Nuku Hiva SEA Car Tour

MFT: Driving to sampling locations
LFP: Scary giant eels in the rivers!

Hallo, so today I joined the SEA students on their tour of the Eastern end of Nuku Hiva. We all got into 5 different 4WD cars and drove over various mountains and down steep roads to neighboring valleys. It was a GORGEOUS ride but it would be hellish if you were scared of heights. It actually is amazing how good the road condition is (paved for almost all of it!). Plus there was space to pass and shoulder bends and even rails at points (major improvement to some Colombian roads I could mention). Anyways I spent the morning in a car with Sayzie, Bri, and Margaret and had lots of fun talking with them. We all decided that I should clearly be sampling the waterfalls themselves! Sadly access to the falls appears to be very difficult and time consuming. On the other hand I think I would have lots of helpers since everyone else seems to want to visit the falls too.

We stopped at various archeological sites along the way. Then we went to the town on the other side of the island. The mayor (a woman in charge for the last 30 years) talked with us about the island and fed us lunch at her restaurant. The food was great if you ate seafood…for me, well there were plenty of veggies and some goat. It was a really pretty location however, a nice airy outside but roofed restaurant overlooking a pretty black sand bay. I managed to collect a sample from one of the two rivers that flowed through town. It was hard going to get an entire gallon of sand but I didn’t want to go downstream where it was geo-engineered completely by humans. After lunch I found out about the scary fresh-water eels that are apparently common to these islands. We fed the eels leftovers from lunch and these things were HUGE (like four feet long with giant heads) and very aggressive to leftover food. I am rather annoyed that no one had told me about these BEFORE I started wadding in rivers…now I’ll just have to keep a sharp lookout for these scary monsters.

On the way back to the boat, we stopped at a couple of vistas and at another river. This time I had lots of help from my car (wohoo) and we all wadded into the river to gather as much sand as we could find. My mantra while collecting samples is “NO LEACHES and no eels”. So far I’ve avoided both and fingers crossed that lasts for the rest of the week. I have watch tonight so once we got back to port I had to go back to the boat. On the other hand, tomorrow night I have free time so I can spend the evening on shore exploring town a bit. Its actually better because tomorrow is Monday and a LOT more shops should be open on Monday instead of Sunday.


Its been a good day and reasonably successful in terms of data collection (especially considering that I didn’t pay for any of it). Here’s to tomorrow and successful data collection! I’ll be spending the day driving around the island collecting more fluvial samples! Hope you are enjoying the blog.

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