The Miss Tutti Frutti Contest

by Graeme Lay

  After the swim I explore the rest of Niue’s coastline by bike. The first thing I notice is that the driver of every vehicle coming the other way waves at me. It’s a cheering gesture that reminds me of the New Zealand of my childhood, when everyone in small towns waved to others on the road. The second discovery is that the perimeter road, in defiance of the laws of physics, always seems to be going ever-so-slightly downhill. This, plus the road’s fine surface, makes biking an effortless pleasure.

  Everywhere in the dozen or so villages of Niue, there are empty houses – not derelict, because they were strongly built, with poured concrete walls and roofs of corrugated fibrolite – but windowless and silent, surrounded by rampant, drought-defying tropical grass and creeper. The houses resemble old-style bus shelters, standing in reproach of the passengers who have taken one-way tickets to the Auckland suburbs of Grey Lynn, Kingsland or Otara.

  My destination is the village of Hakupu. I’m carrying a letter from two Kingsland-based Niuean sisters to their grandmother. I arrive in the village in the late morning. There are the usual empty houses, but others which are obviously still inhabited. Washing is spread out to dry on the grass, doors are open, but along the dusty limestone road which cuts through the village nothing moves. No radios can be heard, no children’s cries. I knock on a couple of doors before coming to a house where there is a pareu-clad girl of about nineteen. When I show her the name on the envelope, she points to a driveway.

  ‘Down there. The old school. She is down there.’

  Every village used to have its own school. Another consequence of emigration is that the primary schools have now been amalgamated, and all the young children attend one school in Alofi, leaving a long, empty classroom block in every village. Hakupu’s classroom block, though, is not quite empty. As I walk towards it across the playing field I see that one room is still occupied – by elderly women. I ask for the person whose name is on the envelope – Trixie Ikinepule – and she comes forward, a large, dark-faced woman with a welcoming smile. I hand her the letter, which she leaves unopened for the moment and beckons me into the room.

  The women, mostly in their sixties, sit on the floor with their backs against the walls. Mats and pillows in the centre of the room provide a resting place for several pre-school children who look at me inquisitively. The women continue their work, chatting and laughing among themselves. They are weaving baskets, hats, place-mats and bags, using strips of dried pandanus. Half-completed crafts are everywhere: a white hat with a still-frayed brim; a coiled, catherine-wheel place-mat with its palm-frond core protruding; a basket with its handles not yet woven into place. Niuean crafts are famous, and looking at the beautiful chequered patterns created by dyeing some of the pandanus black, the intricacy and symmetry of the designs, the care and finish of the weaving, it’s not difficult to see why. It’s clear too that although the work is labour intensive for the women, it’s also sociable and relaxing.

  Mrs Ikinepule explains that her group is finishing a consignment of hats for the women of Rarotonga, who recently sent them boxes of oranges. Hats for oranges. The Rarotongan women are getting the best of the exchange.

  Back on my bike, I discover more natural wonders. In several places around the coast the emerging fresh water has eroded gashes, creating chasms with walls fifty metres high. The most spectacular of these is Togo chasm, on the island’s wild east coast. It is reached after a level walk through a virgin rain forest of mahogany, chestnut, pandanus and banyan trees. The forest ends abruptly, giving way to a steeply sloping zone of coral pinnacles from which there are sweeping views of an ocean so blue it is almost purple. I pick my way through the pinnacles, which are so sharp they can lacerate the skin at a touch. The track plunges further, swings right, and I am at the chasm edge. From there a sturdy ladder takes me down a further nine metres to the floor of Togo chasm.

  The floor is covered with coral sand of purest white, hurled there through a cave at the ocean end during tropical storms. The sand is as soft as talcum powder, and provides a nursery for a number of coconut palms which have taken root there. The surrounding walls are dark grey and perfectly perpendicular, over thirty metres high on the landward side, only a little less on the seaward, while the chasm itself is only a few metres across. Togo is like a secret chamber, utterly soundless and windless, a unique wonder of the Pacific.

