The Taipivai Drive is a tour I’ve wanted to take for 8 years. It is the only tour offered by Holland America Lines on the island of Nuka Hiva in the Marquéses Islands. The tour is organized by residents with 4WD pickup trucks and SUVs to take visitors into Nuka Hiva’s Taipivai Valley. Four to eight of us piled into a truck with our guide riding in one of the vehicles to interpret for us at each stop.
The valley was first brought to the West’s attention by Herman Melville, who jumped ship on a whaling expedition and lived with natives in the valley. He wrote Typee, a Peep at Polynesian Life. It’s a classic of travel writing, a fictionalized account of his own experiences. It made his reputation and during his lifetime it, rather than Moby Dick, was his most famous book. He gained the popular reputation as “The Man who lived among the cannibals.” It drew attention because it was critical of what he saw as the hypocrisy of missionaries and raised questions of what, exactly, “civilized” means. As a kid I loved Melville’s books. He helped heighten the interest in travel and the sea that I got from my grandfather.
The two other times we were on Nuka Hiva, a 300 lbs. weight limit prohibited me from taking the tour. But now I’m below that, partly because I skipped some of the food events I discussed in the last post. One of the rewards of sticking to a diet was I could sign up; knowing that when I long for something too long, I could be setting myself up for disappointment.
This one was a mixed bag. The tour spent time at unadvertised stops including the local Cathedral of Notre Dame with St. Peter the Fisherman and John the Baptist guarding the entrance and ukulele playing saint guarding the cathedral’s mortuary. While the first bishop tried to suppress local culture, newer bishops embraced it commissioning the statues and using stones carved for mixing paints and sharpening tools set into the wall of the cathedral.
We also stopped at a nearby paepae, a rectangular raised stone platform where ceremonial acts were conducted. The guide explained that when people visited from other Polynesian islands, they brought statues. Tikis, from their islands to add to the collection. Some of the carved posts reminded me of Pacific Northwest Native form line art. The stop was lengthened by allowing time to stop for souvenirs.
These stops were not advertised in the tour description and are within easy walking distance of the ship’s tenders. We’ve walked to them in the past. It had been my plan to walk to them after the tour. While the guide told engrossing stories about these places it was not what I signed up for and these stops took up half the time allotted to the tour. As a result, our time in the Taipivai Valley was limited. While we visited the A’itua Temple in the valley and were treated to fresh fruit, including some of the sweetest grapefruit I’ve ever tasted we never got to one of the advertised highlights, the volcanic black sand beach. We did see it from a scenic overlook.
Our guide got a call from his boss during the tour to tell him to skip the beach and head back to the pier because more people booked in the afternoon than expected. He tried to make us feel better by telling us the beach wasn’t as black as it used to be because the black volcanic sand was being diluted by white sand coming from the coral reefs that are beginning to establish themselves off the island. Nuka Hiva is one of the few Islands in French Polynesia that does not have a protective reef. The formally black sand beach was turning gray. The development of coral is a good thing but I still would have liked to see it first-hand.
What we saw of the valley on the drive and from the scenic overviews was beautiful. The guide was well informed and entertaining and I count myself lucky to see, in person, a place so vividly implanted in my brain through good writing.
But Melville is not the reason most people go to the Tiapivai Valley. The reality TV show Survivor made it famous in our time. Our guide explained that the island did not have any dangerous animals. No scorpions, deadly snakes or apex predators. It did have annoying sand flies and some centipedes with bites that hurt but nothing to create mortal danger unless you encounter a shark in the sea. The island is full of nutritious food, like breadfruit, that is free for the taking. Survival was not difficult for “Survivor.” He said the biggest problem was to find remote looking places where you could truck in all the equipment. The islanders liked Survivor. It helped boost the economy when they were shooting it and brought tourists after. They left behind a lot of gear from the community, paid well and threw great parties.
