Last chance to fish in the lagoon. I got up at 5 and biked over to the pier again.

I had a great morning experience with the sun rising and a fresh wind blowing. The morning is really the best time of day in this climate.  I only wore my shorts and did not have to worry about getting sunburned. It even rained a couple of times which was good for cooling down. I was starting to get used to this “wet is good” thing.

However there were no hungry fish around. Just like yesterday I returned empty-handed.

Alexandre had been to see the mayor yesterday about the shark killing. The mayor was upset and had said that this did not give tourists a good impression of Tikehau and had to be stopped. He had called a meeting the same day to do something about the situation. A few days later I got an email from Alexandre where he said that the mayor had decided to have electronic shark repellent devices installed on all the fish traps on Tikehau. I don´t know who will pay for those devices or when they will be installed, but hopefully my filming will save some sharks.

We spent our last day on Tikehau on the beach and in front of our bungalow. Adrian found a boule (aka petanque) set and Iseline, Adrian and I fought it out:

Iseline was very proud when she scored two points in a round (both her balls were closer than any other)

It was another hot day (I had just put the watch back on, so that is air temperature in the shade (For you yankees:  31.4 C is 88.5 F)):

Helene had a hard time at the beach:

Some photos of the perfectly placed bungalows and their surroundings:

Adrian found a hermit crab on the beach:

Iseline said good-bye to the cat:

and we said good-bye to our fantastic hosts. We had had a week we would never forget:

Vanina drove us to the airport where we waited in the waiting hall of terminal 1, next to gate 1:

until our ATR-72 arrived from Papeete:

Luggage transport Tikehau-style

Last glimpse of Tikehau:

We landed safely in Papeete.

When we were in Papeete last time we had not managed to use our credit cars in the ATMs. They just said “operation not possible.” Strange, we thought there might have been a network problem. Luckily there was an automatic money exchange machine and we had used our emergency US dollars to get the CFP francs we needed. This time we really had to get some cash. It is much less common for businesses to accept credit cards here and we knew we needed cash to pay for the bed & breakfast we were going to stay at tomorrow in the Marquesas Islands.

The same thing happened again. There were two ATMs at the airport, from two different banks, and we tried all combinations. We thought we were safe with 4 different cards: VISA, MasterCard, American Express and Diners. But no, nothing worked. One of the banks was still open and I asked if I could do a withdrawal. Negative. They used the same electronics system as the ATMs and the transaction was refused.

The guy behind the counter was completely indifferent to my problem and offered no energy or advice to help me. He just confirmed neutrally that the transaction did not go through. I had to drag words out of his mouth, trying to find out what other options there might be. We saw this in the shop in Tikehau and at check-in at the airport also. The Polynesians working in service positions here have in general been indifferent to us. Sometimes they will not answer a question until you have asked it the third time and it seems like their job is a never-ending pain. However this seems to change completely once they serve other Polynesians.

I have a sneak feeling the problem might be that I speak fluent French and come over as a representative of the colonial power. I don´t know for sure, but that is my guess. It has also struck me how all Polynesians here speak fluent French, they learn it in school, whereas I have not met a French yet who speaks Tahiti Polynesian

It must be very special for the Polynesians in French Polynesia to live in a colony in 2011, when almost everyone around them gained their independence a very long time ago. I managed to bring up the subject once with a Polynesian and the answer was that they cannot become independent because they are completely financially dependent on France. Therefore the status quo is the best solution for the Polynesians. I wonder if the story might not have a few more facets over a couple of beers.

We had to give up getting cash. We still had our other backup, our emergency traveller´s checks. They would be just enough to cover our expenses on the Marquesas, but not comfortably so.

We checked in at the airport motel again.

A couple of days ago Helene had discussed with Sophie, one of the other guests at the bed & breakfast. She is French and works as a teacher on Tahiti. In the conversation Helene had mentioned how difficult it was to get gluten-free stuff out here in the islands of the Pacific. We had stocked up on gluten-free flour in Argentina, and Helene had used the kitchen at the bed & breakfast to bake her gluten-free bread. However, after Easter Island and Tikehau she had now run out of it.

Sophie was going back to Tahiti before us. She knew where to get gluten-free flour in Papeete, but that shop would be closed when we were back. Sophie suggested that she could buy it for us and drop by the airport motel.

Sophie, the angel, showed up at the motel in the evening with flour for Helene. When discussing our further travel plans we mentioned the difficulty of getting cash. She immediately offered to go down to an ATM and withdraw money we could borrow from her. We could just transfer funds to her French bank account later. She had known us for 4 days and was offering to lend us a significant amount to help us out. There is hope for humanity.

Helene went with her to the airport:

Thank you, Sophie!

Relieved we had a great meal at a Chinese restaurant nearby. I can start to feel the effects of the good life here now. In Argentina we were very active and I managed to at least keep my weight. The same cannot be said about Tikehau,

Tomorrow a new adventure awaits us in the Marquesas Islands, another stronghold of the ancient Polynesians.

