Category Archives: South Pacific

Chimney Dive and Niue Departure

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On Sunday we had Keith from the yacht club and his wife, Sue, over for lunch. We had a nice visit with them. They brought us a batch of pineapple muffins, which we were excited about. Muffins make good passage food.

After lunch we went SCUBA diving with Eric and Gisela at a spot Keith told us about. When he first told us about it, we knew we couldn’t go. It is a more advanced dive to 100 feet, through a cave, and totally out of our league. However, Eric and Gisela are certified rescue divers, so when they arrived in port, we asked them to go with us. They also have a nice underwater diver camera. The dive is called “the chimney”. There is a sheer cliff that drops from 30 to 100 feet. Inside the cliff is a vertical cave, which opens up at the bottom. As you go in the cave, you look up a narrow opening 70 feet tall. From the surface, the opening looks like nothing more than a crack in the surface. The mouth of the cave isn’t visible from the surface, but just outside the mouth of the cave is an old jeep that was washed into the water during Heta. Continue reading →

Niue Festival and More Exploring

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This morning we were up early to go to a festival in the town of Lakepa on the other side of the island. Eric and Gisela joined us. Lakepa happens to be the next village over from where we ended our island tour on Thursday, so after the fair we would continue the island tour. Several people had told us to be at the festival by 0730 or 0800 to get good food. It would be over by noon at the latest. We have noticed that in Polynesia, they tend to get an early start on the day. All the markets begin at or before dawn and are over by 0800, which is why we have never gone to one. Continue reading →

Snake Gully Dive in Niue

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Niue is a popular dive destination because of the incredible water clarity. The island is made of limestone, which is porous. Rain water simply seeps through the rock into the ocean, rather than forming streams and rivers. It is the water running through the limestone that has carved out all the amazing caves around the island. Since there are no rivers, there is no soil run off to cloud the ocean water. There are neat caves and gullies to explore. There also used to be a lot of beautiful coral, as well, but Cyclone Heta destroyed a lot of it.

Eric had signed up to go on two dives. They only allow certified divers, so they wouldn’t let Christi dive. The dive shop gave Eric a $20 discount for being a yacht club member, so the membership has already paid for itself. Continue reading →

Tour of Niue – Beaches and Violent Seas

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Thursday This morning we went by the bakery and picked up some bread and cookies on our way out of town. They had several types of white breads, such as loaves, rolls, cheese topped, etc. It is nice to have some bread choices. In most places in French Polynesia your only choice was a baguette, though occasionally we would find coconut bread. The bread was really good. Cookies were not.

We had decided to head south, figuring that Matapa would be our last stop of the day. The first stop on the southern route was Ana Ana lookout point. There was a short staircase leading to an extremely jagged coral ledge. We know this island is coral and limestone, but we were shocked to see that this ledge was definitely made out of coral. No doubt about it. It amazed us that at some point in time this 100 foot lookout was completely underwater and an abundant reef thriving with life. We later found out that the island had eroded into being basically just a reef and some tectonic activity somehow caused the island to rise up again from the bottom up, and suddenly the existing reef was the top of the island and a new reef formed at the bottom. Now we are wondering if what we had thought was lava rock on some of the other islands was also been dead coral that had somehow managed to surface. It is hard to believe that all the foliage on this island lives in this hostile appearing rock. Continue reading →

Tour of Niue Caves and Pools

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We rented a car and went on a tour of the island. Our first stop was an early lunch at the ice cream store adjoining the yacht club. They also sell hamburgers, steak sandwiches, chicken paninis, ham paninis, and toasties. We suspect a toastie is a grilled cheese sandwich. We got chicken paninis, which had cream cheese and bell pepper and were quite good.

We headed north. Our first stop was the cave at Palahu. You walk down a scary and steep flight of stairs towards the water.
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At the bottom of the stairs is a large cave that you have to walk through to get to the water. The cave is well lit and you could see most of it from the mouth, but we still carefully checked the corners for the monsters from the movie “The Descent”. The cave has lots of neat stalactites and stalagmites formations. Continue reading →