Marquesas is remote

We spent more than three weeks in Marquesas islands in January-February. I know I am really late with the post, but better late than never.

So Marquesas. This place is remote! It is part of French Polynesia and about 1600km away from the country’s own capital, Papeete. It is pretty much as far as you can get away from any continent, check out the Wikipedia map:

For people on Marquesas, Papeete is the busy exciting part of the country. Papeete’s population is about 25'000, while the largest island in Marquesas has about 3'000 inhabitants, so you get the idea about the scale… In fact, I haven’t even heard about Marquesas up until this trip.

So how does one come up with the idea to go there? Well, we wanted to go to Tahiti in French Polynesia, it sounds cool to be able to say we went to Tahiti. But in January Tahiti is in the wet season with expected rain every day, so I started looking for places which are not in the middle of their wet season. Once we read in Lonely Planet, “Marquesas with its dramatic coastlines is yet to be discovered by mass tourism” we were sold.

Flight booking was easy, only Air Tahiti flies there, and only from Papeete, so just book on their website. Accommodation is a different story. For example, for Nuku Hiva, the largest island in Marquesas and booking.com had no listed places. We had to go based on a list of accomodation I found on the French Polynesia tourist office website. And after a couple of emails and bank transfer for the room advance we got sorted with a family stay.

And it was worth. The landscape is just amazing.

Life is simple.

One afternoon on the Hiva Oa island we figured let us have some beers in. The tiny tourist office told us to go to the “Tea room”, which didn’t look much but we did get a couple of rounds of Hinanos. The place was run by Areke and Eliane. Early evening Areke and Eliane closes down the “Tea room”, walks down the road to a different building and opens the “Snack bar”, and they serve dinner there. If you want to have a bite after the beers, you better follow them. There is not much alternative.

Another day we rented a car to explore the island and we drove to a place which according to the map had a nice ancient stone statue, a tiki. We tried to find it ourselves. At some point a small girl came to our rescue, figuring that we have no idea what we are doing. She took us through a hillside overgrown with bush, crossed a barbed wire fence, passed a tree under which human sculls and bones were left over from what we believe is an ancient burial site… and voila at some point there it was, the tiki.

In fact the islands have ton of tikis and old stone structures left over for the pre-colonial times when, according to historians, the population was almost ten times the current one. Still, relatively little is understood about these structures, their age is just guessed by locals, lots of them are overgrown with trees. In either case these are cool and local artists make new statues as well.

Also the travelers you meet here are a different crowd from a normal Fiji/Australia/Cook Islands traveller. In Nuku Hiva we stayed in the same home stay with a half Tahitian guy who grew up in New Zealand, lived in Tahiti now and was travelling to Marquesas to make pictures for a tourist agency about accommodations. He invited us over the first night for a round of home mixed Tahitian rum drinks. He knew a lot about the history of the islands and made an interesting evening.

We met a German guy who had unbelievable travel stories. He traveled across Papua New Guinea, and also had a story how he landed in Tulsa, with 5 bucks in his pocket and went on spending 1.5 years in the US.

We also met an English horticulturist, who told us about his recent trip to Fatu Hiva and how uniquely awesome it is and we should go. And he convinced us: we ended up rebooking multiple flights, some hotels and changed our plans to go to Fatu Hiva. In fact, in Marquesas we met two people who made us change our plans. A journalist from Associated Press, who reported among others also from war zones, told us about his trip to Vanuatu: standing on the rim of an active volcano that is spitting up lava. So we ended up buying a ticket to Vanuatu for March. More about that in another post, but let me tell some about Fatu Hiva.

Chris, our English friend, set us up with the boat and the accommodation in Fatu Hiva, moreover he “tourguided” us to hike across the island. When we arrived our host walked us through the village and introduced us to his two grand moms, his uncle, his mom, to half the village. Definitely not the anonymous checking in experience.

We experienced quite a few random things during our stay. To mention a few:

One night our “bread and breakfast” transformed into a cinema, showing Moana, accompanied by a village bingo event in the courtyard. Everyone from the village came there to play bingo, and we were also told to sit down and play, our protests fell on deaf ears.

Another evening, during our bbq dinner, the neighbours’ tiny baby horse was also just hanging out with us on the backyard, casually next to the table.

And when we ran out of beers our host drove around the village to borrow beers from friends and family, the shop closed at 4pm already…

In Fatu Hiva Chris actually “tourguided” us, organized a nice trip for the three of us: an amazing hike across the island and spending one night in a half abandoned camp on the beach with a nice river and coconut trees, basically in the same place Thor Heyerdahl spent in the 1930s his one and a half year effort to go back to nature.

We had sleeping bags, but no tent, so we slept on some wooden planks and banana leaf…under the stars. We had Chris’ machete right next to us in case wild boars would figure they want to bother us. They didn’t, and also didn’t rain which we were happy about.

So yeah, Marquesas is different, is remote. And to round up the picture about how relaxed it is here, this was our airport transfer driver when leaving Marquesas:

Well worth a trip!