Eirik

—–

Aujourd’hui, c’était au tour de Viktor et Hélène de faire un baptême de plongée. On avait un peu hésité car les blessures de Viktor étaient encore fraiches. Mais les plaies ayant bien séché, on a décidé de tenter le coup. Le bateau du Raie Manta Club est venu nous chercher sur la plage vers 8h30.

Après une demi-heure pour traverser le lagon, on s’est arrêtés vers la passe (la sortie du lagon). On a fait du snorkeling pendant que les autres faisaient leur première heure de plongée. Nous avons vu plein de poissons colorés et même des requins (qui mangent seulement des poissons ;-)). C’était super cool!

Le chaufeur du bateau, Ralph, s’est approché du parc à poissons qu’Eirik et Adrian avaient vu hier.

Il y avait plein de poissons pris au piège et une grande bande de requins dormeurs, tapis au fond.

Ensuite les plongeurs ont fait leur pause obligatoire, pendant que nous avons plongé avec nos instructeurs, Anthony et Mélanie.

Après quelques instructions techniques et un apprentissage rapide des signes essentiels pour communiquer sous l’eau, on était prêts. Le baptême a duré une demi-heure. On ne devait pas faire grand chose, juste bouger un peu les palmes, respirer, ouvrir les yeux et savourer. Mélanie s’occupait de Viktor, Anthony d’Hélène. Ils nous guidaient en nous tenant par les bouteilles.

On a trouvé que c’était extraordinaire de pouvoir voir tant de poissons si colorés à plusieurs mètres sous l’eau tout en pouvant respirer!

Après notre baptême, les autres ont replongé pendant qu’on a fait du snorkeling. On a aussi vu une raie manta tout prêt du bateau. On est rentrés vers 13h30, ravis de cette expérience.

Le soir, à la pension, nous avons tous fait la connaissance d’un jeune couple francais vivant à Genève, Camille et Matthieu. Ils font eux aussi le tour du monde, mais en un an et dans l’autre sens ;). Sur la photo, il y a aussi Pascal, co-pilote d’Air France de passage en Polynésie. Un des bons côtés de loger en pension est que l’on fait des connaissances sympas.

Given Viktor´s accident yesterday only Adrian and I went diving today and we were very much looking forward to it. Neither one of us has ever dived before. A long time ago we thought abut getting diving certificates before the voyage, but we somehow didn´t mange to find the time.

We were joined by a Spanish couple who is also staying here. They were together with us on the day-excursion two days ago. We had gotten to know them a bit by now. They are really great and have a good tone with the kids, Fernando and Isabel (?) were on a six month trip. They had been to the US for three months before continuing with 3 months in the Pacific. Here they are with Adrian on the beach, while we are waiting to get picked up by the people from the diving center:

Helene came down to say good-bye and photograph us

We went out to the same abandoned pearl farm where we were yesterday, hoping to get to see some manta rays this time. Adrian and I got a thorough explanation on how the equipment worked and the very basics of diving. When the pressure builds up in your ears, hold your nose and equalize the pressure by blowing air up your nose. Otherwise breath normally and make the OK sign with your thumb and pointy finger whenever the instructor does the same.

We were given clear instruction for what to do if we encountered a manta ray. They are protected and there are strict rules. When you encounter one you must stop moving immediately. It is strictly forbidden to follow one, since this stresses them. Manta rays have actually disappeared from a well known location in Bora Bora because they have been stressed too much by divers. Next, it is absolutely forbidden to touch one. They have a protective layer on the outside and if a human touches it it can rupture and they can get an infection. The good news was that manta rays are curious creatures and will often come towards you.

We snorkled around for a while before Adrian was getting ready to do his dive. This was what they called a diving baptism (French expression for the very first time you do something). The instructor controlled everything. We were only allowed to breathe, look around, move our feet a bit and enjoy. Here Adrian is getting used to the equipment:

and then he was on his way.

I continued snorkeling while he did his 45 minute dive. There were plenty of corals and fish to discover. I was busy trying to take a good photo

when I noticed something big moving behind me. I turned around, and there it was. A gigantic manta ray with a wingspan way larger than my height. I froze and observed:

It turned around and came directly towards me:

Wow! What a fantastic feeling to be swimming with these majestic creatures. They swim with a grace worthy of royals. The ray circled around me and got very close. At one point I had to move to avoid touching it. After what must have been at least 5 minutes of mutual observation it slowly started drifting away.

I floated back to the boat with a big smile on my face.

Adrian had also seen a manta while he was diving and had been really close to it. He was a very happy diver.

Then it was my turn to dive. I have wanted to try diving for a very long time and was happy to finally get the chance. It was very strange to breathe under water and it took some time getting used to the sensation. I never stopped being very conscious of my breathing during the entire dive.

Equalizing the pressure by holding the nose and blowing was magic, it removed the pain and the pressure from the ears immediately. I cursed myself for not having discovered this earlier. All the dives I did as a kid, while holding my breath, down to 5-10 meters, came back to me. The limit for how deep I could go was never having to breathe.  I was a swimmer and trained 2 hours, 5 days a week, and had an excellent lung capacity. No, the limit was always that my ears started to hurt too much and I had to get back to the surface. I still remember the pain when i had pushed too far and gone too deep, Hey, if there is a deity out there, could you rewind and let me do my childhood dives one more time, please?

