The good things...

My last post was kind of down, so I thought I would share some of the things we have really enjoyed.


Food:
Pamplemousse - ok, so I've mentioned these already...they're giant grapefruit but are a hundred times sweeter. We cut them open in the traditional style and eat them with a spoon, but our favorite way to eat them has been to juice them. Jake loves it and Andy and I have found it makes a fantastic mohito if you substitute the juice for the normal lime juice.
Bananas - nothing new, right? Wrong...these are the sweetest bananas I've ever eaten. Unfortunately, they all ripe at the same time so you end up getting all banana'd out. Here are a few things we decided to do with them... bananas foster - you all know what this is, fantastic! banana pancakes - ymmmm. banana brown betty - my first banana pie. Jake and I loved this. Andy is waiting to see what it tastes like cold as he wasn't too keen on a warm banana pie.
Breadfruit - mixed reviews here. what was good, was very good. What was bad, was very bad. Before it gets ripe, you can slice it up and make french fries or chips, just like with potatoes. You can steam it too. These are delicious. We found one of ours a little too ripe so I decided to try to make a recipe I had seen for a mashed potatoe type dish. YOu roast the breadfruit and then scoop out the insides and prepare it like mashed potatoes. This was not a hit. I think it had more to do with texture than taste. It has a real slimey texture and it's almost too sweet.
Mangoes - nothing new done with these, they're just the best mangoes I've ever had.
Fresh baguettes every day - these are about the only thing here that's cheap.  We've taken to eating a lot of bread and cheese lately.  Plus, when it's just about to go bad, it makes great french toast and bread pudding!

You can find just about anything you want here, just for a price. One thing I do find strange is that the chicken comes from the states. Weird, huh? There are chickens running around everywhere here. I can't imagine why they have to import them.


Greenery:
We said we wanted green.  We got it!  The scenery is absolutely beautiful here as you can tell from the pictures.  Our waterfall excursion was one of my favorites.

Wildlife:
We've seen fish that we've never seen before.  I can only imagine how this will continue.  We've also seen dolphins and giant mantas and tons of turtles.  On land we've seen goats, pigs, horses and a few birds we've never seen before.

Cruisers:
I'm digging the laid back style of most of the cruisers here.  I guess they figure if you made it here, you don't need a lot of advice.  Plus, they come from all different places so there's a wide variety of conversation and personalities.  We've only had that one run in with the anchoring situation and that was nothing.

Well, with any luck, we're on our way soon which means no more internet for a while...back to posts without pictures.  Stay with us...this passage is only a week long and I think our first stop has some sort of connection.

It's Raining, it's pouring....

We're still here in Nuku Hiva. We're planning on getting fuel this afternoon, hitting the market tomorrow morning, then heading to Daniel's bay about 5 miles away. We stocked up yesterday on groceries and spent almost $300 on probably $80 worth of food. But in the whole scheme of things, we're still way under budget for April so I'm trying not to look at the individual spends (like $40 for a 12 pack of beer).

It's hard to describe our mood here without sounding unappreciative or negative. We like it here (meaning, We wouldn't go back to Mexico or change our path), but we're ready to move on. The anchorage here is rolly and it rains all the time.  The water is murkey and too rough to swim in, much less dive in.  I'm having trouble getting laundry done because every time you hang it up to dry, it rains. It never dries so it smells sour and you have to start all over again. They do have a laundry service here but it hasn't been open for days (holiday) and today everyone dropped off their clothes so it would take at least two, maybe three days...and we want to leave tomorrow (and it costs about $10 a load and you can guess I have more than one or two loads - more like 5 or 6). So I'm going to try again today...  If I'm being totally honest, I could probably admit to being a little homesick too... I miss my family and I haven't seen some of my closest friends in VA in 2 years... I'll get over it, I always do... but it's not all the rain's fault.
We clearly could have taken advantage of more things here, like tours, but due to our interests (or lack of interest) and our budget, we've decided to spend the time and money in the Tuamotos and/or Society islands (or on a new computer since ours is slowly dying).

