James Ackhurst
“With the dogs there is no problem. You just bring a good stick with you, and when the dog comes near, you hit him hard on the head. Then he will not chase you.”
Such was the advice I received from the man who’d given me a lift into the main town of Alofi. I’d mentioned I was going to be cycling around the island, but my confidence had turned to consternation as a pack of dogs started chasing us. How many were there? A dozen? They followed for some distance, somehow keeping pace with the car, yapping and barking and snarling at its innocent wheels. By the time I’d gotten my rental bike, I told myself, they would have cleared off.
And as I cycled gingerly past the area where the dogs had mustered on the way in, I breathed a sigh of relief. Too soon, as it turned out. They were lying in wait for me by the Seventh Day Adventist church. They barkingly agreed that something had to be done. Their leader howled at the sky self-importantly. And then they gave chase.
I, of course, had prepared for just this. I sped up to the top speed attainable to a 39-year-old academic on a bike with broken gears. But the dogs, like the dogs out of nightmares, kept pace relentlessly. And so I drew my stick, a noble stick that the guy who’d given me a lift had lent me. It had a handle with a trigger at one end and, at the other, a little pincer, I think for picking up garbage, but it would do as an anti-dog stick.
“No!” I cried defiantly, “Bad dogs!” and slashed the air with my stick. On the right, on the left, and finally, behind me, where the wretched things ultimately decided was the only space left to them. It was the nearest I’ll ever come to being in a cavalry engagement. It was only as I routed the last pursuer with an audacious swish behind my back that I realised that I was, strictly speaking, on the wrong side of the road and, strictly or otherwise, about to cycle straight into an oncoming car.
This was my second day on Niue, the rock of Polynesia, a chunk of coral in the middle of a cobalt sea. The day before I’d unfolded one of the big fold-out tourist maps that you get issued on arrival and picked a route. One of those cycle trails looked good, I thought: it was clearly marked on the map with a line as thick as a rope, and if they’d put it on the map as an official cycle trail, it must be pretty well-marked in reality too, right?
A few hours later, I was in the middle of the jungle. On a path, admittedly, albeit a path on which I had to make very sure to not let my thoughts wander – otherwise I’d run face first into a spider’s web strung up at human head height, with a fat-bodied colourful spider sure to be only a few silken strands away. After following the path for a while though – through dark, dank passages between bushes as lush as the brushes in a car-wash, and on through sun-struck meadows – I realised I was completely lost.
The problem was that many of the meadows opened up into broader ponds and larger lakes of leaves – low, broad, roundish leaves, like lily pads out of water. These, I soon worked out, were plantations of taro, the potato-skinned, feta-fleshed crop that’s a staple in the Pacific from Fiji to the Marquesas. The only problem with these taro plantations was that there were so many of them, each of them fringed with the kind of half-hearted tracks that might be left by a pickup truck on a weekly visit. Which of these tracks was the official path, which had been drawn so optimistically onto the map? It was hard to tell, and whichever one I chose seemed to lead back to yet another taro plantation.
Until, finally, in one of the larger lakes of taro-leaf, I saw something. It was a pickup truck as obtrusive and, at the same time, as somehow natural-seeming, as a whale in a duck pond. Its hold was half-full of taros, as brown and wormy as turds. And out behind the back of it was a man wearing a bright orange high-vis vest.
“Hello?” I said hopefully, as a pair of dogs raced inevitably towards me, their dumb heads shouting in dog-speak. Luckily, their master had heard me, and he did enough to call off the troops (the kind of brief, almost perfunctory expression of official discouragement that you wonder why is even necessary – though it always is).
This, I soon learned, was Tony. He was hacking the heads off taros with a machete and flinging their corpses into the back of his truck. He seemed amazed to see me there, and even more amazed to hear that I’d walked there from my hotel (one of only three functioning hotels on the island). But after some initial wariness, he also seemed keen to show me his taro plantation.