On the other hand human history is a chaotic system. At least that is my conclusion.

A chaotic system is a system where very small changes in initial settings create wildly different results, The classic example of a chaotic system is the weather and the so-called butterfly effect, If a butterfly in Brazil flaps it´s wings, it may result in a storm in the North Sea a month later. If a mouse farts in the woods in Norway, Brisbane might be flooded a month later because of the massive rainfall it has caused.

Since the weather has a huge impact on what happens to us humans I believe that our lives too are a chaotic system. You can control how you deal with the possibilities you are given in life, by making the choices which are correct to you. However, you cannot control many of the possibilities which suddenly pop up in your life. It´s how you react to them that matters.

As an example I met Helene because a friend of mine, Jørn Harald, got food poisoned in Finland. Because he got sick he had to stay 2 extra days at a youth hostel. During those days Helene showed up and she told him she was going to Norway. Jørn Harald said he knew someone who could show her around. He called them and they were not home, so he called me instead.

If he had chosen a different bag of sausages in that freezer in the supermarket in Finland I would not have had the wonderful wife and fantastic children I have today.

Further back, I met Jørn Harald because he had a room next to mine at university. I got my room because I started talking to a guy at a student bar. I went to that bar together with another friend, Paul, who had taken the initiative to go there.

I met Paul during a get-to-know-each-other event the first day at university. Over a hundred students were let loose in a room with many tables with 8 chairs around each, to create “talking groups”. I picked one at random and Paul, by chance, picked the same one.

And so I can continue. Small choices that seem to have little impact on your life can change it completely.

There is an interesting theory and thought experiment that suggests that every time we make a decision the universe is split into one universe for each possible decision. In some other universe there is an Eirik who sat down at another table. He met other people, never got married, and died lonely and poor after he had used all his money on fancy fishing equipment.

OK, Odin, sorry, I was just kidding. I can live with the memory of that ear pain and the humiliation of having to admit that I discovered how to dive deep at a very ripe age, as long as I get to keep this fantastic family I have and my interesting and fulfilling life so far.

Am I getting off-topic again? Sorry.

The dive was a breathtaking experience. We went down to about 15 meters and there was a very rich coral “forest” down there. Being deep down really gave a very different experience than snorkeling. One thing that surprised me though was the noise. Several people had mentioned the great calm and silence you experience when you dive. There was no such thing, my own breathing and bubble making created a constant loud noise.

I was hooked, however. As soon as I get home I want to take one of those diving license courses.

Adrian was also blown away by the experience.

Next we moved outside the lagoon where the other divers would continue the diving day. We were finished and hung around the boat together with Ralph, the boat driver, which is polynesian:

:

He asked us if we would mind going back into the lagoon for a while. No problem. He took us to a place just outside a small fishing “village.” There were a couple of houses on a motu. Further out there was a fish trap. Basically it consisted of two leading fences in the water at an angle of maybe 45 degrees to each other. At the end was a cage with some sort of one-way entrance for the fish. In addition to tourism, fishing is the other income generator on Tikehau. Thanks to the airport fresh fish can be transported and sold on the market in Tahiti.

There was someone out at the trap and Ralph waved and yelled at the guy. He turned the boat towards him and explained that the guy was killing sharks. After Alexandre´s lecture on how protected they were here I was very puzzled and asked why. Ralph explained that the sharks go into the fish traps and eat the fish there. Sharks are instinctively protective of their area. If a shark feels offended it will stay around to kill or scare away what offended it. So, if you release a shark from a fish trap it will stick around and just go right back in again. The solution then is to kill them.

As we got closer we could see sharks being killed with a very long spear. The guy pierced them, got them up in his boat, slit them almost in two and threw them out into the water. I made sure to film it all. Here are some snapshots from the video:

He swam over to the boat with sharks in his hands.

and took one on board

It was fascinating listening to them speaking Tahitian Polynesian. To me it sounded like a south-east Asian language, like Vietnamese or Cantonese. They also use the glottal stop as a consonant (found in the English “uh-oh”).

Once the guy had left us we headed back. I was puzzled at what we had seen. Ralph explained that the guy told him he had killed 40 sharks in the last 24 hours. What a massacre.

When we got back the diving instructor was hopping mad and shook his head. He did not know this shark killing was going on and said that if he had seen it going on he would have filmed it and showed it to the mayor so they could stop this criminal behavior. Sharks are plentiful here today, but they are animals who reproduce very slowly and can quickly become extinct. All the fishermen had to do was install an electronic shark-repellent device on their fishing trap.

I couldn´t help thinking that this was a classical conflict between a culture where fishermen have always gotten rid of sharks this way and western ideas about conservation. Of course I believe that this shark killing must be stopped, but explaining it to that fisherman was probably not an easy task.

I coughed and mentioned that if I had managed to hold the camera steady enough in the waves (there was so much light I couldn´t see anything on the screen of the camera) I probably had it all on my memory card.

