Trip 40 — Niue and Dogojima Walks

Niue day 4: Lakepa to Liku
Tuesday, 20 February 2024

Today: 6152 steps/5.23 km/3.25 mi/54m
(including Liku sea track and return to hotel 14776 steps/12.37 km/7.69 mi/2h 13m)
Total: 44950 steps/36.24 km/22.52 mi/6h 49m
(including extras ~71107 steps/~57.85 km/~35.95 mi/~10h 42m)

The Lakepa schoolhouse, Mary said, was built in 1949–1951 and opened in 1952. Her husband, Kupa, had been a student there. In 1988, as part of a consolidation of schools on Niue, the Lakepa building was closed, and students were bussed to larger primary and high schools in Alofi. The bus picks up the younger students from the villages at seven; then it comes back to collect the older students at eight.

Kupa had been a principal and was one of the leaders in effecting the consolidation. As the youngest principal, he had to exercise tact when assigning the new positions, ensuring that all felt they received elevated enough roles. The consolidation was highly successful, as it removed competition among the village schools, and with the population declining, children received a better education in a setting with more students.

Following its closure, the long school building in Lakepa was neglected and overgrown until Kupa and Mary set to work renovating it in 2005. A couple of the classrooms were turned into dormitory accommodation; the room I'm in — a former dental unit — became a private bedroom. There's a kitchen at the opposite end of the yellow and green building (Mary apologized for my having to go outside to reach it), and the large central hall is now used for community events and can be rented out.

This building was made to last. Mary pointed out the walls, fairly thin but very strong, made of kafika wood in a "fiti fiti" pattern (planes of parallel slats, with the slats roughly perpendicular to the ones in the next plane) filled in with a plaster called ponga. The central hall has a tall roof but lacks a ceiling so that the original sturdy beams can be shown off. The building survived the fierce Cyclone Heta in 2004, which destroyed most of the items in Niue's national museum.

The building, known as Lialagi, is near the southern end of Lakepa village. Kupa and Mary also have three cabins for rent — Barry and Trini, whom I met at the Hio Cafe in Tuapa, are in one of them — and pig sheds in the back. Lined up heading into town are Kupa and Mary's house, Rev. Thomas's house, and the bright yellow building where Mary runs a primary school on Tuesday mornings.

"Golden yellow is the village color," she explained.

As at the Anaiki Motel, there was no air conditioning, but a strong fan by the bed was sufficient, and if I opened the front and back doors I enjoyed a good breeze. Whenever I opened the back door, a mouse startled me by running up the frame. I always needed a double-take to realize that it wasn't a mouse but a weight to keep the door closed against the wind.

Mary had put a bottle of water at each of my room's two sinks, because the faucets didn't work well. "Also," she explained, "there are sometimes power cuts and water cuts."

"Scheduled or unscheduled?"

"Both. Sometimes we go two or three weeks without them. Sometimes it's one day and then the next. But if you aren't getting power or water, it's not just you; it's all of us."

In the center of the village, by the church and the World War I memorial, a road headed west to Alofi. A few houses north of this junction was JZ Imports (that's "jay-zed" around here), a convenience store with prices that reflected the distances the items traveled. As I headed into town from Mutalau, I stopped for a liter and a quarter of Coca-Cola: NZ$9, or about US$5.50. Sugary fizz is a tough habit to break.

I had visitors. After Mary acquainted me with the kitchen, the laundry room, and the outdoor faucet for filtered water, Thomas the pastor stopped by. He brought a whole coconut and slices of pawpaw topped with coconut shavings.

In addition to walking the island, Thomas was once almost carried out to sea. He was swimming at one of the reef pools when a strong wave took him away from the shore. Another wave lifted him in the air. It was only from the luck of the third wave's depositing him back onto the reef — a sharp and painful landing — that he's still with us.

"If you need anything, just knock on my door," he offered. He mentioned that it was hard to get villagers to come to church, but he invited me to the next service. "It's Wednesday morning at five — no, six," he said.

Well, that could be your problem, I thought.

He drove away, his daughter's legs dangling out of the back of the car. I liked him; he was easy to talk to and not too serious.

