Trip 40 — Niue and Dogojima Walks

Niue day 3: Hikutavake to Lakepa (via Toi, Toi, and Toi)
Sunday, 18 February 2024

Today: 14438 steps/11.66 km/7.25 mi/2h 9m
(including approach from hotel 20790 steps/16.90 km/10.50 mi/3h 4m)
(and retracing through Toi twice ~25638 steps/~20.90 km/~12.99 mi/~3h 46m)
Total: 38798 steps/31.01 km/19.27 mi/5h 55m
(including extras ~56331 steps/~45.48 km/~28.26 mi/~8h 29m)

The roosters upped their musicianship this morning. Yes, there were two, broadcasting in stereo to my living room at the Anaiki Motel. Today they matched pitch and timbre perfectly; instead of sounding like poorly played shofars, they brought to mind a reasonably polished college band. Perhaps they had drunk and smoked too much on Friday night — stag parties and such — and spent yesterday watering their wattles.

Having read about the incorporation of Christianity into Niuean life over the past two centuries, I thought it might be enriching to attend a Sunday church service. Besides, I had missed "Dance and Mingle with the Locals." Perhaps I'd get one of the two, maybe both if they went really wild with their hymns.

"If you go back into Makefu," Victoria said yesterday, "the church service there starts at ten. But if you come to my church here..."

"Tuapa?" I asked.

"Yes. The service here starts at nine."

That seemed like the better option for three reasons. First, I'd know someone there. Second, it was on the way to where I was headed. And third, the presence of a churchgoing crowd just before nine would make it a safer time to go past all those dogs.

The cats Rusty and Timmy were sitting outside my door when I left the Anaiki Motel, but they weren't whining with hunger. They saw me out to the road, as I carried my backpack, the dog-deterring stick, and an extra plastic bag with the leftover food. I'd repackaged it all so the curry wouldn't leak.

I passed one dog just before the church. "Hey," I said. It didn't move.

And another at the church, perhaps the one that had barked at me from the porch. It also remained silent. "Good morning," I said. "We friends now?" Or at least cordial foes.

I had on my Sunday best — a shirt with a collar and the full gray Pick-Pocket Proof Convertible Travel Pants, with legs attached. Most of the women wore dresses; some had wide-brimmed white hats and carried fans. Many of the men had shirts with floral prints and dark knee-length skirts. The room wasn't air-conditioned, but there was a decent breeze with the windows open on both sides.

Close to 50 people attended. The service was exactly an hour, its commencement marked by the ringing of a bell. Almost all of it was in Niuean, but there's always unity in the singing of a hallelujah, led by a guitarist seated a few rows ahead of me. There weren't hymns, as far as I could tell, but there were several songs sung by everyone who knew them.

After the service, I said hello to Victoria.

"I should have told the Reverend you were here. Maybe he would have said something."

"Oh, that's all right. It was good just to be a part of it."

I talked with one other congregant, who questioned my lack of a hat (it would have been a good idea overall, but at least it was overcast today) and mentioned that Niue's last king, Togia, was buried in front of the church. Next to his grave is a memorial to Niuean participants in World Wars I and II and the Vietnam War, with names for all but World War II.

Today's walk was straightforward: Follow the uphill road branching off after the Hio Cafe — the shortcut bypassing the part of the ring road I covered yesterday — until the junction where I turned around yesterday, and then continue along the ring road through Toi and Mutalau villages until I reached Lakepa near the east coast. (The ring road is close to the shore on the western side of Niue and further inland in the north, east, and south.)

On the way uphill I practiced balancing the stick on my left shoulder at an angle such that it wouldn't fall and I wouldn't have to hold it. I never quite mastered it, but I was able to keep it there for about 20 seconds at a time.

I reached the junction and restarted MapMyWalk, to separate the access walk I'd just completed from the main Abecedarian Walk, day 3, the part that would be officially included in the scoring. I proceeded into Toi.

It was quiet, and there were a few houses and then a shiny, cartoonishly painted bus outside one residence. A couple of other large vans, green but less elaborately designed, were on the same property, along a driveway off the ring road. I couldn't tell whether it was a kind of shop for auto repairs and painting.

On the left, I then passed a long building with a fence around it, perhaps a school. A white dog was going around the back, away from me.

Opposite the long building was a municipal building signed as an evacuation center. A dog was lying on its porch. When it saw me, it started barking and came after me. Another dog appeared and joined in the kerfuffle. I backed away steadily, waving my stick. The dogs continued to approach for a few seconds and then retreated.

I soon came to a house on the left. A woman was on the balcony — the first person I'd seen in Toi. There was a dog in her yard, which eyed me but then slunk off toward the house.

I continued for a few more minutes and realized I hadn't heard MapMyWalk announce the end of a kilometer in a while. I took out my phone and saw that the app wasn't running at all. I was sure I had started it. It was asking me to save the details of a walk with zero distance. Had it started and then completed the session immediately?

