Saturday, May 26, 2007 – Today is the last time we will be able to send pictures for a few weeks. Currently, we are in “civilization” where there is an internet café’ (it is a slow and somewhat inconsistent connection, but it is something). Tomorrow we will be heading out to go island hopping. It is extremely unlikely that we will find an internet café on any island between here and Tahiti. So, back to text only updates. Continue reading
May 25, 2007 We want to begin with a correction to a previous blog post. The statues in the park along the water were carved in 1989 for a festival celebrating the Marquesan culture. We guess the park already existed and they permanently put the statues at the park location. The 2000 year old statues are mentioned below.
On Friday, we got up early and went into shore. We went back to the gas station to take care of the fuel tax exemption paperwork and pay. Then we took a guided tour of Nuka Hiva in a 4×4 with a local tour guide, Dean Richard that speaks excellent English.
They only began putting roads on the islands in 1981. Parts of the island are still only accessible by boat. The roads that exist are mostly dirt. They are actively working on making new roads and paving the existing ones. We have seen work crews doing both. We were glad to be chauffeured because we would have not been too comfortable driving those steep, muddy mountain roads. Continue reading
May 23 to May 24, 2007 – Wednesday was a really mellow day. We had gotten in from dinner late on Tuesday, so on Wednesday we slept late. We spent most of the day tiding and doing some laundry. Tidying is another one of those chores that sounds easy enough, but is laborious on a boat. Putting things back often means pulling everything out of a storage area and repacking it all back in because it needs to be packed in a certain order. As we use up things, spaces open up that need to be repacked so things don’t move around within the storage space. We often need to shuffle things from one storage area to another, causing both areas have to be completely pulled out and repacked.
Around 09:30, “Special Blend”, another Nordhavn 43, pulled in and
anchored (translation: parked) near us. They came from Florida, through the Panama Canal, and departed for the Marquesas from the Galapagos. Eric took the dinghy over to visit them, and also went and introduced himself to some people on another nearby power boat. Special Blend is in the foreground and Kosmos is in the background and another one with Kosmos on the left: Continue reading
May 22, 2007 – On Tuesday morning we awoke early in eager anticipation. We were going on an all day horse back ride through the mountains of Nuka Hiva. It was supposed to be beautiful and we were looking forward to it. Christi had managed to make reservations over the phone in French, which is quite a feat. It was raining a little bit as we got ready and dinghied in, but the rain did not concern us. It has rained every day so far and has not lasted very long.
Our tour guide, Patrice, met us at the dinghy landing. Patrice has traditional face and arm tattoos that are really cool. Despite the intimidating looking tattoos Continue reading
Sunday, May 20 – We all slept late and lounged around in the morning. It felt really good to have nothing we absolutely had to do. Don’t get us wrong we have plenty of boat chores that need to get done, but they could wait.
Eric went for a ride in the dinghy and met some people that were hanging out on their boats. One boat had some mechanical failures with their autopilot and generator. In losing their generator, they also lost their water maker. They had to steer by hand for 7 days (not fun) and could not shower for almost two weeks (eeeewwww). That made us very thankful for the fact that we had absolutely no failures or problems in our time at sea.
At lunch time we all dinghied in to land to go out to eat. As we were walking down the street, Eric recognized Continue reading