Marquises

Fatu Hiva

A breath in and a breath out, a light sweat on the back of my neck is soothed by the breeze that sneaks in through the forepeak hatch, has a mooch through the cabin then wends it's way out through the companionway. Shadows and sun dance alternately and we swing on the anchor chain rotating through 90 degrees in the bay. There's a wind that descends from the green peaks, plunging to the ocean and fanning out amongst us, about 6 yachts moored in the azure.

Ascending the peaks are tall palms, low green bushes and patches of rock, sometimes with little splodges of moving white, agile goats hopping daintily along an almost vertical incline for the choicest of nibbles on the most precarious of narrow ledges.

It was a bitch to get here from Hiva Oa, battling easterly waves and wind, what should have taken 7 hours took over 12, travelling down through the night in the coolness under a blanket of stars. The first bay I anchored had a two metre swell and became intolerable so after half a day I headed to another, just three miles to the north, and perhaps paradise found.

Havawave Bay is located in the western side of the Small Island of Fatu Hiva, the most southerly of the Marquises. It boasts 600 residents, one road, 8 Toyota pick ups, a school, a chur

ch and a small harbour. I arrived just yesterday, so happy to have found a peaceful alternative to the relative bustle of Atuona on Hiva Oa. Here amidst green peaks lies a sheltered bay with a small cluster of buildings.

It's Sunday morning and me and a fellow sailor go to the church service in the small church with empty spaces for windows amidst swaying coconut palms. The rough hewn benches have been knocked together, the lectern is a solid peace of wood about 4 feet high, the tabernacle a hand carved little house for the sacraments and the pews filled with people. Most appear young, black hair tempered copper on the men, the sign of toil on the hot sun. Women wear long black hair tied up behind with flowers and pretty dresses and shawls. The men mostly wear tee shirts and shorts. 5 or 6 clergy stand at the alter, all dressed in long white gowns, a large carved Christ overseas the audience as the electricity cuts on and off, and a wriggling toddler refuses to be pacified by a plastic pacifier. The singing of the people fulfils my expectation, different tonal melodies, some sharp, some like velvet, ascending and descending a musical range, and I look out dreamily to the swaying palms with the back drop of blue, and I feel very much like I am in the south seas.

After the service I talk to a woman in her sixties, she speaks a little English, a small face with bad teeth, bright brown eyes and long hair tied to the side with a purple flower made of plastic and nylon. She has lived here for all of her life. She and her husband, a woodcarver, have 4 children, the two daughters of which live in Normandy in France, working in a restaurant and bringing up her 14 year old grand daughter. They all come together about once every two years, it's an expensive long haul to Europe, 20 hours via San Francisco. I ask her about life here 30 years before, when there was no electricity or internet, when the area that we are sitting in was a shade of trees, now stripped bare to allow for the modern quay that has been installed. She laments the changes and confirms my suspicions that some sense of community has been lost as a result of the ingress of the modern world, a story I'm sure that's the same the world over.

Tomorrow I plan to walk a bit and further explore. I've realised how tired I am after my long passage, especially the one to this island, a night with little sleep. I'm content for the moment to lounge down in my little floating home, take some sun, swim, snooze, eat good food and listen to the small inflatables filled with yachties zoom by, for some reason unable to restrain their hands on the throttle.

Being around these other boats I realise what a quirk I probably am. With their water makers and washing machines, solar panels and generators I realise just how low tech I am. But I also realise the beauty in simplicity and harmony with the world around me. To try to relieve myself of these modern connivances instead of dragging the legacy of the first world around in my hulled. It seems I have the choice, i can try to live in the old way, the islanders of Fatu Hiva with their big satellite receiver dish and modern electric current that lights the village at night seem to have less choice.