With that said, we didn't sit on the boat the ENTIRE time we were here. We had many cocktail hours (I still think the cruisers here are great) and spent some time exploring the town by foot...here are some pictures from our walk about(s).

I've always love cemetaries...this one seems to be a bit abandoned.



The Catholic Church here...it's more like a compound, but it's really beautiful.



The inside of the church.  Try as I did, I couldn't get a picture without
that woman's backside in it.  She had a lot of flowers to water.



The carvings in the church were unbelievable and I think they were done by locals.  This was half of the front door.
(A guy was mopping in the opening of the other half...didn't make for a good picture)



Jake and I enjoyed watching these women fish.  Every time a wave would come,
they would run back and try not to get knocked down.  I think they were catching
bait fish.



One of the many stone carvings over looking the water.  I think these are
technically Tikis??



Market Day, Rain Day and post more pictures day!

Yesterday we heard about a market here on Saturdays that has all the veggies and fruits you need.  The hitch is that it starts at 4:30 in the morning and ends at 8:00 a.m..  So, I decided to do the deed and get up this morning (in the rain) and dinghy (in the dark) to the market.  It wasn't huge but it did have fresh veggies that we hadn't seen since Hiva Oa - cabbage, eggplant, lettuce, tomato, chives and green beans.  They also had fresh donuts so of course I bought some of those! 

After I got back to the boat and put away the stuff, I jumped back in bed.  Andy and I woke up about an hour later only to look out our window and see a boat about 50 ft away.  Now I wouldn't normally post this part as I don't really believe in making fun of others or fussing about them for dragging anchors since it could easily happen to anyone and you know the saying about those in glass houses, right?.  But this case is a little out of the ordinary so at the risk of breaking my own windows I'm going to do it anyway. 

Andy got on the radio and called the guy a few times with no answer.  Then he went in the cockpit and noticed him out there in his own cockpit.  We thought the guy had just come in this morning seeing as his boat wasn't there when I came back from the market.  So Andy told him how much chain we had out (about 6:1 scope).  The guy proceded to tell Andy that we had too much scope out and we would be sorry when we wrapped around coral heads.  Well, the winds are honking here and there's a pretty good swell so we're pretty confident in the amount of chain we had out.  To make a long story short...the other boat was dragging (with his 3:1 scope)...he had been here since Wednesday.  The amazing part to us is that he was TOTALLY unaware of it.  He continued to argue for a few minutes about how we didn't need all that chain out.  Andy finally told him we would move since he was here first and he said no, he was already wet, and went ahead and moved.  I am still a bit unnerved by the fact that HE HAD NO IDEA that he had moved.  If your house suddenly ended up between two totally different houses and you could serve coffee to your neighbors from your window, would you notice?  To all those who are wondering how we know it wasn't us that moved - we did check the GPS before talking to him.  Andy was really tempted to tell him to put out more chain.

So, all is good now and we're sitting in our jammies eating donuts watching Star Wars (yes, he's still obsessed).  It looks like it will be a movie day as it hasn't stopped raining since about 2:00 in the morning.  Good for our watertanks, bad for exploring.  It also means that I have plenty of time to post pictures, so here they go....  Enjoy your weekend!

These are pictures from the island of Tahuata - specifically, the village of Hapatoni (where Jake lost his plane).

There's a little church in every village.  Very different from the
 extravagant cathedrals in Mexico.

One of the many ways we keep Jake in line :)

The local power plant.



Local man creating one of the intricate carvings they're known for.



It's taken me two hours to do this much (I know I said I had plenty of time, but really) so I'm going to go ahead and post before something funky happens and I lose it all and throw the computer out the window...  Stay tuned for more...

Pictures! finally...

After a very uncomfortable five hours, we made it into Nuku Hiva yesterday afternoon.  That means we have internet...... We've got the HP up and running and protected now with the various security programs so I'm going to attempt to post some pictures. There are tons of them so I'm going to spread it out over a few posts and give you guys a break from our day by day account of our trip.

