Week 90: Moorea (5nm)

An active week aboard Serenity First where we shifted from the wonders of the seas around Moorea to exploring the various parts of its interior, first by hiking the Three Coconut Col and then taking some e-bikes (wow they go fast) around the 60km circumference of the island.

Captain’s log

25th May: Waved goodbye to Catherine Estelle and ZAN, and then got stuck into a couple of boat projects as well as catching up a bit on the blog backlog. Laura took a gamble and handed over one of her precious curry recipes for me to be lead cook on during the evening, and thankfully I didn’t mess it up! A delicious (if slightly unorthodox) combination of squash, peanut butter and coconut, but would thoroughly recommend especially as you only need one pan, which means less washing up 🙂

26th May: Decided to make the short trip round to Cook’s Bay for a change of scenery and to be closer to the various amenities. Unfortunately it rained all afternoon, so we decided to wait aboard Serenity and catch up with admin, leaving the exploring of the local town to the next day.

27th May: Mostly clear skies marked a favourable change in the weather and cast a more welcoming light over the spectacular setting that is Cook’s Bay. We headed into shore to have a wander around, and found a smoothie stall that was doing a good trade converting the local pineapples, bananas and mangos into dense liquid desserts. Unfortunately we weren’t able to locate any public garbage disposal and so we returned to Serenity with a dinghy full of trash, but were given some pointers by David and Kris on S/V Taipan as to where we should look the next day.

28th May: We headed off to conquer the infamous Three Coconut Tree hike and returned exalted and exhausted (see Story of the Week below). I then discovered that adding frozen bananas to a blended cocktail completely makes up for an inadequate blender, whilst Laura tried to find a place for our trash that wouldn’t result in a return-to-sender experience. Finished off with an early dinner at the deservedly well-reviewed Allo Pizza – home of both wonderful wood fired pizza and a maverick approach to slicing them.

29th May: Took a guess that the nearby David and Kris on the nearby S/V Taipan would own a set of heavy duty electrical crimpers (they’ve been cruising for 17 years), and was able to offer them some dinghy repair glue to return the favour. This allowed me to rewire some of the newly installed systems monitors (that may have adversely affected the anchor windlass in the original setup), whilst Laura caught up on blog admin and scoped out an expedition for us the next day. Finished the day getting to know Kris and David a bit better over a sundowner, and then enjoyed episode three of Keeping Faith along with testing a recipe for ‘100 garlic clove curry’ (tasty but not a stomach settler).

30th May: We rented a couple of e-bikes (electrically assisted) and set off to explore Moorea – the island is circumnavigated by a single main coast road that is 60km long and has a bike lane almost all the way round. It was a thrilling experience as you are able to maintain speeds of over 20km/hour (the bikes had speedometers!) without any apparent effort, and we punctuated the journey with stops at various view points and snack shacks, culminating in an eye-watering ascent to The Tropical Garden cafe for ice cream followed by a visit to the local distillery (both of which used pineapples as their principal ingredients). Finished the day aboard S/V Taipan where Kris and David introduce us to Sal and John (S/V Capal Mara), Peter (M/V Sea Forever), Jaye and Irwin (S/V Winsome), and Graham and Janny (S/V Leela): it was a full cockpit and the volume of snacks and home-made pizza meant we didn’t even need to cook dinner upon our return to Serenity many hours later. 

31st May: After looking at the weather, we realised that if we wanted to move onto one of the Leeward Islands this week, then we had a closing window as a weather system developing S of Tahiti would generate some unpleasant seas from Tuesday night. So we worked our way through the list of jobs that were keeping us from leaving (reattaching macerator pump, blog updates, meal plan for next two weeks) to ensure that if the window remained open the next day, we would be in a position to leave. Settling down for potentially our last night in Cooks Bay, we took full advantage of the soporific stillness that prevails here once the sun goes down.

Story of the week: Hike up to the Three Coconut Col

It seems Laura’s and my appreciation of hiking is shared by the sailors in whose wake we follow as the various cruising guides typically have at least one recommended trail for each of the islands in French Polynesia. The Three Coconut Trees hike on Moorea has received more plaudits that any other and so it was inevitable that Laura and I would take a day to explore it I whilst we were here. The trail starts at Moorea’s Belvedere (‘lookout spot’), which we knew would take some climbing to reach in itself, and so the plan as per the cruising guide suggestion was to try and hitch a ride up and from there commence our walking in earnest.