Once we got back to our beach

I quickly convinced Helene to try diving tomorrow together with Viktor. His wounds were healing fast and I knew how much he wanted to try diving. I agreed with the diving instructor that he could bring a USB key tomorrow and get the video and photos I had taken.

I had a look at the video and found out I had caught it all, despite the difficulty of filming given all the movements from the waves. Alexandre was also very interested and disgusted. I showed him the video. He told me he would go into Tuherahera and talk to the mayor, first thing in the morning.

Eirik

—–

After a slow morning we headed out on the bikes to have a look at the reef side of Tikehau, the side facing towards the ocean.

We passed by the east end of the airport. Here is the end of the runway. No fences or other fancy security measures here, just a sign saying “Do not enter.”

We biked over to the reef side

This side of the island was very different. On the lagoon side there are beaches all around, on this side there is a large coral reef that stretches about 100 meters (330 feet) out from the shore.

The water is very shallow all the way out to the edge of the reef where the waves are. The water was very warm and small fish were swimming in all directions as we walked out to the edge.

There were natural pools in many places. We walked out to the edge. It was beautiful and exotic. As Viktor sat down in a pool just a meter from the edge I took this picture:

He had hurt his back on the corals while leaning backwards just as I took the picture. I remember thinking casually that I had read about how the Polynesians had to have had very good footwear since they were able to live on coral islands and corals are razor sharp. I was coming to the conclusion that maybe it wasn´t such a good idea to sit down in these since the kids could cut themselves, but first I turned 45 degrees and took this photo. The two photos have the same timestamp 11:01 am:

I still had the camera in my hand when disaster struck. Viktor was saying something and I turned my head back towards him. He had lost one of his shoes which was now floating in the pool and he had a hard time getting over to it because he couldn´t walk barefoot. The corals were cutting his foot. He was standing upright, barely in equilibrium, reaching for his shoe when the wave struck.

Out of nowhere a wave much bigger than any other that had been there while we were out on the reef hit with surprising force. I had a hard time keeping my footing, Adrian managed to hold tight in his pool and Iseline had been quickly held fast by Helene.

Viktor, poor kid, was smashed over by the wave and fell down. He rolled inward over the reef, his body in the same direction as the length of the wave, in what seemed like a never ending series of rolls. He screamed like a pig being slaughtered. It didn´t take long to realize how dangerous this was and how infinitely stupid we had been. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, we could do to help him.

When the wave turned I was really scared he would be rolled back again. I yelled to him to get up as soon as possible while I hurried over to him against the force of the now receding wave. He screamed and screamed in pain and did not move. I repeated my yell and told him no matter how much it hurt he had to get up and out of the water. Luckily he managed to get a foothold while lying down and the wave did not bring him back.

We all got over to him and Helene and I told Iseline and Adrian to get back to shore. I carried a crying and screaming Viktor while blood was running down his legs. We had no idea how hurt he was and we felt like the most stupid and irresponsible parents on earth.

Luckily he had kept his head up and was not scratched in his face. Otherwise he was cut by corals everywhere. His clothes had taken a lot of the hits, they had small holes everywhere. His cuts didn´t seem too deep. We got on the bikes and Viktor managed to pedal by himself back again.

Adrian biked in front and told what had happened. Hervé came towards us with his car. We told him we thought it would be OK and that we had anti-bacterial cream and what we needed. He insisted that we should take Viktor to the local clinic. If pieces of coral were in those wounds they needed to be taken out. He reminded us that corals are living organisms and that they actually can continue to grow inside the wounds. Also, Viktor´s right knee did not look too good on inspection.

There is a small clinic with one nurse in Tuherahera. Normally it closes for siesta at 11. Our hosts called immediately and the nurse was still there and promised to wait for us.

Hervé drove Viktor and me into Tuherahrea where the nurse waited for us:

He told us Viktor had been very lucky, people die in those types of accidents. He showed us his own leg which had scars and a patch of bandage. He had done the same mistake as Viktor, but had been taken out into the sea by the wave. That is why it is so incredibly dangerous to walk out to the rim of the reef. If a wave takes you out to the sea you will be smashed against the reef, create a lot of blood and get a courtesy visit by the sharks. The nurse had been very lucky and after three waves out in the sea the fourth had brought him back on the reef. Badly cut, but alive.

The wounds were very shallow and they were now thoroughly rinsed and disinfected. Viktor got a swimming ban for the next 48 hours. He was very disappointed. We had planned to go snorkeling today and diving(!) tomorrow.

Hervé had been waiting for us outside. Viktor´s right leg was not fit for walking, since he had cuts under it.

What a lesson we had learned. I felt like an Australian who had just had a water throwing fight with his kid out in the forest in Norway at night in 40 degrees below zero (which is the same in both C and F, so I don´t need to calculate).

Facts to remember:

• Waves are unpredictable and can be very powerful.
• Corals are razor sharp.
• Live corals can grow in a wound.
• Don´t go close to the rim of a reef, the waves can knock you down or, even worse, drag you out to sea
• Don´t get caught in the sea just by the rim of a reef, you will be smashed to pieces.
• If you do get caught there you must dive deep down immediately and try to swim away from the reef. The waves are normally too powerful on the surface, you cannot swim away from them there.