First up...Potluck on the beach in Tahuata.  Forgive me if I don't give all the boat names and people names...we met so many people, I'm still learning.







Next up... underwater photos from our dive last week...

 

 

 

 

Enjoy for now...we're headed off to town to see what we can see.  I'll post more pictures tonight or tomorrow.  I hope everyone is enjoying their end of the week (yes, I do know what day it is)!

4/11/2011 - Hiva Oa, Marquesas

You would think after 21 days on the boat that we would get off the boat, right?  Not really.  We spent the whole weekend hanging out on the boat.  We were productive, just not very mobile.  It might have something to do with town being a 2 mile walk one way?  Yesterday was Sunday and we had intentions of going into town and listening to the singing at the church, but we stayed in bed instead.  So that’s my excuse for not updating the blog in the last few days…not much to tell.  I figured you were tired of hearing about laundry (which is what I did).

We did manage to get off the boat a few times to look for a place to swim.  Saturday we took the dinghy out to a little island and took a poke at snorkeling.  Jake was the only one that got in the water as it looked pretty dead to Andy and I.  But we did see a big turtle so all wasn’t lost.  After we let Jake swim back at the boat, I was looking through one of our guides and it said  (I’m paraphrasing here), “not a good idea to swim in this bay due to the large shark population.”  Nice.  The water is kind of murky as there is a small river that feeds into it, so that makes sense.

Yesterday we decided to go back to that river since we saw some locals swimming in there.  It was murky too, but Jake had fun playing in the little stream where the river met the beach/ocean and it was a nice place to cool off as it’s quite hot in the middle of the day here.

Somebody has built a nice little shade for themselves on the beach.

There's a little shower at the boat ramp that proved to be Jake's
favorite part of the day.

Today we’re going to go back into town and pick up a few more veggies and fruit and possibly head out to another nearby island tomorrow.  We’re waiting on our duty free fuel certificate to be stamped by our agent so we can get fuel in Nuka Hiva before we leave the Marquesas (we don’t need any just yet).  

Then tomorrow we’re going to try and head out.  This island is really pretty but it’s more of a stopover to check in.  Not a lot to explore.  Well, that’s not true.  There are a lot of archeological sites and Tikis and there is a tour guide that will take you around to most of them, but the tour is $250.  If we were to find some more people to share it with, it might be worthwhile, but that is proving hard to do as we have 3 people and the car only comfortably holds 4, as well as the next tour wouldn’t be until Wednesday and we have limited time in the French Polynesia Islands and think we should spend our time (and $$) elsewhere on things that interest us a little more (like diving, pearl farms, etc).  But for anyone heading this way, the review of the tour was great, so if it’s something you want to do, go for it…just isn’t in the cards for us this time.

You can see how crowded the anchorage is and how close we
are to shore (Savannah on the far right with her bat wings up).

One item of note is this anchorage...it's kind of tight.  There are 14 boats in here and we're stacked on top of each other, most with stern hooks.  There are a few boats that decided not to use stern hooks.  Yesterday we watched two of them collide.  It was quite interesting to watch all the hand gestures going back and forth.  They were french so of course I couldn't eavesdrop on what they were saying, but in the end, one boat pulled in their chain a little bit and put out a stern hook, but the other one decided to leave things be.  We'll see how that works out.

Two French boats discussing options after a small collision at anchor

Time to make the pancakes.  Stick with us, it promises to get more exciting…we’re just getting our land legs back. 

Island Life

Our first few minutes on land...see Savannah in the back!

Our first day here was exactly what it should be… relaxing, sunny, full of exploration.  After a glorious nights sleep, we had breakfast and got ready to go to shore to check in.  We called our Agent, Sandra on the radio and after a bit we took the dinghy to shore to meet her.  She drove us the two miles or so to town and helped us with all of our paperwork for checking into the country… which was virtually nothing.  All they wanted was our bond exemption paper that we received from our agent in Tahiti and our passports and boat documentation.  They didn’t even glance at our Zarpa from Mexico or the equipment list we had.  The whole process only took about 10 minutes.  I’m not sure if it’s because we had the agent or because it’s just that laid back, but we sure did appreciate it.  After a few Merci’s and getting directions to the bank, we said goodbye to our agent and set about our exploration. 