The sound of crowing cockerels, as if in conversation across the valley. Arising through the roof of green below where houses lie dotted in amongst the palms and fruit trees. A woodcarver sculpts with an angle grinder in the shade of a rusty tin roof, the sound of a dumper truck kicks into life somewhere on the other side of the village. I sit up under a shaded tree on a hill in the village cemetery where the dead, still and immobile lie peacefully looking out onto the bay. It is a parched and well trimmed plot where the tombs are cast in concrete and tiled or whitewashed. Many are anonymous, known only to their loved ones, others have photos and short inscriptions, one is named Gilmore, and they all have crucifixes and crosses. Somewhere below a furore of barking breaks out, mixed in with somebody whistling in short bursts, the distant sound of music , a steady rhythm coming from a Bluetooth boom-box, a rustle in the trees of a breeze, all mixed in with the surge of waves breaking lazily onto the shore. Village life ambles on between the cleavered cliffs and peaks. Paradoxically in a village defined by the sounds and noises that emerge, I find myself completely deaf in my left ear. Psychologically I walk a line between mild worry and the surrender to a new sense of stillness that has enveloped me. Three days previously I was invited to go diving with a fellow sailor. As an utter novice I warmed to the idea and a bright morning found us travelling in the dinghy out to a reef outside of the bay where we threw a small anchor overboard and I struggled into a jumble of straps and buckles, a heavy oxygen tank floating on the surface, somehow I had to put it on like a back pack, whilst half under water with zero gravity. Once ensconced I gave myself some time to adjust and contemplated the next step of breathing under water, a thing that screamed against every natural instinct. Slowly submerging and taking controlled breaths I kept at bay the murmuring what ifs that seemed to circle like sharks around a suspicious and wary prey. As we descended beneath the surface I kept my head and was led by Sven, my instructor. We went down in a timed fashion to adjust for the pressure and soon we were at 15 metres depth and standing on the ocean floor where my awkward flippered feet clamoured for balance and I tried to look around and take in this new world. Beige coloured coral grew out from the rocks, like ceramic to the touch, hard and perhaps brittle but delicately shaped and patterned like some kind of mushroom. Within the depths of the rocks, in small cracks protruded narrow black spikes, porcupine like needles which I assumed were some creature lying, or hiding, slightly sinister and foreboding in the subdued light. Over the contours of the rock swam brightly coloured fish some 2 to 3 inches long. Dazzling shades of blue, yellow, red, orange and green, they delicately swam, oblivious to my intrusion. I wait a while on a ledge and before long I realise that I am looking directly into a dark blinking eye, my view expands and I see the folds of tawny flesh and skin with the gentle pink undersides of the suckers. And there directly below is another. Their skin colour changing from dark to light, flashes across the fleshy landscape, i realise that there are two large octopuses wedged into a vertical crevice in the rock. One of them peels itself out and steels away to a lower shelter more out of sight. Something about this encounter I find extraordinary, and unnerving. I start to realise that one of my ears hurt, and I wonder whether my oxygen tank valve is open enough because it seems harder to breath. And all of the time now I keep seeming to float upwards and Sven keeps me from resurfacing too quickly. Then he points, and we see a manta, about 2 feet across, gliding effortlessly, small tendrils trailing out behind, like a symphony of elements in harmony, slowly disappearing out of sight. I am caught between worlds and I am becoming more and more aware of my mental discomfort and long to be back in the open air. We make a timed ascent and before long the bright silvery undulation marks the point where we break up back into our natural realm. I am marked by the experience on several levels. The realisation of what goes on in that vast underwater world, my privilege to have become a part of it, a timeless foray which went beyond the measure of a clock and embraced an utterly alien, beautiful, dimension. And as for the deaf ear, not a case of barotrauma as I had feared, but a stuffing full of wax that the nurse in the clinic swizzled out with a syringe of warm water into the kidney shaped bowl that I jammed against my neck. The little room had an aircon unit that took the edge off the heat, but I had to find my own warm water, it was kindly donated by a woman a few doors down, it came in a lemonade bottle and the treatment was free. The anchorage contained just 6 boats when I arrived and within a week there were 20 so I figured it was time to move on. When you become a part of an arsenal of wealth that encamps itself on the periphery of a foreign, poorer shore, it begins to feel a little weird and I begin to lose the boundaries that I thought I'd left in place back in Europe. I arrive tonight to Tahuatu, a small island south of Hiva Oa. It's a small bay ringed by palms with a smattering of roofs visible through the green. There's a handful of yachts at anchor in the windy anchorage.

