2012-1-27 Nuku Hiva

We were greeted by a young woman with a coconut bra in Nuku Hiva. This time I didn't say anything. 

There were young men playing drums. 

Bill decided not to go on the seven hour tour. Here he is waiting for the vans to arrive. 

The island is substantially different from those in French Polynesia. It lacks the lushness of Bora Bora and Moorea. It lacks the white sand beaches because there is no lagoon surrounding the land. This is definitely not a beach vacation destination.

The land is harsher and the people have an edge to them that was not present in the other islands. 

The area is experiencing a drought. We dropped anchor in a bay on the dry side of the island where the vegetation resembled the San Francisco Bay area where I grew up. There were hills covered with dry, brown plants and dotted here and there with low green shrubs. Not only are the beaches on that side of the island less appealing but they are infested with sand fleas which are also called biting no-nos. 

I got bitten when I was taking the following video of the beach. I was trying to capture the sound of it because it's not a sandy beach. The sound is of small pebbles hitting the sand. 

https://www.facebook.com/sherri.park/videos/3422907565281

Mosquitos are present on all the islands but were not as annoying here due to the almost constant trade winds. I took some precautions but Bill didn’t and he got a mosquito bite. Before we left home, we each soaked a set of clothes in Permetherin. I wore my repellant pants along with crew socks and sneakers. I sprayed my socks and hat with insect repellant, also. 

Yesterday was another gorgeous day. We could have used those trade winds. When the breeze did come up, it was very welcome. It was humid and we were warm and wet all day. 

The native people are just as beautiful as anywhere else in Polynesia. I wish I had taken a picture of two teenage girls riding a horse bareback in town. They could have been Beyonce’s sisters. 

Afterwards, I heard people say. “Did you see those girls on the horse?” There are many horses tied up all over the island. I asked our guide if they use horses instead of cars. He said, “No, they use horses for recreation just like you do.” They also use them to hunt for both animals and food. 

Bananas, mangos and coconuts grow wild in the higher elevations. There were also pigs, goats and cows tied up all over the island. Sometimes there was a horse and no obvious place of residence nearby. Just a horse tied up next to the road. 

The guide said there are wild goats and pigs, also. The human population is about 9,000. There is no airport so this island is much more isolated the others. Our driver was a young woman in her early 20’s. She spoke a little English. We communicated using her English and the French that I dredged up from high school and college. 

Her name was Coo-ah, as best I could tell. She said it means red in her native language. I asked her if she attended school. She said she is out of school and can’t afford to go to college. She said the airfare and tuition in Tahiti are prohibitively expensive. She is one of ten children and her parents can’t afford to send her to school. The airfare is $500 or $600 each way according to our guide. 

At the same time, we were sitting in a late model Toyota SUV with all wheel drive. She said the car belonged to her uncle. We were in a caravan of eight similar vehicles. Her uncle was driving one and so was an aunt. I got the idea that she wasn’t really interested in school. She said she works on a farm growing legumes. 

We traveled extensively over the island but she said we didn’t get near her home or her farm which is located in an interior valley. The infrastructure on the island was meager but it was newer and in better condition than on the other islands. 

The people give the impression of being more assertive and aggressive. They are trying to bring in more income and improve their lives in various ways. This is a large island and we saw a huge coconut plantation covering most of an inlet. Our guide said that the trees are a hundred years old and don’t produce many coconuts anymore. So, they are systematically replanting the trees. They tried to grow teak trees for the wood but the trees were unsuccessful due to excessive branching. The branches somehow affected the quality of the wood and it was too soft. 

Their biggest cash crop now is noni. It looks like a cactus fruit. It is about the size of the palm of your hand and covered with little bumps. I smelled one and the odor is unpleasant. Reportedly, it tastes bitter. They mix the juice of the noni with other juices and sell it all over the world as a health drink. If it tastes bad, it must be good for you, right? 

We stopped at an agricultural college when we were in the mountains of Moorea. There were 300 students attending there from all over the islands. Our guide was a man from Australia who sailed to Nuku Hiva from Ecuador about 13 years ago. He said he sailed alone because no one can put up with him. According to him, there are some French people on the island but they are all social misfits of some kind. 

This is a guide showing an old style saddle. He was one of the crew of the Survivor Marquesas reality show. He came to Nuku Hiva on a boat that sailed from Ecuador in the 1990's and just never left. 

While we were driving, a rooster ran in front of our car and we almost hit it. Coo-ah blurted out, “La France!” She said the rooster was obviously French because it had a death wish. The French are apparently unpopular here. 

Our journey over the mountains of Moorea from one valley to another took two hours each way. There is one road, not always wide enough for another vehicle to pass. That’s not a problem as there are not many vehicles. The road is alternatively paved and dirt with no seeming rhyme or reason. Our destination was Hatti Valley. 

I thought our driver was saying Happy Valley but the guide spelled it for me. We first passed by an overlook where the TV show, “Survivor Marquesas” was filmed. We stopped at three Maraes to look around. The Marquesians call them Pi-Pi’s. One of them was huge and was used for recreation instead of ritual sacrifices. It is still being excavated by archeologists. 

In the year 2000, the Marquesians held a big festival to show off their newly restored maraes. They invited several hundred people from Tahiti and paid their way to the party. They are still paying for it. Of course, the economy tanked and tourism has really fallen off all over the South Pacific. 

When we got over the mountain, the valley on the other side was more verdant. The hibiscus was especially beautiful. After I took pictures of several plants, Coo-ah picked a beautiful flower and stuck it in an air-conditioning vent. 

The Catholic Church got here before other faiths and we visited some old Catholic churches. I took a picture of a Madonna holding the Christ child. The Christ child is holding a breadfruit. The Catholic traditions were seriously perverted in one of the churches were they appeased the natives by allowing them to baptize babies in blood. 

The statuary and petroglyphs show evidence of testosterone run wild. The chiefs had so much power that they killed and ate anyone they pleased. They usually ate the women and children that they sacrificed in rituals. They ate any male enemies they killed in battle in order to absorb their power. 

One of the statues I photographed is so blatantly cruel that I don’t plan to show it online. They also took the time and effort to carve tikis in sexual positions. In other places, I would say this was just playful art. Here, it feels like pornography in stone. 

They held beauty contests for young women but the emphasis was not on the beauty of their faces or forms. I think it’s pretty obvious by now that Nuka Hiva left a bad taste in my mouth. I can see why it hasn’t become a big tourist destination. Their ancestors were truly nasty. And there is evidence that conventional morality is only now beginning to take hold. There are finally prosecutions for incest which was rampant in the past. According to our guide, girls are beginning to assert themselves and object to being raped by their relatives. 

There was cannibalism in Moorea and other islands, too. I think it was the blatant representations in statuary that set my teeth on edge. I was in a sour mood when we came back from our excursion yesterday. Bill says he is glad now that he waited in the car during most of the stops. 

As an allegory, there were large eels in the tiny creek where we stopped to eat lunch. The restaurant worker threw some fish heads in the creek and brown, spotted eels as big around as my arm crawled over the rocks to get to them. The guide said they liked bread, too, so I found a crust and threw it in. By that time, the eels were back in hiding. But the crayfish came out and nibbled at the bread. It made me think of a paradise polluted by disgusting perversions--which matches my general impression of Nuka Hiva.

Here is a video from a tour I took while a guide was explaining petroglyphs:

https://www.facebook.com/sherri.park/videos/3423078609557