Pitufa.at

The more we see of Rurutu, the more we fall in love with it. We’ve had a few sunny days and used them to explore all around the island. All along the shores we’ve found white beaches with rugged cliffs behind them. There are lots of caves, but no signs to lead tourists there (the locals know where they are anyway, so why bother with signs?) and we only have a rather sketchy map. We have found most of them anyway and stumbling over a cathedral-like grotto hidden in the forest or the cliffs we feel like real discoverers

The interior of the island is criss-crossed with trails and dirt tracks and you can spend days walking along the ridges and up the peaks. The three highest peaks lie conveniently along one caldera and we climbed them within 2 hours (they are all between 360 and 390 m high), but then we got lost for another 3 hours on the way down–many trails but no signs are a perfect recipe for adventurous hikes

First we planned to rent a car, but hitch-hiking is so easy here that we didn’t bother getting our own vehicle in the end. By now everyone on the island seems to know that we’re the ‘sailboatpeople’ and they take us directly to the dock without even asking. Even the gendarmerie car gave us a ride once

We had little info about Rurutu before we got here, but the island is a pleasant surprise for us. In the Lonely Planet Rurutu is described as a raised atoll, but then it should be just a flat plateau surrounded by coral cliffs like Niue, instead it has cliffs divided by flat coastal regions and high mountains inland, so we think that it must have been a lagoon with volcanic islands and a fringing reef before it was raised by tectonic movements.

The road around the island is 36 km long and it’s dotted with look-outs from steep cliffs and caves. So far we’ve seen three of those caves that were once coral and are now covered in stalactites and stalagmites. There is just very little tourism on Rurutu so the sights have no signs, but friendly locals have directed us there. We’re only the third boat(!) here this year, so people are genuinely interested and hospitable. Hitching rides we’ve found that every car stops for a raised thumb, so today we hitchhiked to the southern end of the island where we found endless white beaches with a thundering 3 m swell breaking spectacularly and makatea cliffs just next to volcanic black rocks.

Rurutu has a surprisingly well developed infrastructure, there are well-stocked supermarkets, a bank with an ATM(!), a petrol station, a hospital and a daily veg and fruit market just next to the little harbour where we are located. The harbour itself is well protected (even though it’s been blowing from the southeast since we got here there are hardly any waves in here) and we share it only with a few small local boats.

If it wasn’t for the weather we’d move in here . Unfortunately the Australs are very unlucky weatherwise: in winter it gets seriously cold and the rest of the year the convergence zone usually sits somewhere between Samoa and here and lows and troughs travel along that zone. Since we’ve got here we’ve only had 2 sunny days, the rest of the time it’s been rainy, grey and rather chilly (18 degrees at night, low 20s during the day).

After an excursion through the Cook Islands, Pitufa is back in French Polynesia! We are currently in the ‘Archipel des Australes’ and hop from island to island, starting with Maria in the Northwest and finishing with Rapa Iti in the Southeast.

When we bought Pitufa 10 years ago, she was equipped with navigation instruments by Robertson/Simrad which were already 10 years old then. We are still using these instruments, despite their growing need for life-sustaining measures. Read more »

Yesterday we managed to visit the northern motu, this time in even rougher conditions but with sun and blue skies. The small, shallow lagoon was gleaming light mint, the motus were gleaming in white and fresh green–Maria is stunningly beautiful… A group of young brown boobies circled us while we were taking the dinghy across the lagoon, sometimes almost touching us with their wings – they are incredibly curious and playful.

Today there’s a shift in the wind to the NE predicted, so we have to leave. On the one hand we’d love to visit the motus a few more times, on the other hand the rough conditions in the anchorage have been grinding us down (it seems we haven’t had a good night’s sleep since we left Penrhyn…). Our next stop will be Rurutu 200 nm further east, or if we run out of wind we’ll try to sit out the calm weather in Rimatara (120 nm).

In the end we managed to get everything done and the weather window has arrived just in time: As we’ll be headed East (or rather Southeast) from now on we have to wait for passing troughs and depressions that interrupt the prevailing easterly trade winds and make the wind clock around.
We’ll set out this morning towards the Austral Islands, the southernmost archipelago of French Polynesia.

We’ve spent a week now in Rarotonga. The main island of the Cooks is a beautiful mountainous island with a fringing reef that is too shallow and narrow for navigation (apart from a tiny lagoon on the eastern shore). The main town Avarua is a bustling place with plenty of souvenir shops, clothes shops and little cafes. The Cook Islands are theoretically independent, but have very strong bonds to New Zealand, so the numerous tourists are mainly from New Zealand and the local Polynesians sound also very ‘Kiwi’.

We explored the island hitchhiking and found that the coastal stretch is full of hotels and ressorts, but the mountainous interior remains lush and untouched. There are many hikes up the summits (most of them around 500 m) and we did two of them walking up steep ridges under high trees and many varieties of ferns.

Unfortunately we don’t have much time to play tourists (as much as we enjoy it), because we are busy with errants. The friendly island mentality stops where bureaucracy starts and we still haven’t managed to fuel up Pitufa with duty-free diesel and to organise duty-free fuel (booze) for the crew, despite several days of efforts.

So far we’ve been lucky with the weather, the harbour’s rather calm in the mainly southeasterly winds, but it’s chilly during the nights (18 degrees, BRRRRRRR) and cool during the days. It’s cumbersome to take the dinghy underneath stern lines to the rickety ladder on the dock and lowering provisions down is precarious. With each trip the dinghy gets more dirty and now a construction crew has started a building site on the dock. Two guys are tearing down a concrete wall with jackhammers just upwind of Pitufa–not just the cockpit, even the kitchen sink just below the companion way gets filled up with grit in the 20 knots gusts…