Tiki Wishes and Poisson Cru Dreams
While I am not an epicure and this is not a food-porn blog, food-pornographers may desire to skip to paragraph 14 wherein I describe a meal so astonishingly good that it overshadowed the glory of a 1,200′ waterfall. For the non-food-perverts out there, this is the story of the Valley of the King.
Baie de Tai’oa, on the south-western point of Nuku Hiva, boggles my urban brain. The western wall of the bay is a craggy, 1,500′ cliff that tumbles down from a plateau on the crown of the island. The rest of the bay was formed in a volcanic caldera, with gently curving peaks that climb 500′ around a circular harbour edged with rocky beaches. The bowl stretches up and out of the water towards the crater’s highest edge, full of silent, lush jungle.
We came here to find Vaipo, the as-advertised third highest waterfall in the world , a 3-hour hike from the beach. On the advice of other cruisers, we had contacted Paul (on VHF 9) to act as a local guide and storyteller, and we were scheduled to meet him on the beach at 8am.
The adventure started out well as we sighted a 6′ manta ray flopping clumsily through the surf approaching the beach. These huge creatures fly gracefully through the water when fully submerged, but when they hunt near the surface, their wings splash and jerk around like a morphine-junkie chicken taking a leisurely swim. Paul greeted us on the beach in French-accented English and helped pull the dinghy up above the high-tide line.
The trek started in Haka’ui, or the Valley of the King, so-named because in ~1500AD there was a local ruler known as the Sun King who lived on the beach among a native community of nearly 30,000 people. Paul #humblebragged that he was descended from the royal line. His family still owns the land in the valley, but less than ten of them now live among the ruins of the pre-European civilization.
Near the water he showed us the paepae of the royal home – the stone foundation was roughly two feet high and made out of red volcanic rock reserved for the use in royal structures. His uncle, a young bachelor, now lives on the site in a tin-and-concrete house surrounded by cattle skulls and pirate flags.
Our tour continued northwards on a manicured path called the King’s Highway, a road just wide enough for modern wheeled vehicles to navigate. The highway is lined on either side with well-hewn stone blocks fit together without mortar and runs dead-straight for a kilometre through the nearly uninhabited community. It was built 500 years ago to connect the beachfront population with that of the deeper valley, 8km inland. For our purposes, it provided an easy start to the hike, long and flat, if somewhat muddy.
Paul stopped regularly to show us numerous other paepae along the highway, these ones made of regular stone, not the royal red. Some had more modern (term loosely used) buildings constructed on them, and others were totally overgrown, often taken over completely by a massive banyan tree. The sheer number of these foundations made it a bit easier to picture the size of the community 500 years ago in its prime, which was otherwise difficult to rationalize in the mostly empty valley we were walking through. At least half of the paepae still sported an original tiki idol – small, 1 – 3′ stone carvings that made me want a drink with an umbrella in it. Paul told us that it was ok, even encouraged, to touch them, and that they granted wishes. I wished for a drink with an umbrella in it , being the deep soul that I am.
After about an hour we crossed a knee-deep river marking the boundary of the beachfront village. The trail beyond this became much steeper and the highway disappeared under roots and rockfalls, although the flat-topped edges were sometimes still visible in the overgrowth. The path quickly degenerated into a tangle of mud and rocks, and we spent the next two hours watching our feet as we picked a trail through the mess. From here, the route alternately climbed and descended undulations through the valley floor, but was never quite a difficult climb; it was treacherous, and we all took a muddy spill, but it wasn’t like ascending the Chief. Paul halted at intervals to let us rest and have some water, meanwhile telling some story about the history of the place.
We were trekking through thick tropical forest – the ground was mostly dry and clear of low growth, but on either side of the path the greenery was a criss-crossing knot of trees and vines. The path regularly crossed smaller streams running down ravines full of heavy boulders on the eastern valley wall. To our left, on the west, we could hear the river below us, and occasionally catch a glimpse of the soaring western wall of the valley as it ascended towards the plateau, 1,500′ above. At one stop Paul pointed out a tiny white oblong shape way up in a cave mouth on the cliff, and told us it was a wooden canoe carved and placed there at some long-dead king’s burial. The cave must have been 1,100′ in the air and opened onto what looked like a sheer cliff face. The whole thing seemed impossible, like something from Tolkein.
After three hours, we stopped at a small clearing in the forest, with a huge boulder on our right and a view of the valley on our left. In the distance, Paul pointed out the vertical white knife-edge of Vaipo waterfall, crashing 1,200′ into the valley. It was an impressive sight despite the distance, surrounded with jagged green peaks and monolithic spires. I’d never encountered such a raw landscape before – if it wasn’t for the dusty green veneer clinging to the cliffs, you’d swear the whole range had just been belched steaming out of a volcano.
The hike continued for another half a kilometre after the view of the falls, terminating in a forest clearing full of archaeological artefacts that I was, frankly, too tired to care about. Paul then led us to a small rapids pool in the river and introduced us to his pet fresh-water eel, a brown monstrosity the size of my leg who ate bread but didn’t care for grapefruit. The eel liked to be touched. I sympathized.
There was no circular return route, so we just turned around and retraced the 16,000 odd steps it had taken us to get there. Everyone was silent on the return trip, worn out and awestruck (I’d like to hope) and looking forward to our promised lunch.
Lunch. Forget all that crap I just wrote about natural wonder. We stopped for lunch at one of the few inhabited homes in the valley, where Monette and Matheus had prepared a meal for us. After making sure we took off our shoes and washed our feet, we sat down to a simple table on the terrace, set for four and complete with fresh-drilled coconuts and slightly sweetened lemon water (the combination of which was almost as good as beer. You heard me.) Grilled bananas, shredded green papaya salad and chopped breadfruit with a mustard dressing were laid out for starters. We were all starving and quickly shoveled a plate of this light fare down.
Next came out huge bowls of steamed white rice and the two main courses. One dish was hot goat stew, cooked in coconut milk and spiced with local birds-eye peppers. The other was poisson cru citron; slices of fresh, raw tuna in a light lime and coconut sauce. Six hours of hiking may of course have influenced my opinion of the food, but this was easily one of the best meals I have ever had in my whole 36 years. I had two full plates of the rice and goat and tuna all mixed up, and I’m usually a light eater. In my halting, Spanish-confused French, I tried to propose to Monette, but she just cooed me off with a pat on my head. I was heartbroken.
Full, happy, and exhausted, we set out for the half-click hike back to the beach. While we were eating, Paul had gone to his own homestead nearby and collected bags full of papaya, grapefruit and mint-green limes for us to take with us. He pointed out the trees where the little red hot chili peppers grew and warned us that they were good for, ahem, weight-loss if not used sparingly. He also chopped a huge vine of bananas for us – he carried half, easily, and I strained under the other half. Who knew bananas were so goddamn heavy? That twenty minutes return trip to the dinghy, stuffed with lunch and laden down with twenty pounds of fresh fruit, was the longest, hardest part of the day.
When we got back to the boat, I stripped down and considered the bay. Paul had told us that this time of year, the only creatures in the water were the huge mantas and some hammerhead sharks. The water was green-brown, opaque after heavy rains the night before. I figured, if I can’t see them, they can’t see me, right? I flopped bonelessly over the side of the boat, made a huge splash, and bobbed contentedly for ten minutes before hauling myself out and calling for happy hour.