After lunch we left for a half-day excursion organized by Alexandre and Hervé.

We had wanted to go diving today, but they were full at the diving club. Alexandre took the initiative last night and organized the snorkeling excursion on short notice. He also offered to take care of Iseline for a day so the other 4 of us could go diving together (the age limit is 8). Talk about good service!

Two other guests joined us for the excursion. They were Pascal and Sophie. Viktor joined and we made sure to protect him well from the sprays of salt water in the boat.

We went out to an abandoned pearl farm in a very shallow part of the lagoon. This was where the manta rays have their “cleaning station.” They come here to have their skin rinsed by fish who peck off all the goodies. Wow. The underwater scene was amazing. The water was not very clear, but there were corals and fish everywhere.

Pascal managed to get close to a ray, but the rest of us only saw them as black blobs at a distance.

Next we drove through the only place where boats can pass out of the lagoon. Because of this pass the lagoon in Tikehau has a very good steady supply of oxygen which again makes it particularly abundant in fish. Actually the famous French marine biologist Jacques-Yves Cousteau did research in Tikehau and he concluded that Tikehau had the largest number of species of fish of any atoll in French Polynesia.

On the outside we went snorkeling again. The reef on the outside is really a different world than the lagoon. The water is crystal clear with amazing visibility and from the reef it quickly gets very, very deep. we made sure not to swim too close to the reef.

Afterwards we went fishing. At last something Viktor could take part in. Alas, he did not want to fish, but was very happy to watch. Pascal holding his fishing line:

Sophie with everyone else in her glasses

We caught some small fish while bottom fishing

The disinfectant used by the nurse had a coloring effect:

I thought I had caught something big that didn´t offer too much of a fight. In a way I was right. Is this what they call rockfish?

Sophie and Helene taking it easy

The real action came when we tried some trolling. Soon Hervé pulled up a genuine barracuda

Feet up, please, that thing has sharp teeth:

We let it swim to tell the tale to others.

After a while Alexandre spotted a lot of birds and brought us to them, They were diving down to eat small fish. Where there are small fish there are also larger predator fish. We started hauling up bonitos (a tuna-like fish). Fishing was done with a very thick monofilament line and hand power. My hands took quite a beating.

Securing the catch for the cook:

Another eventful day with lessons to remember.

Since Viktor cannot go into the water we decided that only Adrian and I would go diving tomorrow.

Eirik

—–

I got up at 05:15 to once again attempt to restore my reputation. I biked over to town and down to the port.

I had kept the small fish that had been refused access to the kitchen yesterday and now used them as bait. I had a hard time avoiding catching a shark, they were constantly patrolling the sides of the pier.

There were not many other signs of life and after over 2 hours I was ready to give up when I finally saw the floater move. I waited a while until it disappeared and then pulled hard to hook the fish. No resistance. As i pulled up I saw a nicely sized fish follow the bait upwards. i quickly let go and waited in anticipation. After only a few seconds it was back again. New hooking. YES! Fish on the line! Man, it was a good fighter. It ran off with the line two times and desperately tried to hide under the pier. I had a hard time denying it access. I wanted to wear it out completely since the water was a meter and half (5 feet) below me and it was not possible to get to a place where I could net it. When it finally resigned I could quickly and carefully drag it up. Fish on land! I felt the adrenaline rush and the age-old instinctual satisfaction deep inside the hunter-gatherer part of my brain. Me strong. Me get food.

I was a happy fisherman when I returned with my baliste geant:

In the kitchen they had to admit it was edible and big enough for human consumption. They accepted my gift. My reputation had at least improved a bit.

I haven´t said too much about our hosts yet. Pension Hotu is a well-run family business and a place with a very home-like atmosphere. Naturally, since there are only 5 bungalows and we are staying for a week, we are getting to know our hosts pretty well. There are 3 generations of them. Here they are:

The owners are Hervé (in the middle) and his wife, Vanina (to the right). Hervé is a good guy. He is a bit rough around the edges and unlike many French I know he tries to minimize the wear on his vocal cords.

Vanina is the hostess. She met us at the airport, asks if things are OK, calls us for the meals and helps the staff serve them.

To the left is Alexandre, Hervés father. He is the negotiator and organizer. The bed & breakfast´s official mail address is alexandre@mail.pf and Alexandre answers everyone and negotiates rates for long stays, like ours. He is very talkative. On the average the sum of Hervé and Alexandre probably makes up a normal talkative French. However, Alexandre is also a great guy and genuinely interested in people. He has been a marine/sailor for most of his life and has seen many places in the world. You are never bored with him around. Alexandre does the round after supper every evening and asks everyone what they want to do the next day. He then plans the logistics for the next day, makes calls to the two diving centers here etc.

To the right of Alexandre is his wife, Christiane. She is the cook, and an excellent one as such. She stays mostly in the background but always has a smile or a nice comment for you.

Then there are the kids. Charles is 4 years old and quite a rough and sturdy kid. He is very curious and interested in everything. He followed me to the beach one evening when I was fishing for bait for the next morning. It was amazing how he never had an end to the questions he asked about what I was doing and why.