“It’s good for your teeth, isn’t it,” I said. I’d seen a documentary about the Pacific in which they said that taro had an unusually high fluoride content.
“It’s good for your stomach,” Tony replied. It was hard to argue with that.
It was also hard to argue with a Niuean who was insisting on giving you a lift – a lesson that would be reiterated time and time again during my week on the island. Even if he was also telling you to get in the back of the pickup, “because people in my village might talk” if they saw me in the front seat with him.
Soon we were jolting down the narrow road to Tony’s village, the taros jumping and bumping around me like a pile of hand grenades, their sliced-off ends fluorescing with their fluoride charge. I clung unsteadily to the edge of the truck, my newest canine friend on all fours beside me, worriedly patrolling the road behind us as it shook and shrank back into the jungle.
The second day – the day I first got attacked by dogs – was also the day I realised I’d forgotten about my Covid test. I got my book out from my bag, opened it up, and a folded-up piece of paper fell out, a piece of paper I now recalled they’d slipped me as I’d been passing through the ramshackle customs area at the airport. I unfolded the piece of paper and saw that it was an official notice from the government (the country’s flag – all yellow with a modified Union Jack in the corner – was even printed at the top) telling me that I had to show up at the hospital for a PCR test on the day after my arrival.
Luckily – if that is the word – the hospital knew where I was staying, so they drove up outside my unit as I was drinking my tea and (finally) reading my book. Against the backdrop of the thick island night, the arrival of the light-spraying car on the lawn was the landing of a helicopter or a spaceship. A figure stepped out of it, short, squat, and covered head-to-toe in protective gear. It tottered towards me, its hands out in front of it bearing what I knew was an ingenious sort of probe.
The nurse stuck it up my nose and asked a few questions. At the end, I said, “I’ve had Covid, by the way.” “Oh, right, when?” “In March,” I replied. This seemed significant. She fixed her spacesuit and waddled back to the spaceship, which promptly took off again, leaving mysterious patterns on the blown-mown grass.
Later that night, the manager of my hotel came to give me a message. “You’re negative,” she said, “but you were within a few rows of someone who was positive on the plane in, so you’re a close contact.”
Did I mention I was on the first tourist plane in two years? Niue, like New Zealand, decided to shut itself off from the world out of fear of Covid-19. I heard that, years ago, there were two planes a week bringing tourists to and from the island. After the borders were closed, there was just one flight a fortnight, and that was only open to Niueans making trips home. (90 to 95% of Niueans live in Auckland, where the plane goes to and from.) Now the government had made the call to go back to one flight a week, the first of which one-a-week flights I was on.
Not everyone seemed happy with this – either the restoration of a weekly tourist flight or the fact that I was on it. Several times when I was introduced to people on the island they shied away. Already deserted villages seemed to become even more deserted as I strolled through them, to be welcomed only by the usual canine greeting party. And what had Tony been afraid that his fellow villagers might talk about? That he had a palangi, fresh off the plane, in his truck with him.
My time on Niue flashed before my eyes – not the past, but the possible future of going for swims in green grottos and teal lagoons, talking to local people and getting attacked by dogs. Was I about to be forced into isolation by a Pacific Island nation yet again?
“They say,” my hotel manager said, “to just make sure you keep away from people and wear a mask if you come within a couple of metres of them.”
So I went to Matavai. Scenic Matavai Resort is the only real resort on the island – the kind of place that feels like a world unto itself, with a terrace overlooking the blustery sea and a pool you can swim in without having your feet shredded by coral. I’d checked it out online the week before when I was looking for accommodation but had to pass on the $400-a-unit price tag. That’s despite the fact that it was one of the only places on the official government list of accommodation options which had its own website. Oh well, here I was: I got an iced coffee and watched the ocean wreck itself on the pock-marked cliffs. The only other customers in the restaurant were a tableful of ladies in colourful dresses and wide-brimmed hats enjoying a birthday lunch. This is the nicest place in town, and not only for tourists.
