The Marquesas are the quintessential exotic land far far away. There are maybe a few hundred people on each island, one or two villages, and the requisite church. There’s just one shop and lots of fruit trees. There are ancient petroglyphs, tiki carvings, incredibly tattoed people, and waterfalls streaming through valleys. There are children all around, saying “bon jour” as you pass, and dogs and chickens roaming the streets. Half of the population in French Polynesia is under the age of 15. I guess that when people are well-fed, happy, Catholic, and have lots of time on their hands, they naturally just procreate.

We wandered around the island that first day, impressed by the scenery all around us – it really was a postcard of paradise and we were definitely someplace special. And, it was so good to be on solid ground again. But, thanks to 20 days on a sailboat swaying on the ocean, we walked like we were drunk, slightly off balance with meandering steps. Hello sea legs! Hitchhiking became our primary mode of transportation and it was surreal to find myself in the back of pick-up trucks zooming along coastal roads as amazing scenery flew by. Someone would always stop to give us a ride, and sometimes it’d just be the three of us in the back, but sometimes we’d be sharing the back with two kids, grandpa, his bicycle and a mound of coconuts!

A breeze picked up and the most amazing smell stopped me in my tracks. It was tiare, the flower of French Polynesia. These small white flowers give off the most amazing scent – it’s the kind of smell that you want to put in your pocket and just take with you. Flowers were the first thing that struck me in the Marquesas, after of course, the towering stark mountain landscapes teeming with towering coconut palms, leafy banana trees and big breadfruit trees with their unique leaves. Flowers are a part of everyday life on these islands, and we noticed it the first moment we stepped ashore – huge bushes of bright red hibiscus flowers, trees speckled with white and yellow frangipani, and hot pink bouganvilla were everywhere. Men had a bud of tiare tucked behind their ears, and women wore crowns of orchids and garlands of tiare. Somehow we got the timing just right, just as we did with Carnaval in Panama, and were lucky enough to be in the Marquesas for Easter. Talk about the ultimate celebration of flowers in this extremely religious population. The missionaries obviously did their job on them. We arrived at the local church that Sunday to find a quaint open-air structure decorated with intricately braided coconut palms and sprinkled with white flowers. Tiare filled the air. Women were dressed all in white with colorful tropical flower wreaths on their straw hats. What a joyful atmosphere! The mass was in French and the local Marquesan language so I couldn’t really follow along, but it was such a neat experience that the words didn’t really matter at all, especially when the choir began to sing. The guitars and ukuleles and Polynesian voices were something special. Who would have thought that a Catholic mass could be so lively and festive?

After such a long sail, we were so looking forward to eating “real” food – meat that we could chew, vegetables that didn’t come out of a can, and fresh fruit. You can’t imagine how much we were looking forward to a big Easter brunch, with steak! But, of course, everything was closed that weekend as the French take their holidays very seriously. Our only option was the local specialty, wild goat, sold by a man out of his garage. It seemed like it could be a fun and adventurous idea, until we realized that we’d have to buy the WHOLE goat, killed on the spot. Maybe that was a little too adventurous for a Saturday afternoon...

We quickly became accustomed to some tasty local foods – raw fish eaten in a zillion ways, manioc, taro, banana flowers. There is a definite coconut theme to Polynesian cuisine, and it was absolutely delicious. Poisson cru – raw fish in coconut milk. Crevettes in coconut curry – big freshwater shrimp with coconut milk. Yum! A local man we met asking directions ended up giving us two hocks of wild goat from his latest backcountry hunting success; it seems we were destined for goat one way or the other… I admit I was a bit wary as I watched Gregory and Martial carving up the raw gray meat with a not-so-sharp dive knife, but I’m beginning to believe that coconut milk makes everything taste good! There were fisherman selling their daily catch (strung up by the gills with rope and sometimes still moving) on the side of the road and Chinese restaurants on every street corner. I hadn’t realized how strong the Chinese influence was in these islands… Chow mein and egg rolls are totally standard fare, but of course in French Polynesia it’s served up with a baguette!

In our ongoing search for fresh food, we asked a couple of locals on Tahuata if there was anywhere on the island we could buy fruit. They looked at us if we were from Mars. I guess it’s totally foreign concept to them to buy or sell FRUIT – it’s just everywhere! Word of our quest must have spread like wildfire through the tiny village because no less than 15 minutes later, Gregory and I found ourselves armed with a long stick to pick our own pamplomousse (South Pacific grapefruit) and numerous villagers were picking lemons and limes off their trees to give us along with stalks of bananas and some coconuts! Polynesian hospitality at its finest.

Is it because Fatu Hiva is the island that is the farthest away, least inhabited, the most remote, the least visited and there is no other way to get there other than by boat, that we knew we had to go? The Bay of Vierges in Hanavave is well-known in the yachting world for those reasons, and we couldn’t wait to see it. Urios arrived early on a Sunday morning to a welcoming committee of dolphins, steep and lush cliffsides dotted with wild horses and goats, jagged rock formations with sunshine streaming between the protuberances, a church with a white steeple, birds swooping in the scenery, palm trees as far as you could see, and a black sand beach. It was straight out of a movie, and by far the most spectacular place we’ve been so far.

We spent a week in Fatu Hiva and explored the island, bathed in fresh water rivers, and trekked over the mountain passes. We hiked for two hours along a dirt track and goat paths, climbing over tree roots and under fallen trunks through the jungle to find the local waterfall. Fresh water flowed over a towering ledge and crashed into a clear rock basin amongst the mape trees to create the perfect swimming spot. And, cold water at that! It was heaven… until you got out of the water. Blood-sucking miniscule biting flies clustered in groups on your body in mere seconds and left itchy bites that lasted for weeks. The Marquesas are notorious for these evil creatures and if I thought the mosquitoes in Panama were my greatest enemy, I knew it was because I hadn’t met the no-no yet...

