Life in the Marquesas

South Pacific Familyadventure 2008
Claes Brodin
Fri 23 May 2008 21:06
The Marquesas islands are amazing beautiful. High mountains, waterfalls,
exuberant jungle vegetation, including wild banana, mango, guava,
pineaple, breadfruit, pumplemouse ( a type of sweet grapefruit), limes,
wild pigs (vildsvin), goat and tups to hunt, and a lot of fish and no
dangerous animals other than sharks on the bay. Marquesian people is very
friendly, and live very relaxed. They love gardening, and their gardens
are architectically grown with all types of fruits. Every home have all
the exotic fruit trees, tups and hens, goats,dogs, cats, and a horse. And
many of them own jeeps. Sometimes one can see people riding their horses
on the beach ” a galope y a-pelo” (wthout a horse chair). Weekends and
holidays they spent grilling and bading in the beach with their
families….Real life quality.. We have met som french people that left
France and ”high development” to live in this paradise. The fact that the
Marquesas belong to France, is well welcome by its habitants, there is
good social infrastructure, like primary and secondary schools, very good
roads, and health care. It seems that people here is happy, no high
ambitious or career and they have what they need for living .If I were
french, I would have liked to move here or at least to try.
Sailing life here have been sometimes fantastic and sometimes heavy. Last
week Felix, Carolina and Claes got very sick with 3 days high feber and
vomiting. To make things worse, the potable water was finished in the boat
and there is not tap potable water on this bay. So Gabriel and me bought
some jerry cans and went in a taxi up to the mountains to get 200 L pure
water, Later we rented a car and we did the same trip 3 times and filled
Taritas tanks and reserves with 650 L of water. Yesterday we found that a
water connection broke and we lost all our fresh water Suck! So we are
dong this again today. The worse is to last the dinghy with water-filled
jerry cans in a bay with sw a bad stone bridge.
But we can not have all.