  Wandering up to the end of the ravine, I scramble over a heap of boulders. At this, the landward end, the chasm floor is covered with moss and the palms are more profuse. A few more metres on, the way is blocked by a pool of murky green water. The chasm tapers, and there is no way further in without special caving equipment. I return to the soft white sand, gaze again at the sheer rock walls, and think perversely what a magnificent place this would be for a candlelit dinner party. This impure notion is rapidly replaced by the refrain of an old song: ‘Rock of ages, cleft for me’.

  Biking west, through the village of Hakupu, I slow the bike, stop, rub my eyes. I must be hallucinating. No, I’m not. There are hundreds of llamas spread over the scrubby landscape, grazing contentedly. What are they doing here, on a raised atoll in the middle of the South Pacific? Without being an animal expert, I know llamas are native to South America, and South America is quite a long way from Niue. I feel like the person in Jurassic Park who comes across a herd of foraging dinosaurs. Cycling up to a corral where there are about twenty females and baby llamas, some clustered in the shade of a spreading tree, others with their heads in a large concrete drinking trough, I dismount and lean on the fence. The babies are gorgeous, leggy and snub-nosed, the wool on their legs and necks white, their backs a ginger colour which matches the bare earth around the corral. The adults are uniformly pale ginger.

  As I’m standing in the sun wondering about all this, a young woman in blue overalls, large sunglasses and a brown Aussie stockman’s hat comes out of the hut next to the corral, carrying a baby llama in her arms. She sets it down on the ground and tells me that she is from Tonga, that she is a vet and that the llamas are on Niue for quarantine purposes. They’re from Peru, where all good llamas come from, and they’ve flown to the island on a specially adapted jet plane. They spend some months on Niue, then they’re flown to farms in Australia, where they’re shorn. Llama wool is highly valued in the garment industry, and Niue receives a per head payment for the animals’ stopover on the island.

  Every other Saturday on Niue is inter-village cricket day. Matches are played on village greens, but that’s where the resemblance between the English version of cricket and kilikiti begins and ends. Standing at one end of Alofi’s uncut green, I try to make out exactly what’s going on. For a start, there are many more than eleven fieldsmen and two batsmen – about thirty at a rough count, boys and young men in shorts, sneakers and T-shirts. Women, girls and very young children watch from palm-frond shelters at either end.

  There are wickets, a pitch of sorts, two batsmen, yes, but their bats are like large, angular war clubs, and alongside each batsman are a number of other men carrying long whips. A few fieldsmen stand at the edge of the green, others are on the road, and some sit on the wall bordering the green.

  A bowler lopes in, hurls down the ball. The batsman swings, connects with it on the full, lofts it high over an acacia tree beyond the green. Everyone whoops and claps as the men with the whips sprint to the other end, turn and run back. The ball is found and thrown to a bowler. It’s a very hard ball, the Niue Special. Unlike the Samoan kilikiti ball, which is made from bound rubber, this is a lacrosse ball, imported from Canada, and it has the weight and density of iron. But the Niuean batsmen have superb hand-eye coordination: one smites a full toss right across the green, over the road, over the Alofi wharf and into the sea, precipitating cheers, shouts and prolonged hilarity from the spectators. A man in the outfield grabs a mask and flippers, puts them on and dives to the bottom of the sea to retrieve the ball.

  I can’t comprehend the rules, but it’s clear that everyone’s having a great
time. A burst of frenetic belting of the ball, and whip-cracking charges between the wickets, is followed by long periods of idleness and chat. Perhaps it’s not so different from the flannel-trousered Lords version, after all.

  Towards mid-morning I leave the cricket, but I ride past the green a few more times that Saturday. The game continues all morning, all afternoon, and concludes only when darkness descends over the island. Later I ask one of the players – who had to be taken to the hospital to have the webbing in his right hand stitched after he stopped a crashing hit – who won the match. He looks perplexed at the question.

  ‘Ah … I think we made about … 400 runs. And Hakupu made …’ he shrugs. ‘I don’t know what they made. About the same.’

  ‘So who won?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He grins. ‘It doesn’t matter. It was a good game.’

