TAHITI


HOT, STICKY AND ACHING FROM TWO HOURS OF HIKING STEEP JUNGLE TRAILS, IT’S A RELIEF TO LEAP OFF THE LAVA ROCK LEDGE AND FEEL THE MASSAGING EFFECT OF THE CHURNING OCEAN AS I ENTER THE WATER BELOW.


As I resurface, my hiking companions follow me in. Soon, there are five of us treading cool water, laughing from the adrenaline of the jump. Before long, we all scramble out onto the slick rocks and scale back up the 12ft, pock- marked cliff and repeat the leap. I’m on a guided hike around Te Pari — the wild,


uninhabited seven-mile-long coastline at Tahiti’s southeastern extremity. Te Pari simply means ‘The Cliffs’ in Tahitian, and from our vantage point its stark topography is laid out before us — a series of black, volcanic rock faces plunging vertically into the water, cut by a handful of lush, steep-sided valleys. Battered by wind and sea, the area is only accessible on foot or by boat when the swell is small enough, as it is today. When the ocean is more tempestuous, parts of the trail will be swallowed by legendary waves. More than 250,000 international travellers make it to


Tahiti each year. Most stay around the island capital of Pape’ete and its airport, before hopping over to French Polynesia’s popular island paradise of Bora Bora. The trickle of visitors who make it from Pape’ete to Tahiti Iti — the smaller part of this figure-of-eight-shaped island — tend to come for the surf at its southeastern corner. Thanks to its fearsome reputation for 10ft-high


barrelling waves, in July 2024, Teahupo’o will stage the summer Olympics’ four-day surf competition for France. A remote village where the paved road ends, it’s here that the Fenua Aihere (Bush Country) begins. Sparsely populated with a string of rustic fisher family homes set between the lagoon and mountains, it eventually leads to Te Pari. Though it’s only a 90-minute drive from Pape’ete to Teahupo’o, this area feels like another world.


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After drying off with towels pulled from our backpacks,


we continue our hike along the rising and falling folds of the cliff edge with our local guide, Hitinui Levy. Though he’s easily 6ft tall with a large build and is carrying a heavy canvas backpack, he springs along the rocky path like a sleek cat. Hitinui and some of his fellow guides from Teahupo’o maintain this trail themselves, and he knows it like the back of his hand. Eventually the trail leads us uphill and into a pandanus


forest, thick with the palm-like trees prized by Tahitians for their elongated leaves, which are used in weaving and to make local thatched roofs. Reaching a high clearing, we pause to watch a small aluminium boat bobbing in the deep sea on the horizon. We are just close enough to make out a plump man at the helm, grasping a fishing pole — a sight that makes Hitinui throw his arms up in the air. “This area is protected by the rahui, but no one polices it,” he explains. Rahui is the traditional practice of temporarily banning


fishing to replenish stocks, used by ancient Polynesians long before British and French naval expeditions and missionaries started to arrive in the late 18th century. The first Polynesians are believed to have reached Tahiti around 500 BCE. Archaeology in the area shows that Te Pari was densely inhabited until European diseases killed off approximately 80% of Tahiti’s population from the late 1700s to mid-1800s. Those who were left moved to villages such as Teahupo’o. Hitinui tells us that Teahupo’o was the first area in


French Polynesia to resurrect the rahui system after local fishers noticed their catches had declined over the years. Introduced in 2014, rahui now prohibits fishing across more than 670 hectares of little-visited and pristine lagoon and sea around Te Pari. While the government has authorised the ban, it doesn’t actively manage it. Our group watches as Hitinui takes matters into his own hands, his eyebrows furrowing as he cups his hands to his mouth to let out a long warning cry — “whoo!” — to catch the attention of the fisherman. It works, and seconds later we watch as he fires up his motor and putters away. “Originally I wanted to be a park ranger to patrol the


rahui,” says Hitinui, whose family have been the stewards of this area’s cultural and environmental heritage for generations. “But there’s no funding, so I became a hiking guide instead.” Now he’s the de-facto observer and enforcer, regularly diving this coastline alongside representatives from French Polynesia’s Direction of the Environment agency to check progress. Despite the lack of policing, he says there are markedly more and larger fish here now than there were a decade ago. The initiative is working so well that the community has no short-term plans to re-open fishing in the area; they fish on their village doorstep and leave this uninhabited area alone.


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