I went into the kitchen. I now had his coconut and pawpaw slices, Beryl's breadfruit and thick cucumber, the remains of the fried chicken, French fries, and chicken curry, some fruit salad, three apples, and the most expensive Coke I'd ever bought. I had a better-stocked refrigerator at Lialagi than I often do at home, and that didn't even count the three tins of fish, four protein bars, and half a package of cookies in my room. There was no danger of running out of food during my three nights at Lialagi.

Another car came around the back of the building, but only one of the two people got out. She used the outdoor faucet to fill up a container of drinkable water, and they left.

Then a man arrived on a motorcycle. He seemed to know who I was. Had I met him at church? His name was Panapa and he was Kupa's nephew; he had also gone to the Lakepa school. His left arm had tattoos in stocky lettering that said "Niue" and "Savage Island." He had returned to the village after some years, and he hoped to import a few motorcycles and set up a rental shop. His son had been a kickboxing champion, and they had gone abroad for matches, including to Russia.

"How did you like Russia?" I asked.

"Too cold."

I enjoyed the conversations. It was new to me to be in a place where people came over to talk without scheduling it beforehand. My arrival, if I may be so bold to say so, was perhaps as interesting for some of them as it was for me.

I woke up yesterday much later than I expected to. It was 10:30 and raining. Of my two full days in Lakepa, I planned to be a villager for one, at least as much as possible for someone lacking almost all of the credentials. This would be the day. By the afternoon the rain had stopped, and I walked down the Puluhiki sea track, the continuation of the road from Alofi in the village center.

There was no swimming to be done here: The ocean was frothing like the dogs in Toi. But it was a good place to feel the makeup of the island. The cliff was high, and it was an easy walk down a staircase built into the giant coral boulders covered in short, green vegetation.

My coconut stick had become limp from the vigorous shaking at dogs in Toi. Thomas had mocked it playfully. "That's your stick?" I found a more robust one along the sea track that also happened to be lighter, and I left the coconut stick to nature.

I went back to JZ Imports to find the owner, Ezra, talking with two people. One was back for a relative's grave unveiling in Mutalau; the other was his friend from New Zealand. "Have you been to Rarotonga?" the friend asked. "That would be a great 'R.'" He showed me a picture on his phone. "You could walk it in half a day." It did look beautiful for a future visit, if too small for Abecedarian Walks purposes.

Ezra asked a question I'd heard a few times: "How did you hear about Niue?" My answer was superficial: that I needed an 'N' island and found Niue as I was moving around the screen on Google Maps one night. I'd heard of it, but it hadn't been on my radar as much as nearby Tonga, which had a guidebook that I'd sometimes browse back when I could make a pleasant evening of walking up to the now long-gone Barnes & Noble bookstore in Lincoln Center. It seemed insulting to say that I was here because of the alphabet. But Ezra chuckled; he wasn't offended.

The other two left and I bought a banana-berry ice cream. Ezra had two friendly dogs who appreciated a belly scratch and licked my face and fingers. Would they remember me as an ally if I walked by their home by myself? And Ezra said a popular time to come for ice cream was late in the evening, around nine. Would the village's dogs let me walk through after dark?

I returned to Lialagi. There wasn't much to do in the late afternoon but bring a chair out and watch chickens scurry across the lawn. A car came by; it was Kupa and Mary checking to see whether things were all right.

Sometime later another pair of visitors arrived: Barry in his car, and Panapa on his motorcycle. "I brought you a cold one," Barry said, handing me a can of Great Uncle Kenny's Multi-Purpose Amazing Wakachangi Lager.

They got to reminiscing of the old days. "Back then," Barry said, giving the customary introduction to life in the 1970s, "there was no TV and only one radio station. Maybe you could get another from New Zealand on the shortwave. There wasn't much to do here, so we made our own entertainment."

"You must have known every track," I said.

"I knew the back of every cave. And there were no stairs or ladders like there are now. You had to climb down the cliff to get to the sea."

They shared some of their fishing stories. "One day I was out on the vaka — you've seen the vakas, yes?" Barry asked. "The canoes."

"Barely wider than myself," I said.

"Yes. And with the outrigger, so they're very stable. One guy caught a marlin. Forty-five kilos. But you've seen the vakas — nowhere to put it! The marlin's down there, under the vaka, pulling him around. So what happened? Other people came out in their vakas, and they all linked hands. They made a kind of raft, all of them together. And that's how they landed the marlin."