I stop and have to laugh sometimes, just thinking about the situations that I have found myself in in the last few months. The island gets supplies by cargo ship every month or so and we were obviously nearing the end of the month because the shop was bare except for a few cans of Safeway carrots and a couple of rolls of toilet paper. They must all have been eating canned corned beef for days! We happened to hike the four and a half long hot hours to the other village Omoa on the day that the Aranui cargo ship was coming to make deliveries. The dirt track took us high up the hills to panoramic views of the ocean, over the summit through forests and tropical foliage, and down the other side with a dramatic backdrop of rocky volcanic peaks the whole way. Stunning! Martial had done the hike the day before with the expectation of making it a one-way effort, but eight hours later we saw him wearily trudging down the road. Unlucky. It seems that the number of cars going from one village to the other was zero that day. The thought of a nine-hour roundtrip was discouraging, but we thought for sure that we’d have better hitchhiking karma. But, of course, Murphy’s Law reigns supreme – of the three cars on this side of the island, none were making the trip over the hill that day. Bummer, but, my laziness combined with Gregory’s charm and language skills made for true resourcefulness to find a way home. After spending five hours watching the cargo crew ferry and unload countless pallets of supplies with a motorized platform barge in the crazy surging surf – the epitome of hairy and dangerous – we found ourselves leaping onto the heaving platform and then being unloaded onto the cargo ship with the rest of the crew. Soon thereafter we faked our way onto the Lido deck and were heading towards Hanavave Bay, enjoying the sunset with an icy cold Ricard (pastis) in our hands. Who would have known you could hitchhike on a cargo ship? Lesson learned: you never know what can happen, unless you ask.

The Marquesas are known for their wood carving and tattoos as much as they are known for their awesome scenery. Fatu Hiva is home to notable artisans and the artwork is amazingly detailed and delicate and exotic, both in rosewood and on skin! I’d always imagined these artists sitting in their studios taking their time carving intricate turtle designs on bowls by hand, but in reality their workshop is usually just a tin shack in their backyard where they’re attacking pieces of wood with a power saw while listening to the Rolling Stones. Regardless of the process though, the end result is still beautiful art! I don’t know what it is about traveling, but when you’re in the element, you always want that one cool souvenir to take home with you… There were great big carved masks, three-foot tiki statues and some war clubs that I would love to have but thankfully, the finite storage space on a sailboat limits most impulse buys. And, at the end of the day, would I really want a google-eyed idol staring at me eerily from some corner of my living room?

Tattoo art has significant cultural history and meaning in French Polynesia and both men and women were often fully covered in beautiful elaborate Polyesian-designed tattoos, or at the very least tattoed on an arm or ankle. The themes were unique and the designs were distinctively Marquesan. It was funny to witness the souvenir tattoo phenomenon with sailors. It seemed like if you ever had the temptation in life to get a tattoo, you got really indulgent (or daring) and couldn’t resist when you got to the Marquesas. We saw lots of blond-haired yachties with Polynesian arm bands or tiki tattoos in the smalls of their backs. The first time I met Sean in Rangiroa, I couldn’t help but comment on the cool tattoo on his ankle – it was a really neat intricate design of lizards and dolphins and tiki faces. The next time I saw him in Papeete, he had just gotten another tattoo on his arm, the same theme, but different. A few weeks later when I saw him again, the arm tattoo now swirled around his arm in a lizard tail design down towards his wrist. I think Sean needs to get out of French Polynesia soon otherwise he’s going to end up tattooed from head to toe at this rate, and look shockingly out of place when he gets back to Bermuda!

For people that mostly didn’t have running water, I was a little surprised to see televisions broadcasting Party of Five dubbed in French, cans of Cheetos and bottles of Coca Cola littering the streets, and kids wearing Fubu t-shirts. You want to think that the population is immune to the influences of commerciality by sheer distance, but obviously some things like Coke are just ubiquitous. The local population seemed eager to meet the new visitors in the anchorage, and it didn’t take long for us to find out why. Understandably, they are so far from everything that the yachties are a great resource of information, help and STUFF. After an initial “bonjour,” the next sentence was usually about trading. It was a bit bizarre to be asked for ammunition and alcohol – though a surprisingly large number of sailboats have it– but we discovered that they literally wanted anything we had… t-shirts, rope, tools, food. A few hairclips, a baseball hat and a bottle of shampoo got me a wooden tiki statue. Cool! The concept was neat and novel but after a week of “Trade? Trade?” everytime we walked by, I have to admit we were all hoping for a different kind of conversation and local interaction. Even the little picked up on the concept and those who had candy became pied pipers all through town with little kids following them asking for bon bons... The yachties embraced the community and did what they could to help. A man’s pig is now securely tethered by one leg to a tree thanks to Twixt’s piece of rope, a woman has the first picture ever taken of her child, and a woodcarver can keep on carving thanks to some drill bits that Billabong happened to have on board. I didn’t mind the “asking” so much (especially since I didn’t speak French and didn’t know what they were talking about anyways), but some thought it was more akin to begging and were understandably more bothered by it... I have to agree that asking for someone’s wedding ring off her finger was a little too much! But, however you choose to look at it, no matter how much we gave or what they didn’t get, one thing is for sure... there will always be other sailboats coming to Fatu Hiva.