The little girl is his sister, 2-year old Oceane. She follows Iseline all the time,  and Iseline mostly doesn´t mind. She is a complete heartbreaker and does not take no for an answer, like most kids her age.

We are really having a great time here and the family is doing everything they can to make our stay as good as possible. They know when to stay in the background and always try to help when we ask. I chose this place because of the raving reviews on TripAdvisor, and they seem well deserved. Of course, it is a big advantage that we all speak French.

After yesterday´s excursion we felt the need to just chill out at the beach. Which we did.

Helene and Iseline observed the cat of the owners encounter a crab. They were equally afraid of each other.

Iseline made a very nice drawing for me in the afternoon. It´s slinky from Toy Story:

A lazy day can be good sometimes.

Eirik

—–

Determined to restore my honor I got up at 5:30 to go fishing. I grabbed one of the plastic kayaks and headed for the boulders two islands down the beach. I had made sure to put aside a piece of French bread at dinner yesterday, which would be my bait.

The counterwind was strong and the waves surprisingly high. I kayaked like a hero and got a good morning excercise. I had only put on a bathing short and a t-shirt, so I didn´t care that I was getting completely wet. It stil felt counter-intuituve but I was starting to get used to the fact that wet is not a problem in this climate.

It took me well over 20 minutes to reach my destination.

Catching fish was easy, the small ones took the bread immediately. Once I got a small one I used its flesh as bait and got fish a bit bigger. Just like the Polynesian scouts I could return home safely with the wind in my back. After a morning shower I could proudly show the food I had caught to my dear Jane:

Alas, when I tried to give them away in the kitchen I was turned down. Even though I was told yesterday they eat all the fish here, these fish were an exception. Obviously fish that small didn´t count as fish. Standards were different here than in the Amazon. Oh well, I grabbed some breakfast, determined to do better tomorrow.

At 9am we left on our day excursion organized by the owners of the bed & breakfast. We were joined by three other guests. First we humped and bumped for an hour over the lagoon.

We had all forgotten how bumpy a fast boat ride can be, especially when there are waves.

We arrived at the island of Eden and found a small community we had not expected to find on Tikehau:

In 1997 a self-proclaimed prophet, Elijah Hong, came here from Taiwan (just like the Polynesians). He is the leader of an obscure sect called the NTC (New Testament Church). It has its roots in the Pentecostal Church and was started by a Hong Kong movie actress, Kong Duen-Yee after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the 1960s.

They are basically luddites and follow the age-old idea that modern technology is a bad thing and that we need to get back to nature. Elijah Hong travelled around to search for a place to start their Eden Homestead project in 1997. When he came to Tikehau he said that he felt that God meant that this was the place. They then purchased a motu and here they live off the land in cooperation with nature.

They claim to have around 5000 members of the sect world-wide. Their goal is quite ambitious: “The ultimate goal is to terminate the systems of the human kingdoms, end the history of men, accomplish God’s plan of salvation, usher in the new heaven and new earth, and bring all creation into the perfect realm of Eden to enjoy God’s commanded blessings.” Somehow I was glad these people did not believe in active conversion of others nor had weapons of mass destruction.

We were shown around by one of the permanent residents here. Ha had lived here since 1998.

He told us they were only 5 permanent residents and the 5 of them do almost all the agricultural work. They get visitors, sect members, from all over the world on a regular basis. Often they have children here on a kind of camp.

It was impressive what they have managed to do on a coral island. They had many different kinds of vegetables and fruits.

They made their own salt from seawater

They also made their own fertilizer by fermenting fish, which seemed to work well. They had pigs and chickens

Everything was clean and in good condition. Actually I have never before been to a place with chickens and/or pigs which smelled as little as here.

Even though it was back to nature they seemed to accept modern inventions like nylon cord, concrete, metal plates, plastic sheets and metal cooking ware. Their income to purchase these came from a steady food surplus which they sold to the inhabitants of Tikehau. In fact we had had excellent pork meat during lunch yesterday which came from here.

Some of the visiting sect children were making beehives. Iseline didn´t understand their purpose, until we mentioned that she had seen them at Hal´s place, then she lightened up:

This is their main meeting area:

There were posters on the wall in the front. Where do you want to be?

We went back to our boat. The harbor they have built looks very nice. It was completely destroyed by the cyclone which hit Tikehau a year ago and they had rebuilt everything.

This is where the permanent residents live, not completely back to nature, I guess:

Our next stop was bird island, a small island inside the lagoon which the birds have completely taken over.

The boat stopped by the reef around the island and we walked ashore.

Wow. What a place. This was the kingdom of the birds and they acted like we were not there. There were nests everywhere.

Next we went over to an uninhabited motu and had a beach to ourselves

We had brought the underwater casing for the camera and Adrian took some good photos with it:

As you can see there were many sharks around us. Self-portrait:

Lunch was being prepared

Great meal!

Adrian and I fished some small fish using bread and fed them to the sharks afterwards. Leftover from dinner was also thrown to the sharks. There must be around 20 sharks in the water on this photo:

Sharks here are protected since they are threatened by extinction. It is actually difficult to fish using pieces of fish as bait since the sharks try to take the bait all the time.

