wrote a book called "Typee" based on his experience.  I was so excited to download the e-book from my Florida library and read it while we were there.  

While we loved the many treasures to be found on land, this bay was also abundant in sea life.  Every day we watched as the manta rays frolicked around our boat, turtles swimming by and loved the many fish and beautiful coral we saw while snorkeling.  But the best part was that Pedro caught dinner for us several nights in the form of 2 humpback red snappers and 1 peacock grouper. 

Leaving Nuku Hiva, next we sailed over to the island of Ua Huka where the Marquesan Heritage festival was to be held.  This festival is held once every two years and each time moves to a different island.  We were so excited to be here for the event and it did not disappoint. People from all the Marquesan islands as well as many from Tahiti and beyond attended and participated in both the dances and the competitions.

All of the Marquesan Islands are volcanic formed and as such are quite mountainous.  However, on Ua Huka, the hills are not as steep and the roads are well paved.  So, for the first time since leaving Panama, we got to use our bikes.  We quickly fell in love with this little island exploring it on both bike and through a bit of hiking too.  We met several other cruisers who were also there for the festival and, despite the language barrier, we made friends with several locals.  We also managed to find some fresh produce as we stopped at one house with many banana trees and asked if we could buy a bunch. Another lady who had green beans growing on the fence in her front yard agreed to sell us some and then proceeded to also give us about 15 huge mangoes.  Still, another lady saw me picking up limes off the ground and made a point to come tell me that I was welcome to take as many as I wanted but just pick them off the bush. The lady who runs the local store and her daughter were so friendly to us that we often stopped in just to say hello. 

There's a saying amongst cruisers that this lifestyle is mostly fixing your boat in exotic places.  While we have more fun than not, there is a large degree of truth to that.  We left Ua Huka and headed back to Comptroller Bay in Nuku Hiva where we met up with friends to celebrate Pedro's birthday.  After being there only a couple of days, our generator broke.  Thankfully, we have good solar and wind generators but sadly we do occasionally have supplement this with our boat generator, so this became a priority to fix.  We moved back over to the main bay of Taiohae where we knew we’d have a much better chance of getting it repaired.  Since we were there, we decided to put up our lights and participate in the town's Christmas celebrations. As, Dan and Alison were flying back soon and we were their ride back to the boat, we stayed a bit longer than we'd planned.  While we were able to get the generator mostly repaired, we discovered that another friend who was still in Fatu Hiva had the final part we needed for sale.  So, with Equus' crew safely back on their boat, we took off again and made a 24-hour sail back to that beautiful island where we first arrived several months ago.

We enjoyed Fatu Hiva almost as much the second time.  We again walked to the waterfall and decided to try another hike further up the mountain to get a better view of the harbor.  While it was a tough hike, the view was definitely worth it.  We also met another local couple who invited us over for lunch and sent us home with a bag full of fresh fruit and some leftovers from lunch. 

As soon as we got back to the boat, I got a text from Alison with an attachment that was a song they wrote for us!  What an amazing gift and we love these people and this song so much.  

Whatever She Wants' song

While we loved Fatu Hiva, we needed to get back to Nuku Hiva. So, we  had a great day sail over to Hiva Oa where we stayed for a couple of days to pick up some material Alison needed to sew a new cover for our dinghy and stock up on new fishing supplies (they seem to have the only true fishing store in the islands).

As I type this, we have just left Hiva Oa and are sailing overnight to reach Nuku Hiva in daylight.  We’re sailing along nicely on a gorgeous star filled night with a quarter moon lighting up the sea.  It’s times like this and when we’re with new and old friends that make all the boat repairs worth it.  We have a big weekend planned where we’ll celebrate several January birthdays and bid Bon Voyage until we meet again to our dear friends.

But I’ll fill you in on that next time.

Until next post.