Moorea

Yesterday we began our seven day cruise around Polynesia’s Society Islands.  Having set sail from Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia, yesterday, this morning we sailed into Ōpūnohu Bay at the island of Moorea.

As one of the most widely-visited Polynesian islands (probably in large part due to its close proximity to Tahiti), we’d been able to find our own local tour guide here, rather than paying over-the-odds for one of the Windstar excursions.

The basic premise of the tour was to visit a waterfall.  With the tour operator’s website not providing a whole lot of information, or any decent pictures, we’d taken a bit of a gamble.  Would it really be worth spending most of our only day on Moorea visiting a waterfall?  Well… the answer proved to be most emphatically yes!

After meeting up with our guide, Yvette, on the pier at Ōpūnohu, we had a 50-minute drive around the coast to the starting point for our walk, with two pickups to make en route.  The first, a lady who has been living on Moorea for several years but whom our guide had only recently met.  She is an ambassador for Moorea and wider Polynesia, travelling internationally to spread knowledge about the island, its people, and especially the ways that Polynesians have traditionally used plants in food, medicines and beauty products.  Yvette had invited Leyla to join her tour – free of charge I am sure – in the hope of learning a thing or two from her.

The second pickup was rather more conventional: two French ladies who were staying at the Sofitel, the newest and most luxurious resort on the island.  As is the case with many of the hotels in Polynesia, the Sofitel is a collection of bungalows – detached studio suites, built on land, or (for anyone whose budget will stretch to the eye-watering prices), on stilts over the lagoon.

With her full contingent of passengers, Yvette explained that the waterfall we would be visiting is located on private land but that she has a special arrangement with the land-owners, who we would be meeting later on.  The final five minutes of the drive were spent very gingerly navigating the family’s very lumpy driveway – our first lesson in Polynesian dancing we were told, as our hips swayed with the rolling of the car!

Before setting out on the hike, we were introduced to the Roucou flower.  The small seeds of the Roucou have been used for centuries wherever red dye is required – in makeup, in fashion… and in paint.  Paul Gaugin spent ten years on Moorea and neighbouring islands, and having not brought with him enough paint to last that long, he sought the help of locals to provide colour for his paintings. Yvette showed us several examples of Gaugin’s works where the colour of the Roucou flower is very prominent.

The seeds of the Roucou plant are also used as an indigestion remedy – three or four seeds in a glass of water is all that is required – and for treating eczema.

By way of a pre-hike pick-me-up, Yvette served us all with a glass of Polynesian Red Bull, made from lime juice, passion fruit and a bit of sugar (delicious!), and also a small Hamoa banana, quite unlike the ones we get in the West.

During the walk up to the waterfall (and I use the word ‘up’ quite literally… we were walking inland and uphill all the way), Yvette introduced us to many more plants and flowers and explained their significance to the Polynesian people.

Historically, a plant with particular importance to the Polynesians is the Bread Fruit Tree.  As well as having a highly-rich, calorific fruit that tastes curiously like fresh bread, the sap of this plant has been used for centuries as an adhesive.  Yvette demonstrated by squeezing the sap from a freshly-cut branch onto two fingers and then pressing them together for a couple of minutes.  Sure enough… they stuck… and the leaves are sticky too.

While the English language has just one word for coconut, and one word for bread fruit, the Polynesians have seven words for each, describing these plants at every stage of their maturity.  Rather like with the Inuit and their numerous words for snow, this goes to show just how important these plants are to the Polynesian people.

Another interesting plant is the Wild Hibiscus.  While they are attached to the plant, Wild Hibiscus flowers are yellow, but between the hours of midday and 1pm, some of the flowers will drop, changing colour to red when they do so.  The Polynesians used the Wild Hibiscus plant to tell the time – when the flowers drop, it was time for the afternoon siesta!