As it turns out, the ease of hitching in Moorea may have changed since our guides were written (or perhaps we are not appealing hitchhikers?) but when reflecting back on the overall success of the day, this was fate actually working in our favour. We had set out early in case no rides were available, and so it was still fairly cool and only got properly steep for the final 20 minutes to the Belvedere. On the way up, we passed countless pineapple plantations, the local agricultural college (presumably the world leading institute on pineapple growing), and our first encounter with some marae – archaeological ruins from the original settlers of these islands. They took the form of some stone platforms that were now slowly being reclaimed by the surrounding woodland and represented significant outlays of effort given they were built 300 years ago.

Catching our breath whilst enjoying the bench at the suitably named Belvedere, we found a helpful map that marked out a number of the local trails including the one we were hoping for. Our trail was marked as Easy (on a scale that also included Very Easy and Difficult), but the ascent was only 200m (vs. the 800m of our Tahitian hike) and the estimated hiking time was 3 hours. It was before 9am and so we lined up one of the other hikes on the board in the event that our legs still had some energy left in them when we returned. 

We had been expecting a hike along one of the mountainous ridges (although neither of us could put our finger on why), but the trail immediately descended into some fairly thick woodland and we bumbled across the sides of the mountainous ridge with limited ups and downs. Whilst the first 100m of the trail were reinforced with gravel, it then reverted to a more natural feel that was certainly more than a goat path but occasionally raised questions about where we needed to go. After around an hour of hiking, it then started to divert upwards and then reached a series of intense switchbacks before revealing the final view point. 

The hike takes its name from a trio of palm trees that used to be found at its highest point (which poses the interesting question of “where did the coconut come from?”), but unfortunates a storm had blown these trees down. It isn’t clear whether they seeded the next generation before this event, or people have intervened with replacements – either way the good news is that new palm trees growing on the final col mean that the tourist board don’t need to perform a rebranding exercise. We hadn’t realised that since we were finishing at a col (or ridge saddle), we would have views down both the North and South sides of the island, which were a more than ample reward for our hiking efforts (especially when accompanied with some wild passion fruit we’d found on route).

We made the return journey with the satisfaction of knowing that there was now limited ascent in our hiking futures, and we then had an enjoyable lunch of Brie and tomato sandwiches back on the Belvedere bench. Wild chickens (who we’ve started to consider to be the French Polynesian pigeon) had clearly identified the scavenging potential of this spot and provided us with some laughs as they pounced on various morsels, but were forced to flee before they were mobbed by their compatriots, leading to Benny Hill style chase scenes as they desperately sought solitude where they could finally enjoy their prize. 

Previous intentions to do another hike were shattered upon learning that the other options all required another round of fighting gravity, and my legs exercised their veto power. Instead, we plotted a path back down to Cooks Bay on a series of small paths that wound their way through the woods and fields, empowered by the accuracy of the MapsMe offline app that another cruiser had recently recommended to us. Relaxing into a homeward bound state of mind, we were pleasantly surprised to come upon even more memorable experiences in this final stage of our journey.

First was a much larger set of marae that weren’t mentioned on any of the maps, but gave far better indication of the scale of the human population that had originally settled here. The jungle setting helped provide a Indiana Jones atmosphere and we both found ourselves humming the theme tune as yet more of these ruins revealed themselves.

No sooner were we past the marae than we were walking through the middle of a pineapple plantation. We were pretty sure the path we were following was public, and this was confirmed by the friendly response of three farm workers that were resting by the side of it. Witnessing my undoubtedly hilarious reaction to seeing how pineapples actually grow, they insisted we pick one of the remaining fruits (a dangerous task without gloves!) and then prepared it for us to eat leaving a bit of the top behind to use like the stick of an ice lolly. This was the Polynesian hospitality that we’d heard about in the stories of other cruisers. 

The pineapple plantation mysteriously became a high ropes course that could have occupied us for at least a day had it been open, and then itself became a back road where we were befriended by a quartet of bull terriers who clearly decided that we were in need of protection from the other mongrels down the road. After fifteen minutes and now rejoining the main road, we eventually managed to persuade them that we could take care of ourselves and got them to return back up towards their home, as we did the same.

Parting thoughts: A profanity of pineapples

I hope I’m not the only one who wasn’t aware of what a pineapple plant looked like. They grow from the centre of these low spiky bushes, one pineapple per plant, and I would argue look slightly ridiculous. We weren’t able to verify why Moorea was so conducive to pineapple farms (I’m assuming they need insane amounts of both sun and rain, and maybe volcanic soil?), but the vast numbers of farms felt like some kind of full immersion therapy having never seen a single wild pineapple before this point. Our crude use of language in continually remarking upon the number of pineapples led us to coin the word ‘profanity’ as our preferred alliterative collective noun. 

It also must tax the local economy to come up with inspired uses of pineapples, of which the peak must be the bottle of pineapple wine that we have bought but not yet tried – watch this space.