I never really appreciated how much Spanish we actually knew until I was standing at the counter at the bank trying to speak French.  It was a site for sure…  I had my “French for Cruisers” book out (highly recommend it already) and my hand gestures ready.  All I was trying to say was that I needed Pacific Francs.  Well, I butchered it…  but lucky for me the guy spoke in perfect English “The ATM is outside”. 

“Yes, but it has no money”

“You need to talk to him” and he pointed to the next window over.  Lucky me, he spoke English too.  They were a bit grumpy so I tried to participate by asking them how to say certain things and pointing out the Tapa on the wall (they make beautiful almost fabric like pieces here out of bark, I’m sure I’ll write more on that later as I fully plan on finding me one).  In the end, they only loosened up a little but I got my “Trent Mil Francs” and left feeling like I had accomplished something.

Speaking of money and Francs….THEY’RE HUGE!!  It’s like trying to fit a bunch of postcards in your pocket.  And the coins are just as big… the smallest one I got was the size of our silver dollar.  I can’t quit looking at them.  And we’re dealing in large numbers here.  They come in denominations of 5000, 1000, 500, etc.  The coins are 100, 50, 20, 5.  The exchange rate is about 80 Francs/ 1 dllr right now so trying to do the math in your head can get a bit complicated with all those zeros.  I totally sympathize with those people in Mexico who used to get confused with the conversion (I thought they were just mathematically challenged).  When you have no grasp of the language or the money, you just feel lost.  But so far, it’s a good lost…it’s kind of fun.

Everything we heard about the prices is true…they astronomical.  Luckily we didn’t need anything so we just wasted our money on some sodas and lunch.  I did buy some veggies because they were absolutely beautiful, but for 3 eggplants, 1 bag of bok choy, a large cucumber and 2 grapefruit thingys, I paid almost $10.  Our lunch consisted of two hamburgers (no fries), 1 large bowl of fried rice, 1 juice, 4 beers and it was….hold your breath….grab your seat…. $65!  The beer was good, but really… it’s a good thing we still have a ton of Tacate from Mexico left!

There are quite a few stores and they’re stocked with everything you could need and then some, but the prices continue to amaze me…a jar of Skippy peanut butter was $990 Francs – over $10.  But it was fun going up and down the isles…they have tons of makings for Chinese food, lots of meat (albeit not stuff we normally eat – lamb, goat, etc.), really good cheeses.  They even have Nike Air tennis shoes.  They have all the fishing lures you could possibly want and all the hardware stuff you would need for repairs.   Lucky for us, we don’t really need anything right now.  Hopefully we won’t need anything until Tahiti so we can save a little money.

We finally headed on the 2 mile trek back to the boat.  We found a tiny shortcut that met Jake’s requirements for hiking in the woods and met my requirement for shade.  When we got back to the boat, I lugged out our wifi booster to see if I could get a connection.  Sure I could….for $5/an hour!!!  So everyone who had all those fancy requests for changing the blog and/or maps or had any ideas of me going back and posting pictures for each blog…sorry!  Not going to happen!  What I decided to do was just do one big blog post with all the pictures as that won’t take as long.  So look for that coming shortly after you read this. 

We ended our day with cocktail hour(s) with our fellow “yachties” from Songline, Sara Jean II, and Lardo…all very nice people that we had not yet met in person but had talked to every night on the radio during our crossing.  It was fun to hear about their experiences…Songline was out there for 37 days!!!   Lardo made the same time we did, 21 ½ days, and Sara Jean II beat us all at 19 days.  All of our boats are very different and we obviously had different strategies for getting here (ours being very simple….just get there), but everyone is pretty giddy about it.

Today is a lazy day…Jake’s watching movies, I’m going to do laundry (you would think I would be done with that by now…but everyone keeps wearing their clothes!) and Andy is building a set of dinghy wheels to make our life easier.  Looking forward to another day in paradise!