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On passage from Bora Bora to Tonga It’s a wrap! We are in the last 5 months of our world cruise, and I am finally realising that my boat pantry is so full, we have enough to feed ourselves all the way to Australia and beyond. This in itself is not so bad, except that our next ports of call in Tonga, Fiji and Vanuatu have strict quarantine rules (no doubt, taken… Read More
Besides coconuts, the main item on the Paumotus diet is seafood. Fish, lobsters, octopus and crabs are all available inside and outside the lagoons, and every local we met is a practised fisherman (or woman). Each visit at Laiza’s kitchen in Hirifa, would bring a surprise: freshly caught lagoon fish turned into carpaccio or an octopus silly enough to swim in front of the house speared and thrown into a coconut curry… Read More
Lying between the Society and Marquesas groups, the Tuamotu Archipelago is a huge arc of exclusively coral atolls. Atolls are formed by a ring of motus, small islets covered by coconut groves, some cultivated some left unattended. Depending on the sources, the archilepago comprises between 73 and 78 islands, out of which 30 are permanently inhabited, the rest supporting small populations limited by food, water and space. Unlike the Marquesas with their… Read More
After 3 weeks at sea, we landed in the Marquesas last month. This archipelago of 12 mountainous islands is as remote a destination as you get: 6000 klm west of the Galapagos and south of Hawaii, the closest neighboring islands are the Tuamotus, 1000 klm to the west. The Marquesas were originally settled around 340BC by tribes coming from western Polynesia (Tonga-Samoa). These are believed to be descendants of austronesians who started… Read More
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