It was still early in the day and I had plenty of time to reach Lakepa. I checked the map: I'd walked two kilometers since the junction. I wanted an accurate count for the Abecedarian Walks, even if it meant going an extra four kilometers. It was only about a 40-minute delay and it wasn't too hot. There were just the two dogs by the evacuation center. I decided to go back to the junction and restart the counter.

When I retraced my steps, the woman in the house saw me and we said a quick hello to each other. The two dogs were still there, still obnoxiously loud, but they didn't come too close. I walked the length of the big building and came to the driveway with the vans and bus.

This time the white dog saw me. And when it barked and ran toward me, so did another. And another. And three more. There were six snarling dogs bounding into the road ahead, and no people around.

Curse you, MapMyWalk. Or whatever electronic fault had canceled the smooth strolling session I thought I was having. And curse my own stubbornness to get a correct step and distance count.

Pray, and do not worry, I would hear later.

"Go home!" I kept repeating, as I walked steadily, waving my stick at their teeth and their cacophony. They kept barking at the side of the road, but they let me pass.

Farther ahead, two other dogs — protecting a different turf — had heard the chaos, and they wanted a piece of the action. I had been so lucky not to rouse these two groups the first time through Toi, and now I was going to turn around and face them again. I hoped my coming through twice wouldn't be seen as a challenge to them. On the other hand, maybe the second time they wouldn't see me as a threat.

Ten minutes later I reached the junction, turned around, and restarted MapMyWalk. For the first few minutes — the safe zone before any dogs — I checked it frequently, confirming that it was running.

I reached the first two dogs and they approached, but there was a man in a house on the right. Had he been there the whole time? He called the dogs away.

But there was no one to call the six dogs by the big vehicles. Some of them were still lying in the street. They resumed their barking and came toward me, before I reached the gaudily painted bus.

As this wasn't yet their property, my waving the stick caused them to retreat — for a while. When I got to the driveway, they were all around me.

"Go home!" I shouted, walking backward to the east, continuing my progress. "Go home, go home, go home!" It became a chant, with a rhythm like the wheels of a train.

They kept inching closer. I managed to keep my eyes on all of them. Sometimes they split up, a couple on one side of me and the rest on the other. I couldn't let them corner me. I kept waving the stick at all of them. I attempted to hurl a rock as well, but I had my bag of food in my left hand and the stick in my right. Maybe it was for the better — a properly thrown rock might have antagonized them further.

A brown dog seemed to have a tender eye that made it seem less vicious. When I could, I stared at that one, making an appeal for a truce the way someone might get out of a kidnapping by appealing to the one captor with the tiniest bit of empathy.

But they were still snarling, and they weren't much past the end of my stick. Their mouths were starting to froth. I realized I was drifting toward the side of the road, and I adjusted my angle to stay parallel to the edge, continuing to walk backward.

Why couldn't a car come by?

I was now midway along the long building. One by one, the dogs stopped advancing, and their cacophony dwindled to silence. They kept staring me down until I was...

...At the evacuation center and submitting myself to the two dogs in control of that parcel of land. They were not as aggressive, but they followed me for a short distance. I resumed my backward walk until they stopped pursuing me.

I waved to the woman in the house.

"You're having your walk, then?" she called from the upper terrace. "We met you in the market in Alofi."

My mind wasn't there yet. It took a few moments for me to catch up.

"Mele!" I said. "I asked Norman to get me an uga, but he said I might have to find it somewhere else, maybe the Matavai resort."

"I see."

"But if I catch one, maybe I can cook it."

"Sure, if your accommodation has cooking facilities," she said. "How's the walk going?"

"It's beautiful, except for the dogs."

"Oh, yes, some of them are quite vicious."

"Back there, there were six of them. By the bus and vans. Who is that?"

"That," she said, assuming a cynical expression, "is a member of Parliament."

"Really."

"Yes. My dog" — the one that didn't approach me — "is a friendly one. But we have problems with the others. They chase my chickens."

"Oh, that's awful." I explained why I had walked through Toi three times. "What's ahead? Are there more dogs?"

"Yes, there are a few."

I asked the leading question: "But the worst ones were back there?"

And got the answer I wanted: "Yes, those are the most vicious ones."

We wrapped up the conversation and I continued. Sure enough, about five minutes later, there was another pack of five dogs. The worst part of these encounters was not knowing how many would appear. Whenever one was protecting its terrain, all the neighbors had to join in.

These came pretty close as well, but the stick did the trick. They stared me down until I was out of sight.

I reached the Toi boundary sign at the eastern end. Good riddance, I thought. Except for Mele, this was probably the worst place I've ever walked. The three dogs that blocked my progress on day 2 in Aruba may have been slightly more aggressive, but there were people around. If I'd kept encountering packs like in Toi on my first Abecedarian Walk, there well may never have been a second.

