January 7, 2011

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.

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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

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