Fatu Hiva 4
VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Wed 23 May 2012 03:05
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The main industry here is copra - oil extracted
from the white internal flesh of the coconut. There must be a lot of money in
it, because everyone here is driving round in late model Japanese pick-ups. Here
is copra, drying in a special shelter:
 It needs to dry in the sun, but it musn't get wet
and it rains a lot here. So the copra drying sheds have sliding roofs going
backwards and forwards on rails as you can see on the left of this
picture:
 These are manually operated, so someone has to sit
here ready to cover the copra up if it rains. It's always showery here at
present, so there is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing.
The village is remarkably spick and span, no litter
to be seen(no MacDonald's!), the grass is cut and people have neat tidy gardens
(often, since this is French, with a gate sliding on rails). Completely and
utterly different to the mess of the Caribbean, even the French
islands. It's so clean that this street reminded us a bit of Austria -
mountains, flowers everywhere and tidy:
 This is what the houses used to look like, but
nowadays almost everyone lives in a nice smart modern bungalow:
 All in all a very nice place - but I wouldn't want
to live here.
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