The sharks were not afraid at all and would come very close to the shore to get the food we tossed to them. At one point Hervé (he is the owner of the bed & breakfast business) managed to grab one by the tail and gave us a photo-op before releasing it again:

We humped and bumped our way back. Iseline had been a bit afraid on the way out, but this time she discovered she could stand in the front, feel the wind and sea-spray and have a good time. She did.

Not a soul was dry when we arrived.

Eirik

—–

Our last night on Easter Island we had managed to forget to close the window in the kids´s room. It was open behind the curtain. By the time we noticed, their bedroom was swarming with mosquitoes. At breakfast it became painfully clear how bad parents we are:

After intense days on Easter Island we decided to take it easy and get to know Tikehau on our first day here.

Here is the view from our porch

Yep, this was pretty much the tropical paradise we were looking for.

We rented some bikes to have a look around the island. The island we are staying is where almost all inhabitants live and where both the airport and the only town is.

.

The bed & breakfast has a fixed price for renting both bikes and kayaks for the entire stay. We paid 500 CFP francs (5.50 USD) per bike for a week. Good deal.

The currency here is CFP Francs, a special kind of French Francs for some of France´s colonies. French Polynesia got an exception when France entered the European monetary union and got to keep their Francs. The currency is so exotic that if you go to xe.com you first have to click “more currencies” to get their large list and then click “all world currencies” to finally find it (the international TLA is XPF, but the French use CFP Francs). 1 NOK is roughly 15 CFP Francs and 1 USD is roughly 90 CFP Francs.

The name is interesting. CFP used to be “Colonies Francaises Pacifique,” (French Pacific Colonies) but when the use of the word “colony” became politically incorrect  they changed the name to “Comptoirs Francaises Pacifique” (French Pacific Trading Posts), so they could keep the TLA. Of course, French Polynesia is still a French colony in all meanings of the word.

We biked the 2 kilometers (a bit over a mile) into Tuherahera, the only town in Tikehau. There are two streets in parallel for the stretch of the town. One of them continues to follow the coast of the island, making up the road going around the island. This means that you can actually make a map with three road stretches visible at the same time. Not bad for a place with 350 inhabitants. Close the two left open ends with a half circle, close the two right open ends with a half circle and you have a complete map of the island:

We stopped at the largest shop (the two others were not much to write home about) and had some ice cream

Downtown Tuherahera:

Street lights here are interesting. Each and every light has its own solar panel, and there are many of them:

The telecommunications station, similar to the one on Easter Island, except the main dish is smaller here:

The church.

The road was either gravel or made from concrete blocks:

We were told to stay away from the palm trees. I have never thought about it before, but those falling coconuts can be lethal. Our hosts told us that a lot more people die every year from falling coconuts than from being eaten by sharks. At one point Adrian, Viktor and I were waiting with our bikes at what we thought was safe distance to the trees, Suddenly a coconut came thudding hard into the ground in the middle of the triangle the three of us formed. The wind must have given it a push by moving the tree. It could only have come from the tree behind me and thus had to have had a flight path going over my head. I never felt 100% safe after that and kept looking up whenever I moved around Tikehau.

We biked down to the port. The colors of the sky and the lagoon were gorgeous:

The kids went all the way out to feel the spray of the water:

Back at our bungalow I connected to the rip-off wifi service available. It was very expensive and paid by the hour. I had been emailing with some people in Norway and had promised to send them feedback on a document today. They really needed that feedback, and they had to have it today. I wasted 3 hours of my life trying unsuccessfully to send a 130 kb document when I could have been on the beach. Several times it almost went through. I became more and more annoyed and difficult to be around. Here I am, in the early stages, while I was not too grumpy.

In the meantime the kids played on the beach and Helene worked on her tan.

In the end I realized that I had a GSM signal, even though I couldn´t get data transfer to work over it. I sent out a test SMS. I got a response back from Norway! I ended up retyping the comments I had to the document and sent 11 very long SMSes to Norway. I had found a solution!

Later I found out the the wifi provider had 3 hotspots on the island and that the 3 zones shared a common line out of the island with the unheard of capacity of 128 kilobits per second. The owners told me they were not proud of the service and wished I had spoken to them before, so they could have warned me.

I had spoken to the owners about fishing and was told that the fishing was best by some boulders further down the beach. At around 6pm I grabbed my fishing rod and lures and started walking down the beach. Man those boulders sure were further away than they seemed at first. I came to the end of the island. Bummer, the place was on the next island. Refusing to give up I found a place where it was possible to cross over with water about to my knees and went for it. When I came to the end of the next island also, I had to give up, it was too deep to cross over and I didn´t want to swim. I tried out some lures where I was, no luck. I could see some people fishing with bait over at the boulders. They were catching fish.

Almost too late I realized I was close to the equator and that when the sun sets it would get dark much quicker than I am used to. I had no flashlight and both a shallow lagoon stretch and coconut jungle to cross. I had no idea which potential lethal night animals might be around. I hurried back. Only a few hundred meters from my goal I got caught in the rain in the dark. There is no landmass to speak of here, the highest point must be a few meters over sea level, so there is nothing stopping the wind or clouds. Rain clouds blow over the island with impressive speed and it can start and stop raining very hard in a few seconds, almost without warning.