  Many of the Niue locals have strong connections with New Zealand. Indeed, many of them are New Zealanders. Ernie Walsh is a Kiwi electrician who first came to the Rock in the 1950s, married a local woman, returned with her to Christchurch to raise their large family, then came back to the island with her in 1987 to retire. But Ernie has only semiretired, because he has a five-metre aluminium boat, Tuaki, rigged for fishing. He’s sharp-eyed, fit, and extremely knowledgeable about local conditions.

  The derrick swings Tuaki out from Alofi’s concrete wharf and lowers her gently into the water. It’s nine o’clock on a nearly moonless Niuean night. Ernie starts up his 400hp Mariner outboard, manoeuvres the boat up to the wharf, and we climb aboard. There is a light atop a PVC stem on the prow of Tuaki; another glows from a stem on the stern. We cruise out through the inky sea and turn east. Conditions are good, with the cuticle moon shining weakly in the west. My Niuean friend, Faama, stands in the bow; I stand in the stern, braced against the railing. We both hold nets with three-metre-long handles which make them cumbersome but give us good reach. Tuaki rolls gently as we motor along the coast, under the cliffs. I peer at the water. What happens next?

  Faama shouts from the bow. ‘There!’

  Looking left, I see a small fish skittering across the surface of the black water. It darts in one direction, then tacks back in another. Ernie swings the wheel to starboard but the fish has gone.

  ‘Behind you!’ Faama shouts, and I turn to see the fish zoom like a small missile towards the boat. I shove the net out clumsily, lunge at it, and hear a whoop of triumph from Faama and a chuckle from Ernie. By extraordinary good luck for me, and considerable ill-fortune for the flying fish, it has flown straight into my net. Hauling the net in, I grab the fish and drop it in a bucket, where it flops pathetically, wings flailing against the sides.

  For the next two hours we cruise slowly along the coast, from time to time swiping and scooping at the creatures which leap, flutter and glide towards Tuaki’s light. Occasionally the fish leap at the light, land in the water and float inert, as if waiting to be scooped up. Others are more assertive. One launches itself from the water and flies straight at Faama’s face. He ducks away just in time, and it swishes past him and back into the water on the other side of the boat.

  Fly fishing, as it’s called, is a combination of lepidoptery, whitebaiting and small-game hunting. It’s also hilarious, at least for those on board, although more than half of the fish that come for our light manage to evade the nets. Even the ones which stun themselves by striking our gunwales usually sink immediately.

  There are also sea snakes everywhere. They lie ribbonlike on top of the water, twisted into S shapes, unafraid of humans. Understandably, this part of Niue’s coast is known as Snake Gully. The creatures call to mind Coleridge’s lines:

  Within the shadow of the ship

  I watched their rich attire:

  They coiled and swam; and every track …

  Was a flash of golden fire.

  These ones are banded, usually yellow and black, and venomous, although their mouths are so small they find it difficult to get a grip on a human. The skin between the fingers is something they can get their teeth into, Faama tells me.

  Curious, I scoop up a couple in my net, but they slip through the mesh. Then Faama nets a bigger one, pulls it aboard and drops it into the bucket. It convulses, writhes its way up and out, and slithers across the bottom of the boat towards me. I have seldom seen anything so repulsive, and I’m about to leap overboard when I remember that there are many more out there in the water waiting, so instead I jump up on to the gunwale until Faama, laughing helplessly, snatches up the snake and throws it back in the sea.

  At half-past eleven, with sixteen flying fish in the bucket, we draw up alongside the wharf. Ernie’s wife Hine is there with the tractor. Tuaki is hooked up to the derrick, Hine drives the tractor off a few metres and the boat is hoisted from the water and lowered on to her trailer. It’s quicker than using a boat ramp, and besides, there is no ramp, even on this, the sheltered side of the island, because of the persistent swell.

  Under the wharf light I examine the catch. Flying fish are shaped like big herrings, though they have much larger eyes and their skin is slimier – to assist, I assume, their egress from the water. Their strong tail is used to break the tension between water and air; the large, delicate, folding wings are used for gliding, and can keep them airborne for fifty metres or so. They’re good eating, if rather bony, but Ernie takes this catch to use as bait for larger prey the next day.

