I think we all a bit shell shocked our first day on Hiva Oa. We had made our landfall very early, so much so that we did circles with the boat outside the harbor waiting for good light before we went in, but after so many days at sea there was lots to be done to the boat before we went ashore. By the time we dealt with anchoring and digging the dingy out of the forepeak and blowing it up, and many other necessary tasks, it was early afternoon before we headed for shore. Here in the Marquesas that means it was quite hot and anyone with any sense is having a nap in the shade. I believe they call it the time of day when only mad dogs and Englishmen are astir. Well we were with them our first day. One of our cruising guides had said that it was quite easy to get a ride into town, even without putting your thumb out, but apparently that book is about 8 years old and things have changed. We couldn't get a ride with all our thumbs out, so we hoofed it about 2 miles over a big hill into town, panting and sweating the whole way. Just before town we found a small hotel with a lovely balconye with tables overlooking the bay. We gratefully sat in their shade and had our first icy cold Hinanos, the local beer from Tahiti - delicious. The kind folks there gave us our first pamplemousse, the local version of grapefruit. They are enormous and very sweet. We are big fans now and usually have one along with our morning coffee.
Next we wandered on into town, but found that everything was closed, since it was a Sunday, but we did locate all the stores, and the bank and post office and we enjoyed seeing the town. The houses were all pretty simple, but some of the yards are beautiful, with hibiscus and all sorts of other flowers, and fruit trees everywhere.
After our walkabout, we wandered back to the hotel balconey restaurant at about 3PM hoping to have a bite to eat, but they were not serving food until 6 PM. Fred voted for napping right there on their patio chairs until dinnertime, but I thought I might pass out from hunger before then, so Fred managed to talk the hotel man into driving us back to the harbor then and picking us up again at 7 PM, so we could return for dinner. We went back to the boat, had a snack, freshened up and returned to the shore at 7, waiting for our ride. We waited and waited and waited, until we became convinced that the hotel guy had forgotten us and we were tired of being dinner for the mosquitos instead of having dinner ourselves. Fred managed to bum us a different ride into town from Joseph (the first of about 6 Josephs we would eventually meet). When we got back to the restaurant they asked what we were doing there so early, and we found that we had not set our watches to local time correctly, and it was only 645 - doh! Anyway, we had a nice dinner, but barely managed to stay awake for the whole thing, and returned to the boat for our first full night sleep since leaving San Francisco.
The next day, Monday, was spent shopping and trying to figure out how to make phone calls and where one could get on the internet (it's at the post office here). This is when it became clear that Fred and Angie had forgotten more French than they remembered (Jeff says he'll help with the Spanish, but the French is up to us) and that very few of the locals speak much English at all. So things went a bit more slowly than we expected. This is also the day that we learned that pretty much everything closes from 1130 - 230, which is quite sensible here, but a bit inconvenient for boaters since the harbor is far away from the town.
ON Tuesday we officially checked through customs with the help of a yacht service Fred had arranged for ahead of time. That meant we got a ride into town, then did a few errands, then headed to the post office where we learned there was a 2 hour wait for the computer, so back to the boat we went. By this time we were really ready to get to a swimming spot. We had been advised against swimming where we were because of sharks, so we decided to head off to Fatu Hiva the next day.
That evening we had a bit of a surprise when the copra boat arrived. There are two copra boats which service the islands and bring goods in from Tahiti and pick up copra (dried coconut meat from which oil is extracted) and carry passengers. Inside the harbor they had a big area that you were not allowed to moor in because you have to leave room for these boats to maneuver to the dock. We wound up anchoring outside the breakwater because there was so little room left in the allowed area inside. It looked to us like the boats that were already outside had left an empty corridor that lined up with the entrance to the breakwater, so we assumed that was the path the copra boats would take. Wrong! We had just finished dinner on the boat and heard a strange noise outside and looked out to see the copra boat, which was much bigger than we had imagined, crusing right through the middle of the all the anchored sailboats. We weren't right alongside the path it chose to take, but it looked like they were about 10 feet away from some of the other sailboats, and they were just zooming right along. I think that if I'd been on one of those boats I might have dove off and tried to swim for it, sharks or no sharks!
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