1001 saveurs des Marquises part 1/4

Labels: 44 - 1001 saveurs des Marquises part 1/4

1001 saveurs des Marquises part 1/4

The Marquises islands in a few words: amazing smell of flowers, wonderful colours of nature and unlimited kindness of the Marquisieans.

I'm very limited in wifi so I will try to choose the most special photos to valorise our experience 😳 But in fact it's too difficult to choose, so I will have to endure days of slow charging 😇😎

By the way, something went wrong with the automatic message when a new post went up. So don't miss out on number 43: https://sailinglouiseanna.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-27-days-of-our-pacific-crossing.html

This is part 1 and 2 of our visit to the Marquises:

Fatu Hiva, 22/05/2019

Arriving at the Marquises was exciting! The first island we visited was Fatu Hiva in the south. We could only see a silhouette of the mountains when the moon managed to shine through the thick clouds. The smell was overwhelming. Like thousands of flowers enveloped our boat! It was 23 o’clock and instead of waiting all night for the sun to come up, we were being guided into the anchorage by our friends that arrived a few days earlier and saved us a great spot!

After a well deserved beer and a “full” night sleep, we take a long breakfast under the rain. The girls experience the smell for the first time and they look like dogs sniffing out the new garden !

The rain rinses off all the salt, reenergises us and so we decide it is time to set foot on land.

Great feeling after 27 days on sea!!! The tall green walls surround us and we just cannot believe that we made it this far !!!

At 11: 30 the school doors opened and we asked if Louise and Anna could join them in the afternoon. Euh, no we were not fed up with them, however getting the girls two days into school was a very strange and quite nice feeling.

They loved school so much we’ll try it on a few more islands 😳

At 12: 50 the school started and at 12:30 we didn’t even have lunch yet. STRESS, STRESS, “HURRY UP, WE’LL BE LATE FOR SCHOOL”. Honestly, not something we missed so far!!!

The girls were shy at first and wanted to stay together, which makes me wonder how it will go when we get back to Belgium 😬.

I was able to untangle Anna from my arms and when we came back three hours later, they were ecstatic! Especially since they were preparing mothers day (which we already celebrated, so mommy got it twice!).

Unfortunately, the second day was also the last as they had a one week holiday. Anna asked me: “What is a holiday?!”. And then two days later she said: “Holiday, holiday, why? When is it finished? I want to go back to school!”.

It’s such a tiny school. They have three classes and 40 children in total. Chickens running around over the playground, surrounded by flowers.

So we finally found it was the perfect opportunity to give them the hockey uniforms we received from Hockey club Merode (Grimbergen). Just enough for the 40 students and quite the right size too. We even had T-shirts for the smallest class 😍 So cute !!!

They were surprised to see a short attached to the skirt 😂

As a token of their gratitude they rehearsed for mothers day in their uniforms:

As I was just still over the top tired, tears of happiness were rolling over my cheeks. Thanks a lot Merode! On top of that every child had brought a gift from their garden.

The “senior class” helped us to carry the fruits to our dinghy and they all wanted to come for a visit on LouiseAnna.

About one hour later Geoffrey was done getting back and forth with the visitors and Louise, Anna and I could go check out all we had received.

After 4 weeks of little vitamins this was heaven!!!

To conclude these two already very intense days, we had a Marquisan diner with 4 other boats at Jean-Pierre’s house. We were still so tired though that we have absolutely no pictures of this other way of savouring this island. They cooked a wild pig in a whole in their garden, covered by banana leaves and “juten” bags. Deliciously soft meat accompanied by manioc in coconut, steamed breadfruit, banana/tapioca mixture, chicken with rice (for the kids) and as a starter we had raw tuna in coconut milk.

Jean-Pierre and his lovely wife are a very interesting couple that thought us a lot about their people and island life. For example (while enjoying our last bottle of whine) they believe that the new priest is a tad too conservative 😏

As to make the night extra special, there was a dance rehearsal in the gym just next door. Incredible to see about 50 villagers dance and sing as a rehearsal for the 14th of July 😎

Needless to say we were the partypoopers and crawled back to our bed the first… Anna fell asleep on the toilet …

The night was a bit short as I got eaten alive by mosquitos and I’m still waking up according to my watch hours. Luckily as a boat started dragging and came dangerously close and last but not least Anna got sick and we had to change all the sheets …

We spent a few days of cleaning (the hull was yellow from the huge volume of plankton in the Pacific) combined with island exploring in the afternoon. This is the selection of pictures I was not able to shorten, sorry, but I hope you’ll like it 😌

We met many animals attached here and there and vanilla creepers. Do you find the acrobatic goats?

A swim in the waterfall wasn’t possible. Too many mosquitos and not enough water yet.

Just before sunset, the local kids wanted to play soccer with Louise and Anna (and mommy 😀 ).

Quite a nice view to play sports!

On Sunday we went to church. It was a beautiful ceremony full of songs, all in Marquisan. Luckily the final song for mothers day, seemed familiar to our ears 😊

We’ve been here for 5 days and it seems months. We walk around the village and everybody knows us. We hear the children shout “Louise” and “Anna” all the time. We really feel at home.