But I didn’t go to Matavai for the ebullient ladies, the smashing scenery, or even the iced coffee. I went there for the only dive shop currently operating on the island. It’s run by an eager, organised Kiwi couple who bought it only a couple of years ago – just in time to see the borders closed to tourists. Heaven knows how they survived. The old, much larger dive shop near the capital didn’t – they pointed its former location out to me as we drove past later that day.
But they did, and that meant they were still around for the influx of, well, me. I was handed over to no fewer than four young handlers, who bustled me into a car and drove me along the coast like I was some kind of high-value hostage. After we’d been out at sea for only about ten or fifteen minutes, someone spotted the distinctive sea-blue hump of a humpback whale. The hope was that we would be able to swim beside it (Niue being one of the only places in the world you can do this) but in the end it wasn’t to be, with the large, shy creature coyly and continuously retreating from our eager, motor-propelled advances. But he did wave at us, several times, his huge bulk plunging deep into the water before throwing up a white tail in ironic surrender.
That the diving guides seemed happy to see me should come as no surprise. In 2018, Niue welcomed about ten thousand tourists, who collectively contributed around $5 million to Niue’s economy. In a large economy, this would be small beans, but Niue is, to put it mildly, not a large economy. The monthly cargo ship that arrives just north of Alofi plays a crucial role, delivering some $18 million a year of imports. What makes up the shortfall in the balance of payments? An annual cheque from New Zealand to the tune of some $14 million. Even with its borders open to tourists, Niue is pretty much reliant on New Zealand for its survival.
Tourism has become especially important in the last twenty years or so, as exports of taro, once Niue’s dominant export, have shrunk to an insignificant level. But the island has long struggled to stay afloat in the modern global economy, if largely for reasons outside of Niueans’ control. Cyclones careened into the island in 1979 and 1990, and again, and most destructively, in 2004. In 1974, Niueans were given New Zealand passports and the ability to work there. The result was a mass exodus, drawing the island’s population down from just over 5000 in 1970 to around only 1600 today. With some twenty-four thousand Niueans living in Auckland, the island finds itself in the unusual situation of having no fewer than 90% of its people living offshore.
The marks of destruction or abandonment can be seen in any of Niue’s fourteen villages. Uninhabited houses peer out from mossy window-frames. Coral-concrete foundations mark where houses once stood. A few times I was told of buildings, or businesses, that used to be somewhere on the island but are now elsewhere, or nowhere.
With increasing streams of foreign arrivals being the only thing bringing economic blood to the island (along with the generosity of the people of New Zealand), it was no shock to hear that the decision to close the borders over the last two years only led to further collapse. Niueans turned more and more to their plantations of taro, or put out to sea in their vaka – traditional outrigger canoes – as the already-steep prices in Niue’s single supermarket rose even further. To people from more developed countries, this might seem like a romantic return to traditional lifeways, and a retreat from the anxieties of modern living. I’d be genuinely interested to see how long a modern, urban New Zealander would persist in that belief if they were forced to fish and farm for their livelihood on a daily basis.
What else did I do in Niue? Well, to be honest, there wasn’t much to do, with not much going on on the island and many of the businesses that do cater to tourists having still not reopened in time for that first flight in. I went out one more time with the dive guides. We swam into a little cave near where Cook landed in 1777, having a spear thrown at him for his pains. Zebra-striped sea snakes corkscrewed up from the surface and ribboned around us. (These were the katuali, which, as I discovered after I got back, are described on Wikipedia as ‘highly venomous’ and ‘one of the most potentially dangerous creatures on the planet.’) The main dive guide told me this was one of several local secrets she’d taken some locals on free trips to during the long months that tourists were barred from entry; here, as elsewhere, spiritual communion with nature seems to largely be something that people from developed, capitalist economies have time for.