But perhaps I've gotten more confident and able. I couldn't have reacted as calmly in Aruba. I wouldn't have known what to do. I was no exemplar of grace today, either, but at least I had a better understanding of how to deal with the situation without panicking.

I continued toward Mutalau, a little wobbly in the aftermath of what had just happened. I let out short gasps of air: I needed water. I also needed a few minutes to stop and collect myself. The opportunity came at a neglected cluster of graves, where there was a municipal electric box on which I could rest my bag. The clouds had gone away, and I put on sunscreen and drank water.

The road bent sharply to the right at Mutalau, the village where 60 people protected Peniamina when he returned from Samoa to introduce Niueans to Christianity. Down a track — I didn't go — are the remains of the fort where that happened.

Today, Mutalau was quiet. The houses were all well off the road until it turned to the southeast. In one house, a family was just finishing their uga lunch on the porch. They invited me to drink a coconut.

Even walking up to the house wasn't so easy. The family's two dogs, and to a greater extent the neighbors', protested with barks and snarls, even with the family calling them away. Eventually I got through.

The person who invited me was Beryl; her husband was Niu (like the word for a coconut), and her brother and her mother, Dave and Moka, were there, too.

"And our dad is right there, next to you," Beryl said. "He left us a year ago." The sparkling white tile grave was on my right. I liked the Niuean tradition of keeping graves on the property or by the road, in small clusters, though of course things could get complicated if the house got sold.

Beryl, it turned out, had been two rows ahead of me on Friday's flight from Auckland. Dave and her their mother had been farther back. They remarked how smooth our flight was, whereas it had been a scary, rough ride from Niue to Auckland three weeks earlier. Beryl and Niu lived in Auckland but came back with Moka to bring her home.

In addition to the coconut ("You need to get some electrolytes in you"), Beryl offered me a gigantic cucumber from her garden — it was about the size of a football — and a cooked breadfruit, which tastes a little like yuca and is best in a sauce. And because those additions to my stash might be too much for the plastic bag, they gave me a cloth bag with a zipper to put them in.

I thought I might extend the walk by taking a sea-track loop from Mutalau back to the ring road, but Beryl had never heard of it, and I didn't see a sign for it, so I continued south past the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses instead. They were in mid-service, singing jubilantly, and a child greeted me as I walked by.

From Mutalau to Lakepa was a blissfully quiet hour. There were few houses and no dogs. A pair of white terns reminded me that animals can flutter in happiness. Only one driver passed me, twice, having stopped so he and his passenger could examine one of the roadside grave sites.

Kupa and Mary were short on words in their e-mail messages to me, but they got the point across. I'd confirmed a month ago that I was staying at their converted schoolhouse, Lialagi, and we'd had no contact since then. I decided yesterday that I'd better remind them that I was coming, and I gave them a time estimate.

All I got back, this afternoon, was, "We will be at Lialagi setting up. Just seen your message."

They weren't there, however, so I rested a bit in the main room and then went over to Lakepa's afternoon church service. There were only about 13 of us. The pastor, Thomas, acknowledged me with the caveat that the service would be mostly in Niuean. One woman, seated in the congregation, led the songs, and for the most part the others blended well with her, harmonizing in thirds, though there was always a point near the end where they couldn't figure out the pattern and how to keep the harmony going.

The Rev. Thomas interspersed a few phrases in English.

"Pray, and do not worry," he said.

After the service, he and I talked for a while. He was from the southwest in Niue; he left for New Zealand at the age of 18, and now he was back 40 years later, on a five-year contract as minister. His grandfather had been a minister here in Lakepa, and his great-great-grandfather had also been in the ministry. He was married and had a daughter.

"Are you married?" he asked.

"No."

"Ah. Free love."

He said they had a tradition of walking around the island when they were younger. They'd start in the afternoon and walk through the night, and whoever completed the circuit in the shortest time won the contest. He once earned that honor.

And he said it was wonderful to walk around the island. "Except for the dogs."

Finally, someone said it before I did. I wasn't just a nervous traveler. There really was a problem.

He looked out over the green. "I wonder where the dogs are," he said. "There are usually about fifteen of them. Maybe the police took them."

"Why?"

"I made a report. The dogs were behaving badly. See that one — it has a collar on. That's how you know it's being taken care of properly. But a lot of them don't have collars. They're not looked after, and they misbehave. I tell people, if your dog doesn't have a collar and the police find it, that's it."

By "that's it" he wasn't referring to a sad ending for the dogs, only that the owners would lose their privilege.

I walked back to Lialagi and found Mary just getting ready to leave, but she stopped and showed me around the place. She had a collared dog with her, Buddy, a rescue. Buddy was timid around me at first, perhaps because I was still holding the stick. But once he let me pet him, and he licked my fingers, it was among the happiest moments of the day.

Go on to Niue day 4