We were confronted with two options in getting back to Baie Hanavave this morning. Either we hike the 5 miles there and back (not much an option with Gary's leg) or we take the little rubber dinghy on a 3 mile open water adventure. We went with the dinghy. Saddle up partner.
After a rough ride, it started to rain as we approached the bay. But hell, I aint mad.
The current was pretty strong coming in, but we still made it.
There are no trail markings or maps here. Other than asking the locals, there is no way to determine how to get to the waterfall. We wandered around the village looking for a river until a friendly local gave us some rough direction.
This is some kind of worshipping site.
And a of course a Christian church.
Yay! A river! Usually waterfalls have rivers!
We just tried to stay on any path that seemed to be following the river.
We had no idea if we were going in the right direction or not. That is, until we came to the 2nd of the 5 Trials of the Forbidden Waterfall (as we decided they were). The first was merely finding the right trail. The second was the local pot-smoking shaman who let us cross the River of Time after answering his questions three.
The third trial involved walking past three feral dogs who seemed aggressive at first, but were quite friendly (and not feral) once you approached them. I have no pictures of this one.
We knew we were at the fourth trial when a huge bull suddenly stepped out of nowhere and blocked our path, mooing at us with the utmost ferocity.
We tried going around him, but the area was all fenced off with barbed wire, so you had no choice but to brave the fourth trial. I found a weakness in the fence, right behind the bull and tried crawling through.
The bull was on to me and charged as soon as I poked my head through. I had to jump back for my life.
In the end, the bull ended up just being a simple cow, so we yelled at it and it ran away, passing the fourth trial.
The trail got a little rough at this point, and we found ourselves hiking up the side of a mountain.
The fifth trial was just simply playing a quick game of Russian roulette with the devil. I didn't bother taking any pictures as it didn't seem important at the time. I won.
It wasn't long before the waterfall finally came into view.
The Marquesas haven't seen much rain this season, so a lot of their waterfalls are dried up. This one still had SOME water trickling down, but it wasn't much. I imagine this place is absolutely spectacular during full river flow.
We watched the clouds scraping along the top of the mountains on the walk back.
No comments:
Post a Comment