A Niue to get away

BY LLOYD ESLER

There are a few sounds I haven't yet heard – the banshee, a rattle snake and the rumble of a rocket launch – but I added a new one just recently, the sound of a 60cm wide crab scrambling through a forest.

It's a dry, heavy, scrunching sort of noise, like sweeping the workshop floor. The crab isn't after me, he only eats rotten coconuts, but the weaponry up front can amputate any bit of me that gets in his way.

Perhaps when the gloom of the Southland winter gets you depressed and the thought of a spot of tropical warmth is appealing, then you may find charming Niue to your liking.

Niue is a flat island, "The Rock" as it is generally known, four hours flying from Auckland, 19 degrees below the equator and on the other side of the international Date Line.

I spent a week there in October – out of the wet season and the hurricane season. The temperature was in the 20s and low 30s and so quite bearable.

The humidity varied and was pleasantly lower in the evenings not that there is much of an evening.

In the south we are used to protracted twilight but in the tropics the Earth is turning faster and the sun quickly slips below the horizon and into darkness.

You only have minutes between sunset and night. The stars were good and there were some new ones – the Andromeda Galaxy and the Great Square of Pegasus which I haven't seen before.

Niue is not a touristy island. Businesses don't advertise and you have to ask which is the fish shop, the bakery and the butchery. There are no cash machines and not much chance to use a credit card so take cash.

What to spend the cash on? Accommodation – there are several options; the flash Matavai Resort, several motels and a number of modestly priced guesthouses.

Hire a car, buy fruit at the market, hunt up a cultural performance, take a guided tour of the reef or the forest, and go on a diving trip.

The diving is amazing. Niue is the sea-snake capital of the world and has a rich array of corals and coloured fish.

The snakes won't bite but the crabs do. We are used to our crabs being on the beach but Niue has several land crabs including a fast and vicious purple one and the clunky coconut crab.

These guys start life in the sea as hermit crabs but move on to land, although they keep their borrowed shell for many years. They are called ugas and they have been part of the diet since the island was settled. The meat is quite bitter and unlike crabmeat you buy here.

I found 20 sorts of birds, the commonest of which is the chicken. The roosters start each morning sometime between 1.52am and 2.03am. I know this.

The other common birds are the Polynesian triller, swift, Golden plover and Banded rail. I saw both sorts of pigeons, the Polynesian starling. White tern, Frigate bird and White-tailed tropic bird.

Lizards are everywhere – fast, coppery, skinks, and geckos, climbing the walls and under every flake of bark. No frogs on Niue and no land snakes but they do have bats.

There is 100km of road, mostly sealed. In a week I drove every inch of road and walked a lot of it as well.

I did all the tracks, visited all the chasms and caves and found all the access points to the reef.

The best places are the Togo Chasm and the Matapa Chasm, worn over thousands of years by the sea gnawing into the soft coral rock.

Everyone stops to offer a lift, no matter which direction they are driving. The idea of hiking is a bit of a novel concept.

"No thanks, I'm fine."

"Your car break down? Hop in."

"No thank you I'm just walking."

"I'll give you a ride, it's five ks to the village."

"That's why I'm walking."

There are a lot of small villages a few kilometres apart. They each have a well-maintained church and village green but many of the houses are empty, abandoned after migration to New Zealand or damaged in Cyclone Hetta on January 6, 2004.

Hetta flattened a lot of the forest and crops but only two lives were lost. As the houses are well above sea level they are safe from all but the most extreme events. The recent tsunami only resulted in a 40cm wave sloshing across the reef.

The island is odd geologically. It was once an atoll at sea level, then an upheaval poked it about 40m up. Thousands of years later another wiggle added 30 more metres, so it is round and flat with no sandy beaches.

It was once fully forested but forest only occupies a small part of the island now – tall tropical hardwood forest growing among corals that have been preserved intact following the upheaval, sharp as scrap-iron and potholed, making a cross-country journey impossible.

The rest of Niue is, or has been, cultivated. Taro, bananas, cassava, tomatoes and pawpaws grow rapidly then the plot is abandoned and another one formed.

Weeds take over quickly. Oranges don't grow there and mangoes are small and mean but there are coconut palms everywhere, in fact the name of the island comes from "niu" the local word for coconut.

I soon learned how to knock down a coconut and decapitate it. There are two cupfuls of liquid in each. Once, coconuts were harvested for copra but this industry, like many others, has disappeared.

Distance to New Zealand, transport cost, small scale and pesticide use make exports unviable for the most part.

I hope the future isn't to plant oil palms all over the island although oil palms have been tried along with every other crop you can think of plus cattle and sheep.

At one time a Chinese company wanted to harvest the abundant sea cucumbers but in a week they would have been all gone.

One business, however, that seems to be thriving is vanilla.

Vanillin is a South American orchid and it does well in Niue's climate, the problem being that without pollinating bees all flowers have to be hand pollinated.

The scent and flavouring come from the seedpod, and one home-processing plant I visited had a room full of pods drying.

There are worse jobs than working in a vanilla factory. The other memorable scent, the scent of the tropics, is frangipani. It grows everywhere, five cream petals spiralling inwards.

The island is in some ways a suburb of Auckland with many Niueans commuting from their village to their New Zealand home.

Only around 1400 Niueans live on Niue – 22,000 don't. Most of these are in Auckland or Australia but others have moved further afield.

Dubai, New York, Tokyo and London were some of the answers when I asked after the family. Niue's main employer is its government, heavily subsidised by New Zealand and other aid donors.

It's not a tenable arrangement indefinitely but it is difficult to suggest an alternative. There is no harbour or safe anchorage, few sales of locally made goods and food, and not much of the indigenous culture on display. Resorts and casinos have been mentioned but at what cost?

It was very relaxing. There were no emails to check and the phone wasn't going to ring. The washing dried in a few minutes and everyone was friendly. I'm going back some time.

- © Fairfax NZ News