logo Althea's Web Diary
Date: 01 Jan 2005 02:24:11
Title: Jan 1, 2005
[<< Prev Post] | [Next Post >>]
[Back to Index/Map]

Auckland, New Zealand

 

Happy New Year from New Zealand!  We have been here for about a month (sorry for the delay in posting). Before we tell you much about NZ, we need to catch you up on our stay in Wallis/Futuna and Fiji.

 

Wallis & Futuna, 13 20 South, 176 09 West

In mid October we visited the country of Wallis & Futuna (a French colony) after a 3 day sail from Samoa. Made up of three big islands that are off the beaten path even for cruisers, this country is seldom visited & offers little in the way of tourism infrastructure. We arrived with no French Polynesia money & headed to Wallis' only ATM. Alas, it was broken & no restaurant or store could even process a credit card. (We managed to pay for lunch with NZ dollars after a little haggling over the exchange rate.) Wallis looks much like Bora Bora - one large mountainous central island surrounded by a beautiful lagoon & lots of uninhabited motus (small islands) many of which had small beachside chapels - a testament to a strong Catholic faith. The Wallisians are fortunate in that they well never be overrun by tourists given the Island’s location. We spent several days in one little anchorage where we were serenaded one evening by beautiful hymns pouring out of a pretty little white beachside church that was completely open with no walls or roof, with just an altar as backdrop that rose into a spire. The people were extremely laid back, yet prices were very high as we have found in all the French islands. We walked & hitchhiked around the island & came across several interesting churches like the one below (it is not stone, but painted to look like stone with lots of decorative shells on its wedding cake front).

 

 

 

After Wallis, we stopped for one night in the pass between Alofi & Futuna. Alofi is uninhabited except by day when boatloads of farmers arrive to tend to the crops they plant there. They erected a pretty white chapel we guess in case they stayed over the weekend – certainly no chance of missing mass. We had a nice dive over some pretty coral heads & spotted a majestic wahoo (rare to see so close to land) & a giant sea turtle. The beach that we anchored off was a long, long stretch of white sand with lots of beautiful shells as it did not have many visitors to pick them over. The sunset offered us a spectacular array of changing colors.

 

 

 

 

 

[<< Prev Post] | [Next Post >>]
[Back to Index/Map]

Diary Entries