Further up the hill, we came across some red, Fehi bananas (another banana species – who knew there were so many of them!?), and several Star Fruit trees.   Yvette had not expected us to like star fruit as it is quite sour and most of her clients screw up their face like they’ve been asked to eat a lemon.  But Kit and I really enjoyed it – probably explained by our taste for lime in margaritas.

So far, we’d been walking on a track wide enough for vehicles to pass, but this was not the original path.  It had been built to enable four-wheel-drive vehicles to take visitors up to the waterfall, but the landowners became unhappy with the damage this was doing to the ecology of the area.  So they closed the road, and disguised the old path – the one that would have been used centuries ago by the locals to access the waterfall themselves – so it would not attract visitors.

Lucky for us that Yvette knows the way (and has permission to take small groups of hikers up it), so off we tramped into the jungle.

Our route became increasingly shady as we climbed up through the forest.  Yvette demonstrated how one of the trees we were walking beneath – the Polynesian Chestnut – was used for communication.  If you bang a rock against the trunk of this tree, it makes a remarkably loud noise, as if the tree were hollow.  Hitting different parts of the tree makes different pitched sounds – if Evelyn Glennie had been in our group, I am sure she could have produced a masterpiece with a couple of rocks and this tree!

The Awapuhi is another useful plant.  In the red flowers of the Awapuhi – a member of the ginger family – is a clear, slightly viscous liquid which acts as a natural soap or shampoo, and also a mild insect repellent.  Awapuhi is actually used in some Paul Mitchell shampoos in the west, and has the nickname Shampoo Ginger!

Since joining the old path, we had been following a river, and soon came across a small waterfall, and a great spot for a dip.  Being quite hot and sticky by this point, the cool water was very welcome.  Although very tight, there was just enough space to lean back behind the waterfall.  Being able to breathe normally and open your eyes whilst a wall of deafening water falls just a few inches in front of your is a cool, if slightly unnerving, experience!

But this waterfall was nothing in comparison to the one that we reached just a few minutes later.  The Afareaitu waterfall might not be as big or as spectacular as others we have visited (Niagara, notably!), but it is absolutely idyllic.  With the midday sun reflecting off the falling water, it was definitely that scene from the Timotei advert, and another great chance for a swim and a back massage courtesy of the powerful water falling from above.

This waterfall was considered by locals to be a sacred place, as indeed was the whole river.  We saw some hieroglyphs carved into the rocks at the riverside as we began our descent, as well as a carved face that no doubt represented an important figure from Polynesian mythology.

Heading back to the car, Yvette showed us another culturally-significant plant: the Candlenut (or Kukui Nut).  The shells of this nut are ground down and mixed with coconut oil to make ink for tattoos (very popular with Polynesians), while the nut is so oily that it can be used in a lamp… or as a laxative!

To celebrate our completion of the waterfall hike, we were introduced to the land-owners who had prepared for us a banquet of fresh local fruit: pineapple, mango fruit, passion fruit and bananas.  We were also given a taste of Mape – the boiled fruit of the Polynesian chestnut.  Definitely an acquired taste this one – we didn’t dislike it, but as with the Durian that we’d tried whilst in Bali, it’s not like anything we’ve tasted before, and you just don’t expect a fruit to taste quite so much like a this does (something between a very starchy bread and a nut).  As we ate the (mostly) delicious fruits, Leyla played a guitar and sang for us some songs she had written herself in the Tahitian and Hawaiian languages.  We certainly were lucky that Yvette had chosen this day to invite Layla along on the tour!

The river that we had been swimming in earlier passes behind the house where our banquet of fruits was served, and this section of the river is home to several very large eels.  One of our hosts brought a few scraps of fish down to the water side and soon the eels were crowding around at the smell of dinner!  Polynesians do not kill eels: they are considered sacred because – when there are eels in the water – you can be sure that it is clean and healthy.

Over the years, we have spent time with a lot of tour guides in a lot of different places, and Yvette was right up with the best of them.  She was very cheerful, had fantastic English, and provided just the right mix of local knowledge, chit-chat and – when the time was right – a moment of silence.