  At dawn we pull away from the wharf on Tuaki again. Ernie has rigged her with two rods, one on each gunwale, and two reel lines. Faama attaches lures to the reel lines and bait to the rod lines. The reels are made, with typical island ingenuity, from old motorbike hubs with handles welded to them, and they trail plastic lures about ten metres behind the boat. These are teasers for the main bait, the flying fish, which troll much further behind. The two dead fish are attached to traces attached to the rods, and inside the bait are concealed two large, lethal-looking double hooks.

  As we roll slowly along Niue’s western coast, the horizon turns apricot and a molten sun rises from the sea, turning the sky bright and clear apart from a trail of small grey clouds just above the horizon. To starboard, the island is a long, black, level expanse, like the profile of a slumbering whale. By the time we round the northern end of the island, daybreak is complete and the coastal features are very clear. The grey-brown cliffs are about twenty metres high, notched where fresh water has emerged at the foot of the water-table edge and neatly undercut by the sea. There is bush on the highest ground, the occasional canoe landing is visible, but there is no other sign of human settlement. It occurs to me that this, the ‘skirt’ of the island, is Niue just as Cook and his men first viewed it from Resolution in June 1774.

  Now we are adjacent to the eastern coast, the windward side of the island. Although the trade wind is gentle today, the ocean swells are strong and the water occasionally turbulent as current and tide conflict. Tuaki rolls on, the lures and baits tumbling in her wake. The sun is hot, the sky almost cloudless. Although we remain fishless, it’s an uncommonly pleasant way to start a day. And we have company in the form of the little vaka – outrigger canoes – which bob about on the ocean. They’re so insubstantial that from a distance it appears the fishermen are sitting on the sea, and I wonder how they manage when the weather is less clement.

  Faama says, ‘Most of those guys can’t swim, so if they fall out they’re in trouble. But they keep an eye on each other and help out in all kinds of ways. If one hooks a marlin, for example, the others will see it broach and come over and help get it in. The one who’s hooked it wraps the line around his thigh as a brake.’

  ‘A nylon line, around his thigh, with a marlin at the other end?’

  ‘Right. You look at a Niuean man’s leg. If he’s a good fisherman, he’ll have line scars across it. Sometimes they get towed all night by a big fish.’

  With the sun climbing the sky and its rays burning our backs, Ernie turns the boat and we begin the long journey back. There have been no take
rs for our trailing morsels, it’s after ten o’clock and the sun’s too bright for big fish. Ernie points out landmarks on the cliff as we pass – a church wrecked by Cyclone Ofa and subsequently abandoned, a canoe landing place, the motel where I’m staying. He also explains that his family back in Christchurch will never come to Niue to live. The wages are much too low. ‘The wife and I only get a quarter of the superannuation that we’d get back in New Zealand. That’s why I do these fishing trips.’ But he’s clearly disconsolate. ‘I hate taking out visitors and not getting a fish.’

  ‘Well, that’s the way it goes. It’s good just to be out on the water.’

  ‘Yeah, but I still hate not getting …’

  ‘Hey! Hey, Ernie!’

  The shout comes from Faama in the stern. Turning, I see that one rod’s bent, its reel shrieking. Ernie shoves the boat into neutral, and as he does so the motorbike hub on the same side as the bent rod begins to spin. A double strike, and no time to get a harness on. I scramble aft, Faama takes the rod from its holder, hands it to me, barks orders.

  ‘Reel in, reel in! Keep the tension on!’

  Braced against the stern rail, rod butt digging into my groin, I obey. Whatever’s on the other end is heavy, and fighting hard, but by applying all my energy I feel it yield. Minutes later I see flashes of electric blue and silver behind the boat, reel harder, and the fish is alongside. Faama gaffs it, hauls the flapping fish aboard, clubs it with a wooden truncheon and goes back to winding in the rodless line.

  It’s a wahoo, a long, tapering, blue-black fish with a pointed head, upright tail flukes and razor-sharp teeth. Blood leaks from its gills as it lies, dying. Faama winds in the second motorbike hub, a relatively simple operation, and hauls a second wahoo aboard. We must have passed through a school of them. We’re all gleeful, and so I understand a possible derivation of the fish’s name. It’s so exciting to catch one that you can’t help yelling, ‘Wahoo!’