"I still make a smoked-fish spread," Panapa said. "I sell it at the market on Friday mornings."

"Is that the best time to go?" I asked. "I went on Friday afternoon, but there were only two vendors there."

"Friday morning is much busier. Or Wednesday morning."

It seemed a cruel bit of scheduling that the best market times would be after I'd walked the whole island. And I couldn't bring food back to New Zealand, even from Niue. But I knew what I'd be having for lunch on the plane.

They continued chatting, about hunting and eating flying foxes (fruit bats) — "not as salty as muttonfish," a kind of shellfish — and about Sir Robert Rex, Niue's first premier. "He thought he was royalty." They were skeptical about the National Party's recent win in New Zealand's election, which might mean an excessive focus on money and a scarcity of focus on the country's minority groups. But Panapa was in his late sixties and knew how to get by, no matter what happened.

"I would like to visit the United States," Panapa said. "But I've heard that it's racist."

"It's very racist," I said.

Barry was struck by how readily I admitted it.

"In New York it's not as bad; we try to welcome everybody. But it's still there."

They returned to their respective sleeping quarters, and I went to bed early. When I woke up and opened the front door, Panapa came by again, with his usual upbeat attitude tempered by a matter-of-fact expression.

"Beautiful day, nice breeze," he said. "Pray for the trees, pray for the house, pray for the chickens. My wife was up early, making tea, making breakfast — pawpaw and toast. Now she's looking after the garden. She does what she likes, I do what I like. Everything is free. I'm going to go walk in the bush. Later I'll go swim."

"Where?"

"Right here. Puluhiki."

"I went there yesterday. Pretty rough sea."

"The winds are changing. You gotta take a rope. Tie it to a rock. They're gonna develop that place. Put in toilets and showers, V.C. says." The village council.

I was half-hoping he would invite me on his bush walk, but it didn't happen. "I'm going to walk to Liku," I said.

"They're bulldozing the road."

That was good news — it was comforting to see people along the way. Panapa drove off, and I left soon after, around nine, while there was a reasonable amount of car traffic. The bulldozing seemed to be on a break, but the two workers and I shared a greeting.

Liku was five kilometers from Lakepa, and it had the usual village layout, with a long, white church on a broad green, a World War I memorial nearby, and houses scattered around the green and on a couple of side roads. At a junction, a road went west to Alofi, and opposite, a track led to a rough ocean. A staircase at the end of the track brought me through a cavelike formation, a kind of pentagonal window to the sea.

The only noisy dog in Liku turned out to belong to John, who had grilled the burger for me in Alofi. "How's your walk?" he asked.

"Beautiful, except for the dogs."

John's dog regarded me cautiously. "He doesn't like the stick," John said.

"I don't like it either, but I have to protect myself." Once I put the stick behind me, the dog trusted me. It was a very clean animal, with a soft, white coat. "Will you be at the market Friday morning?"

"No, only in the afternoon."

"Ah, OK. Well, I'll be coming through here again tomorrow morning. Perhaps I'll see you then."

I walked back to Lakepa, had lunch, and cut across to Kupa and Mary's cabins. Barry and Trini were on their porch.

"I'm going down the path," I said. Mary had said that if I took the wide path past the pigpens, it would end in a roundabout, and then I could find my way to a view of the sea, although there was no sea access there.

Barry and Trini knew the path. "OK, it should take you about twenty minutes," Trini said. "If you're not back in an hour..."

"Send a search party," I said.

It was an easy walk to the roundabout, and then about ten minutes picking my way along a sharp, fractured coral floor. I emerged at the top of a narrow chasm, through which I could just make out the sea foam. There might have been a way down, but then there might not have been a way back up.

I climbed to the roundabout and into the village. I might have had another ice cream, but no one was at the store, so I sliced open the coconut from Thomas — the perfect juice on what had become a hot day. I might have cut out the white meat and snacked on it, but it was unusually thin, so — with Mary's consent — I broke it into pieces and fed it to the pigs and piglets, husk and all.

Thomas had told me about the orange sunsets in Lakepa. My first two nights here were too cloudy, but today there was just enough of a break to reveal what seemed to be a celestial fire burning behind the telecommunications tower. Darkness came to the soundtrack of the village's dogs — cries of happiness, I hoped.

Go on to Niue day 5