A propos of nothing, here is a joke. Stop me if you have heard this before:

“Why did they send men up to space on the space shuttle?”
“So if they got lost SOMEONE would stop and read the signs at the intersection.”

Got up and begged two eggs from Sea Pearl to make Sunday morning waffles. We had realized too late yesterday that all the markets closed at noon on Saturday.

After waffles we set out on bicycles for the market and some sort of exploration of the interior. We stopped at the market in town first, since they would close at noon. Got a six pack of Heineken, a dozen eggs, sausages and haricots verts for dinner, and a bauguette, some terrine de cpmpagne and some pate foi for picnic lunch. And a 1.5 L bottle of Orangina. Hooray for French culture!

We had a vague plan to bike up the river valley that flows into Atuona. Robin wanted to bike up the east side, convinced that there were trails to petroglyphs somewhere up the valley on that side. I thought the Google map showed that road dead ending, and thought I’d seen a sign at the intersection advertising a piste to somewhere.

I rode past the first right to take a look at the sign, which pointed right to “Piste Hanamenu.” Robin arrived a few minutes behind me, expressed frustration that we weren’t going on the east side, and rode on by me up the west side while i protested. I would not be outdone in pigheadedness. So, I went Robins way and Robin went my way. The road up the east side was very attractive, with cultivated gardens blossoming and a river with hardened banks. Robin eventually joined me. The road indeed dead ended at some clearly private driveways. So this was just one of many false starts and serendipitous explorations of the day.

The other road went farther up the valley before it turned to rutted rocks and dirt. We eventually parked our bikes and walked, seeing no point in pushing our folding bikes up rocky rutted hills we would never dare to ride back down on the little skinny wheels. At each fork, we tried to guess which was the private drive and which was the public road or piste. Past one last forks up a steep hill, the road dead ended at a hammock tied to trees, with the sound of rushing water in the background.

So I lay down and stared up at the coconut palms and listened to the soothing water. Robin wandered off into the jungle on an indistinct footpath. I eventually went looking for her. Robin was hoping to find petroglyphs or some stone tiki in the wildnesses. I was hoping to find a plunging waterfall of clear fresh water with a pool to bathe in.

Neither of us had any idea whether the things we sought were up this valley. Guide books for Hiva Oa are hard to come by, and nothing on the All Trails maps or Google indicated any particular point of interest up here. But there were some small freshwater cascades, and we declared one of the more attractive ones to be our lunch and bathing site, and stripped and stretched out in the cascade. Nothing is so wondrous to a sailor after a long passage than plentiful flowing fresh water running over your body.

After our very French picnic, we explored up a ridge, then went back to the dirt road and tried the other direction at the last fork. It seemed to lead to a banana plantation - lots of chickens running around - but a fork off the fork led up the other branch of the stream past ancient stone works that seemed to be exactly where a stone tiki god would live. Views of the high mountains through the trees revealed distant cataracts that melted into veils of mist from the highest ridge.

At the end of this dirt track, past some domestic water piping, another footpath led into bamboo and banana forests and red pepper plants that were the size of small trees. We explored further up this valley, past some more stone works, until we found another plunge pool, deeper and clearer than our lunch pool, and bathed again in simple solitude deep in the tropical jungle.

Beyond that pool the trail seemed to disappear into thickets, and it was getting late. We had scheduled a video call with our children for 1530 local time. So we turned around. On the trail back, we remembered there was another side path that looked intriguing. Would we find our tiki up this steep embankment, or at least a view out over the valley?

The distinct side-hill trail climbed up and up, and at the end, where the trail petered out among piles of fallen coconut husks, there was one more elegant stone platform. It looked to me like a throne for a tiki carving, my theory is that most of these ancient spiritual sites were destroyed by Christian missionaries centuries ago, bent on substituting their own superstitions for the ones held by the Polynesians. Robin has read that the ancient spiritual sites became taboo as the islands were converted to Christianity. But clearly people have walked to this site repeatedly, leaving a path distinct enough for us to follow.

There will be mapped tiki carvings at other locations we plan to visit, and next time we go tiki hunting we will probably find a local guide. But we had a spiritual and restorative Sunday nonetheless, and it was great to see and hear our children on a video call using the fast wifi at the boat yard, among the chickens and bottom painting projects.