Hot weather and I are a little at odds, if we have to share the same side of the street I will, but I'm happier if I'm in the shade. I returned from a hike into the jungle, up a mountain along a snaking series of trails ascending through the damp humid canopy into the dryer higher slopes, the summit being a finger of rock rising 300 metres, majestic and imposing. Home to some grassy tussocks on one far edge, with small birds circling above. We returned by a different route plunging down into a valley, a bubbling brook and harangued by mosquitoes that look for the chance to land and sting. I've been reading a book about the tropics and some of the subject matter is sobering. There are thousands of tropical diseases that kill millions of people globally every year. The stretch of the globe that spans between the latitudes of cancer and Capricorn are home to a third of the worlds population and account for a third of the worlds surface area. It is with grim realisation that I reflect that because there is no money to be made in saving the lives of poor people, there is little money invested in the prevention of death and illness by the world pharmaceutical companies. It is a grimmer irony to realise that a lot of the worlds drug money is made by treating people who manifest the dire consequences of unhealthy life styles, and of course the obsession to want to live for as long as possible, as though death from old age is something to be avoided at all costs. It pays little for me to reflect too deeply about the 3000 different types of mosquito and the 70 known species that carry and spread malaria. Perhaps a little dangerous for me to read about water born parasites and tiny creatures burrowed into fruits and vegetables in a place like this. Having sustained a handful of mosquito bites in my legs, I seemed to have escaped unscathed. Two days ago I was stung by a jellyfish whilst swimming in the warm clear water off the boat. It was like a bubble the size of a gob-stopper, floating on the surface, a vibrant blue thread like tentacle about 18 inches long that had attached itself to my arm and was administrating its venom. Suddenly the water lost its appeal and I climbed out and failed to catch one in a bucket from the deck, to take a closer look. This afternoon we returned from our hike, laden with avocados and a local grapefruit, wonderfully named, pampamoose. We sat a while in the shade of a large tree just off the beach. Children played in the surf and in an open sided building, teenagers and musicians rehearsed a dance routine, swaying and jigging to the guitar and drum. An old man next to us sat, white haired and unshaven, gazing out to sea, listening to pop music coming from a small radio. Yesterday I found a restaurant, the only one in this tiny village which also boasts a school and two churches and a nightclub up on the hill. I wandered in through the dusty yard, putting my head through a narrow opening bordered by weaved matting in brown wooden frames. A lady sat at a table, smoking. I walked up and asked her if she spoke English. Turning to me with dark eyes glaring under perfectly plucked narrow eyebrows she retorted that she only spoke French and Marquise. With that she leaned back defensively and took a puff on her cigarette. Feeling slightly annoyed I smiled and told her, tres bien, good for you! "Philippe, parle Anglais?" She shouted and I turned to a doorway to meet the chef and the owner. Short and squat, a round belly with a close fitting black tee shirt, a smart hair cut with tufts of grey sticking out between the little rolls in the back of his neck ,long shorts and flip flops, covered in Polynesian tattoos, he turned his attention from the tray of food he was preparing. Looking up at me through fashionable heavy rimmed glasses we chatted about the menu, the opening times, the prices, and yes there was wifi, as long as you bought a drink you could avail yourself in the comfortable surroundings. I could tell he wasn't local and asked him where he was from. "Sicily" he replied. "I am Sicilian and I have been coming here for 44 years, I have lived here for the last 13" He poured some liquid in a pan and we chatted some more. He knew Plymouth, from when he was in the French navy, he'd been to London and Scotland, and here he was on one of the most remote islands on earth, seeming very at home, which perhaps is more than can be said for the woman who continued to sit and glare. Back to today and by the time I got back to the boat I was beat from the days walking and dozed in the forepeak which mercifully had a little of a breeze coming in. After an hour I roused my self and sat, feeling a hostage to the heat from the burning sun. Every time the boat swung around it burst into the cabin so I sacrificed what little draft there was and closed the stern hatch. With the boat rolling in the heavy swell, the sun continued to taunt me, penetrating through the narrow slot of the port side window. With a growing sense of claustrophobia I calculated that the sun would be set in an hour and the coolness would arrive for the night. All the time trying not to focus on the taps and rattles as we listed back and forth, some days it's just like this. If anything will drive me from here it will be the heat, I'll persevere, it's far too close to paradise to give up on that easily.