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By the time my three month visa was due to expire, I had already met the Gendarme on a rare trip to Taiohae, he said that he thought that the Caledonien would soon be taken out of service and that it would be best for me to take the next boat, which was the Caledonien's sister ship the Tahitien, it was arriving about the time my Visa would expire. By that time my house in the jungle was near completion and I felt in many ways that I had accomplished what I had set out to do. Also I was ready to return to Vancouver as I had debts to pay and could not live without money indefinitely. I had learned some important lessons in Hakaui and realized that the next time I tried to go back to nature, it would be in a place where there were not so many mosquitoes, no no flys, centipedes, cockroaches and insects generally, and that I should look for a place that was cooler, perhaps a sub tropical climate. I had built a shack in the jungle, but it was with the help and traditional know how of Marcel and his wife Rosemarie, for which, I shall be forever grateful, as well as the great generosity shown to me by Marcel's father Martin Taupotini who welcomed me with open arms from the first day. |
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Also Daniel and Antoinette who were the only other people living in Hakaui, They too did all they could to assist me and fed me royally on many occasions. You will have perhaps noticed that on the internet Hakaui is often called Daniel's bay, being named that by the numerous yacht people that have dropped anchor here. This is due in no small part to Daniel's great kindness and hospitality to all those who had been fortunate enough to visit this truly unique and wonderous valley. "Since 1970 cruising sailors have enjoyed refuge in Daniel's Bay, an exquisite anchorage in the southwest corner of beautiful Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands. Charted as Taioa Bay, its eastern arm, Hakatea Cove, is the best natural harbor in the Marquesas with 360-degree protection, good holding in mud, cruising manta rays, and soaring cliffs surrounding it. The white sand beach once boasted a pipe with a freshwater shower head and a tap fed with delicious drinking water from a distant hillside stream. Daniel planted pamplemousse [grapefruit], bananas, mangoes, papayas, and coconuts around his solitary beach front house and shared them abundantly with visiting sailors. He patiently explained to each arriving boat how to find the landing at the river and the trail to the cool waterfall. The reliable and generous hospitality of Daniel and his wife, Antoinette, extended to cruising boats for more than 30 years, gave Daniel's Bay its name and character." (see this article on the aftermath of "Survivor" in Hakaui) I left almost everything behind in Hakaui, the trunk, bicycle, hammock, as I figured I would going back to Canada as soon as I could figure out a way to do it. I caught the Tahitien out of Taiohae, and on it's way to Tahiti, the ship passed close to Ua Pou. Even though I had just come from one of the most spectacular places in the Pacific, Ua Pou was even more amazing. I remember thinking that it looked like an immense towering castle of some powerful Sorceress, flanked with huge spires and a lofty summit that rises above the clouds. Certainly one of the seven wonders of the South Pacific. |
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Soon after arriving in Tahiti I had the good luck to run into Tom who had passed through Hakaui on his trimaran the month before. He had dry docked his boat in Papeete (Fare Ute) and said I could stay on it while he went back to the States for a few weeks. Before he left he recommended that I read some of the books he had on the boat, one was The First and Last Freedom, by Jiddu Krishnamurti. Tom was perhaps a fan of Krishnamurti, I don't really remember, but he was anyway a very bright guy and amazed me with his ability to speak Marquesan, simply by studying a book on the language while sailing down. Anyway I am fairly sure he must have recommended this work by Krishnamurti and I did get around to reading it as, almost as soon as Tom left, I caught the dangue fever, and was stuck on the boat recuperating for quite a while. The dangue fever is a powerful and sometimes deadly flu spread by mosquitoes. I walked into town one morning and suddenly started to feel out of strength and so sat down on the steps outside a travel agency, to recuperate my forces. I think I was going there to find out how I could get back to Canada, anyway I sat on the steps all day, I couldn't move, I couldn't get up, I felt as though I couldn't walk. Late in the afternoon, in desperation, I decided to flag down a taxi to take me back to the boat where I was barely able to climb in and then did not move for three days. I didn't eat or drink anything, water seemed like oil if you tried to drink it. You develop a strong fever oscillating with terrible chills and numbing headache and lose a lot of weight just sweating. I think I must have been quite delirious at times. Your mind locks on to fixations that seem to last for hours, like spending 5 hours thinking about how to get up and out of bed I was overweight coming out of the Marquesas, so losing a few pounds wasn't a bad thing and when I was able, I started reading the First and Last Freedom. I was lucky to have come across this book so early in life. It is the kind of book that you have to be ready for, and at that point I was not yet ripe enough. About three years later I read it again, and in some ways it was as though I was reading it for the first time. By this time I was ready, and really studied the whole book cover to cover, and then went out and bought every other Krishnamurti publication I could find. But really you only need to read just the one book, The First and Last Freedom, contains the quintessence of his message, light years ahead of it's time. |