I also started to gain more familiarity with the northwest part of the island, where I was staying. I began to recognise a few of the people in the villages (some of whom would insist on giving me lifts after seeing me walking along the road); and I became a bit more confident around the local dogs, who did seem to have a healthy respect for an assertively-brandished stick. One of the best and simplest things to do in Niue is simply to walk down one of the many paths to the sea, which usually takes you down through some combination of paths through luscious greenery, stones cut out of the rock, and echoing empty caves that end at air and waves.
For my second to last day on the island I’d booked a trip with Tony, the man I’d run into in the interior of the island who, it turned out, also offered tours. The tour mostly focussed on his plantations, both up in the forest and around his family compound in Mutalau. Tony grows taro, breadfruit, kumara, lemongrass, banana (red and yellow), coconut, cassava, pawpaw, pomegranate, passion fruit, custard apple, sweet basil, feijoa, pineapple, chilli, watermelon, and a few other things. I’d read online that Niue – the rock of Polynesia – was known for its thin soils. Tony vehemently disagreed. “The soil is good here,” he told me, “real good.” Though I put his success down at least partly to a green thumb.
For the last part of my tour, Tony had promised to take me to an old fort just outside of Mutalau that I’d seen marked on the tourist map. He seemed quite surprised at my interest, but I insisted. We passed between the church and a couple of houses near the spacious village green. Soon we were in the jungle again, pushing along an apparently little-used path and hacking at the occasional branch or frond with our machetes. Within a few minutes, we were at the fort.
The ‘fort’ seemed to be a natural formation of coral stone, which formed ‘walls’ a few metres high on each side and left an ‘interior’ of a few metres squared in the middle; at some stage, someone had obviously shaped it so that there was a path leading up to the construction and an escape-hole through a cave on the seaward side. It was here that a local man named Peniamina was held up, protected – so we’re told – by no fewer than 61 Samoan warriors so that he could establish a foothold on the island and preach Christianity to the Niueans.
Peniamina – that is, Benjamin – wasn’t, as you might have guessed, the man’s original name. Peniamina was originally Nukai, but was educated by Christian missionaries in Samoa and brought back to his homeland to convert his people. Nobody, including Peniamina, could have been in any doubt about the difficulty of the task. A few years before, the London Missionary Society had taken two other boys off the island and returned them as missionaries. But the Niueans rejected them, and one of them was killed. Hence Peniamina’s impressive personal bodyguard of 61 warriors.
Why were the Niueans so hostile to these first missionaries, despite the fact that they were all themselves from the island? In some ways, the question hardly needs an answer. Remote tribes are often hostile to outsiders. Footage from the Amazon shows uncontacted tribesmen aiming arrows at the helicopters or drones above them. In 2018, John Chau, an American missionary, was killed by arrows after attempting to land on the Andaman Island in the Indian Ocean, whose inhabitants have no contact with the outside world. The Niueans themselves attacked Captain Cook and his men when they attempted to land on the island in 1774; Cook himself was nearly killed when a spear flew just over his shoulder. So perhaps in attacking the missionaries they were simply doing what they had always done and attacking anyone who had come from outside – even if they had originally departed for the outside from the island.
There is, though, another possibility, that the Niueans rejected the three earliest missionaries (even though they were Niueans themselves) because they were afraid of diseases being brought onto the island. In 1903, Stephenson Percy Smith, the founder of the Polynesian Society, speculated in the society’s journal that sometime before Cook’s visit, “some fell disease was left behind on the island by a visitor from elsewhere in the Pacific that affected the Niue people very seriously, and caused them to oppose the landing of any foreigners”.
Whatever the truth about the past, this fear of disease was something that was an intermittent and unpredictable presence all through my week in Niue. Many people greeted me in an unrestrainedly friendly manner, shook my hand, and insisted I accept a lift in their car (and got into the front seat); others seemed to keep their distance or shied away from me when I introduced myself.
