Marquesas, Hiva Oa - May 2007
On the morning of 3rd May we were in sight of Hiva Oa and its neighbours. Coming close to land, which was shrouded with cloud, the sea grew pretty disturbed. This is not surprising where sea depths of 4km are interrupted by volcanic islands, in the trade winds and current!
Hiva Oa showed some very jagged ridges on our way in, but around Atuona the hills were covered in lush greenery before rising into the clouds. Coming into the harbour you could smell the trees! The harbour is small but fairly protected; all the yachts anchor with bow and stern anchors to minimise swinging in such a small space. The old volcanic crater edge towers above the bay past the town. Our friends Tony and Linda had arrived the day before, so we got some local info straight away.
The harbour includes fresh water, a fuel station and a small shop, anything else is in the village of Atuona, of 1700 inhabitants, which we discovered was a couple of miles walk away! If you are lucky a passing truck will give you a lift.
Our arrival coincided with the visit of the supply ship “Aranui”, and all the trucks passing on the first day were full of cargo, nobody picked us up, but in any case the views while walking were stunning. However on that Friday we missed the Gendarmerie by minutes as they are only there mornings, they asked us to come back on Monday! So we wandered around the town exploring the hardware and general stores before eating lunch out. Lunch was expensive compared to Panama, and beers very expensive, but it was good food, and after an ocean crossing we felt we deserved it!
After lunch we saw the selection of small supermarkets and got a feel for the prices, which are generally between 1-2x prices at home, but we left shopping in quantity for another day.
We also had to get familiar with the local currency, the Central Pacific Franc, used in all the French Pacific territories. This is tied to the Euro at 119 CPF per Euro, giving about 170 CPF to the pound, a conversion difficult to get used to.
Over the weekend Nigel cleaned the hull as best he could despite the visibility not being very good. After seeing the prices for laundry Elaine made a start on our two bags of laundry with our big black bucket on the shore with the plentiful fresh water from the tap! Dan took the opportunity to ride around on his bike and another mum and boy had had the same idea, so Dan was happy! I got through loads of washing.
On Monday we made another trip to town, to sign in and do some shopping. Pretty much everything was expensive apart from baguettes, and we bought some expensive but excellent local fruit and veg from a van.
During that week we stocked up on shopping, fruit and veg, and finished the outstanding laundry.
We found the people of Atuona mostly very friendly, with varying accents. Almost everyone is of Polynesian descent, some speak good French, and some sound as if they are learning it at school. However we did not hear any of the Marquesan language, related to Tahitian. A number of people speak some English, they must get a fair trickle of visitors like us.
It rained frequently and was also very sunny and hot in the day, but the nights were cool.
The island is made of high ridges and valleys and is therefore difficult to get around, so we didn’t get far but what we did see is beautiful.
We could not get internet in Hiva Oa via any land solution - it exists but was broken, very expensive, odd times, far away, etc etc. We therefore used our Iridium phone for email here, that was really useful, although it is not feasible to use the web that way so dealing with banking and other internet business mostly had to wait.