I came back wet in the pitch dark and not very proud. This is a different environment than I have grown up in and I didn´t know the basics for survival. I had a hunch there would be more dangers lurking than only falling coconuts and instant darkness.

Apart from that and a little internet snafu our day had been fantastic. We were going to enjoy it here. Tomorrow we will go for a day excursion into the lagoon.

Eirik

—–

We had a 2:35 pm flight to Tikehau and could take it easy in the morning. We showed up at breakfast just before closing at 9:30.

We have a family rule that everyone speaks French when we are in France, so we had all switched to French last night when we landed. At breakfast we fit right into the “crowd” Everyone seemed to come from France.

French Polynesia is a strange place. It is a part of France in the Pacific. A good old-fashioned colony and an anachronism (just like Easter Island, actually), where the colonial power rules supreme and where police and customs officials are caucasian French (at least the ones we saw).

For breakfast there was French baguette, pain chocolat and French jam. What? French jam? It seemed very strange to eat red currant jam transported from France in a place abundant with all sorts of exotic fruit. Even the butter and the milk came from France. 12 000 km (7500 miles) closer than France lies New Zealand, a large dairy producer.

We got a phone call from FedEx that a package had arrived. We originally had a deal with the motel that they would keep it for us when it arrived so we could pick it up when we would be back in Tahiti in a week. Now they wouldn´t have to.

At 11 the package arrived. It was the Christmas present DVDs I had ordered from amazon.fr which Dauro and Laura had resent from Brasil. With criminal Brazilian import taxes and the cost of resending to Tahiti they had cost about 3 times as much as planned. But now they were here. Ho, ho, ho, merry Christmas!

Thank you, FedEx!

Thanks to the package traces I can show you where those DVDs have been traveling:

(Map generated by the Great Circle Mapper – copyright © Karl L. Swartz.)

Not bad for digital content on a physical medium, heh? The total traveling distance is 47 400 km (29459 miles), more then the circumference of the earth. The DVDs were ordered on December 10 and the package was sent from Paris on December 14. Once it reached Florianopoilis it was resent the next day. We received the package 22 days after it was sent from Paris.

I will now proceed to rip the DVDs and throw away the physical media so we don´t have to carry the weight. There are many paradoxes in our modern-day semi-digital world.

We repacked our stuff and left 3 backpacks at the hotel. Air Tahiti has some of the worst bagage restrictions I have ever seen. 10 kg of checked-in luggage per passanger and one piece of hand-luggage with maximum weight 3 kg (6.6 pounds)! Heck, my carry-on suitcase must weigh at least half that when it is empty! These restrictions led to some pretty tough prioritization and some creative packing. In the end we managed to get within the limit with the exception of the saxophone, which weighs 7 kg (15 pounds). We decided to take the chance and try to talk it through.

We had a great view of Faa´a airport from the motel (right click and View Image for a larger version):

We had lunch at the airport with French stuff:

and checked in. There was no control of the hand-luggage whatsoever. Oh well.

Ah, Tikehau, the name vibrated Pacific paradise:

We flew an ATR-72

The flight was almost empty:

Papeete:

Tikehau is an atoll with about 350 inhabitants (The last census showed 503, but about 150 are students or others who do not live there) and a few tourists. It is one of the Tuamotus, an island group with a large number of atolls north-east of Tahiti.

It is still not certain exactly how an atoll has been created, but the major theory is that they started as volcano craters when sea levels where much lower than today. As the ocean has been rising corals have been building up around the crater rim, always searching for that sweet spot just under the surface where there is sea water and maximum sun penetration. The results are doughnut shaped islands with shallow lagoons in the middle. The lagoons are havens safe from the forces of the open sea and contain an amazing variety of fish. Often the rim is split into many islands, called motus. Here is a sattelite photograph of Tikehau:

The airport in Tikehau does not have lights along the runway, nor an electronic guidance system, nor a control tower. We are talking one strip of tarmac and one building. Here it is:

We were met by our hostess from the bed & breakfast with the traditional Polynesian welcoming flower necklaces. The kids got to sit in the back, really in the back:

There is one road here, it goes around the coast of the main motu (island) and measures the impressive length of 9 km (5.6 miles).

We were staying at Pension Hotu, a small family-run business with 5 bungalows on the beach. We immediately took advantage of the little daylight which was left and had a look around:

Yeah, we could live with staying here for a week, even though there were sharks in the lagoon:

We were told they were completely harmless to humans as long as you did not bleed in the water.

Our bungalow was about 10 meters (30 feet) from the beach, had 3 beds in a room and a spacious bathroom. Just what we needed. In this climate all you want is a place to sleep and a place to shower:

The owners´s daughter, two-year old Oceane, quickly gained Helene´s confidence:

After a great dinner the kids quickly fell asleep:

In the Tuamotus, the islands Thor Heyerdahl reached with his Kon-Tiki raft, at last.

Eirik

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