One of the benefits of living on a coral rock in the middle of the world’s most spacious ocean is, of course, that you can very readily cut yourself off from most interaction with the outside world if you want to. And this Niue readily did. Predictably, as in New Zealand, Covid-19 was kept out, and deaths from the virus were eliminated, at least for the time being. But being the kind of place a virus is less likely to get to – being removed from the ebb and flow of global interest and information – also means that you tend to miss out on all the benefits that come with connectivity. This is what led to most modern Niueans choosing to live off the island, even when times were good and there were two flights a week.
The way Niue chose to handle China’s latest pandemic gift to the world only made matters worse. By ‘matters’ I mean, of course, life. Niueans were forced to fish and farm. They were deprived of the lifeblood of trade and exchange. They were even unable to make it to Auckland – a place where, it would seem, so many have found a brighter and better life not too far away. And even the soul of the island itself seems to have shriveled from its lack of watering from the usual trickle of curious outsiders. After all, how is the island going to show off the sparkle of its vistas with so few café patios open to visitors who might want to gaze out at them? And how are Niue’s history and culture going to have any potency without anyone from the outside being able to stumble upon it?
At one end of the fortress we found ourselves in, I noticed what looked like a particularly flat, square rock, or a section of rock. Closer inspection revealed that it was in fact a plaque with information in Niuean and English. But the brass plate was curtained with ferns and brambles, and most of the text itself was muffled by moss. Nobody had come here for two years, and without the tourists coming to gaze at the thing, the locals had seen no point in dusting it off from time to time. We got to work with our machetes, lustily hacking away the foliage and deliberately scraping off the muddy green moss until the story of Peniamina’s – in some ways, the cardinal episode of Niue’s history – was once again revealed to the world.
By my final full day on the island, I made for the two last sites on the tourist map that I hadn’t yet found time for. The paths to both of them snaked down from a sky-blown green just outside of Hikutavake, a village perched above the windy sea. I took the one least-travelled by, a stony, jungly path that takes you down through slippy caverns to bring you suddenly face to face with the sea again – and, there, standing in the middle of it, the huge rock doorway of the Talava arches. Then I retraced my steps and jaunted down the wider grassier way to Matapa chasm.
Matapa chasm is the closest nature has come to providing a local community with a swimming pool. It’s not just a body of water – it’s an almost perfect rectangle of blue water with shading walls of rock on each side. The opening at the end is quite narrow, and the reef means that the rougher waves don’t tend to disturb the unruffled surface of the pool. There’s even a stone platform at one end where you can get changed and lay out your towel.
It was while I was drying my feet and putting my socks back on that I started chatting to two of the only other tourists I’d met on the island, a classic Kiwi couple (the husband with a marked English accent) abroad. They told me how glad they were to be out, after four days of isolation in their unit at Matavai. “Did you not get told to isolate?” they asked me. “Weren’t you on the same flight?” I’ll never really know why I wasn’t told to isolate – perhaps because I’d had Covid before? – but I would still have one more run-in with the island’s chaotic and yet hyperactive Covid bureaucracy the following day: I turned up to get a final test at the hospital, as I’d been asked to do, only to be told more or less immediately that it wasn’t necessary and that I could go.
But that was still a day in the future as I picked up my stick and set out again up the green path, now speared with amber slants of late daylight. I re-joined the road at Hikutavake and walked with the sea on my right and the forest on my left through Namukulu, Tuapa and Makefu. In every village that I passed through, the dogs came for me one last time. But they were no longer any threat to me. I had mastered the dark arts of stick-wielding. Time and again I raised my stick, looked the yelping fools in the eye, and said, “Kuli kelea! Kuli kelea!” (It means ‘bad dog’ in Niuean, and was one of the only phrases that I picked up in the local tongue). One after another, they slunk away whimpering like exorcised demons.
After I got back, a friend asked me how Niue had been. “There were lots of wild dogs,” I said. “Wild dogs!” she said. “That doesn’t sound very nice!”
“There’s no problem with the dogs,” I told her. “You just bring a good stick with you.”
