A beautiful week in Tikehau

 10/08/2021

Two days ago, I came back from one of the best holidays I had ever had. Sunny weather? Check. Sea? Check. Beaches? Double check. The paradisiac atoll my family and I went to was Tikehau, a two-hour flight from Tahiti. Tikehau has about five hundred inhabitants, almost all of whom are fishermen.  When we arrived on 3 July, after a one-hour delay, we were welcomed by our hotel's staff. They drove us in a minivan for ten minutes, past hundreds of coconut trees, to a tiny port where a motorboat was waiting for us. We sailed for twenty minutes before arriving at an overwater cabin, the hotel reception. 

Our hotel was called, drumroll please,..."Le Tikehau", with 37 bungalows, 2/3 of which are overwater. The first three days our bungalow was an overwater suite, with a queen sized bed, two single beds, a huge bathroom with a bath and shower, and best of all, a double-levelled outside deck with two deck chairs, a fare pote'e with a table and chairs, and a shower. Our hotel's location was fantastic, right between some uninhabited islands, a dozen yards away, with nothing but coconut trees and sea cucumbers. In the morning, the lagoon would be a dazzling mirror for miles, reflecting the sunlight right into our eyes (I must've worn sunglasses nearly the entire time😎). We often went kayaking to and from those islands, feeling like explorers discovering a new place. At night, we spotted at least five black fin sharks and a sting ray underneath our bungalow. The sharks didn't bother the ray at all  Black fins are usually quite harmless to humans.

Our hotel

Photo from Whats that fish

After three days spent solely at the hotel, my parents decided we'd join a day tour to see manta rays and different islands. Two guides picked us up with their boat at 9am and there was already a couple on board. We sailed to a spot where many other boats were already anchored, our captain showed us a manta ray close to the surface, and after gearing up, we jumped into the water excitedly. The sight that awaited us was breathtaking. The first manta ray we saw had heart shaped grey lines on its back and scars on its left dorsal fin. It was gliding around a coral with its mouth wide open, eating krill that seemed invisible to us. When a small fish got caught in its mouth, it spat it back out. We spent some time observing this ray, majestically gliding around and around the coral, then our guide told us that another ray had been spotted. We swam for a bit before finding not one, but two manta rays, far down below us...wait was that another one...and another.

There were now four manta rays in a gliding procession, with the biggest one, about 4m wide, leading the way. It had curved pectoral fins instead of the pointy ones the others had. The smallest manta ray had brilliant sparkling silver tusks! I thought that it was strange, until he uncoiled the "tusk", to show that they were really cephalic fins ( the small fins at the front of manta rays). The group looked perfectly synchronised, twirling around a coral like birds in formation. They each had two or three suckerfish/remoras attached to their underside. The fish are then protected from predators.

photo on left from National Geographic 

photo on right from Manta-ray World

A man from another group dived too close to one of the rays and it turned on its side in defence. We saw his white belly, spots and gills momentarily before it dived back down into the unknown. We then climbed back onto the boat, marvelling at what we had just witnessed: nature in its purest form.

Our group then made our way to the archipelago's bird island, a protected reserve, where about half a dozen different bird species coexist. The guide explained that in 1992 there was a huge storms that destroyed all the trees on a neighbouring island so the birds living there took refuge on this island. Nothing could have prepared us to what we saw. At our arrival, we instantly saw birds everywhere, in every tree nesting, on the ground, in the air. They weren't afraid of us at all as we went by them, sometimes stopping twenty centimetres away from them, instead they looked us dead in the eye, as if thinking "Oi! What are you looking at?". The Bird Island is a protected reserve so these birds have never been hunted down before. 

 © Aurelien Audevard

 © Jean Michel Fenerole

There are four main species of birds on that island: the Northern Gannet, the Northern Gannet with a red foot (these looks like fluffy ducks perched on trees), the brown Nodi sterns with a white patch on the top of their heads, they lay their eggs in trees and take care of them, the white Sterns, lay their eggs anywhere then leave it but they do fee them once they are hatched. We saw some birds hunt very calmly on a strip of sand, they waited for the tide to come in before pouncing on the unsuspecting fish brought in. Each looked like they had been drawn in a sketchbook before coming to life. There were also many big crabs on the island, though here the crabs ate chicks and not the other way round. The trees on the outer edge of the small island were mostly redwood. The village elders used this wood with lime, from burned coral, to construct their church.

We then set off for a well deserved lunch at a tiny island they had nicknamed "Motu Picnic",( motu means small island), and I have unfortunately forgotten its real name. (Oh, btw all of these islands' beaches had pastel orange-pink sand. This is due to the Benthic Foraminifera, a pink single-celled microscopic animal with a shell full of holes through which it extends its "Pseudopodia", (meaning "false foot"), used to attach itself and feed.) 

 There, now I can get back to the picnic island.

For lunch I had, raw parrotfish, rice with coconut milk and grilled red mullet. Raw fish is THE main Polynesian dish. Raw fish with coconut milk, raw fish sashimi, raw fish with olives and feta... We fed our leftovers to the black-fin sharks along the shore, they were coming from everywhere, all seventeen of them, pushing over each other for the dead fish. And after that, we saw a huge colony of spider-crabs. Well, they weren't actually spider crabs, they were hermit crabs that could climb on things like spider-man ;) While snorkelling, my brother found an octopus hiding under a coral. It was a purple-red with a few tentacles sticking out...and that was all I could see. After a few hours, we headed back to the hotel. 

If you're thinking of going to an isolated little-known island with coconut trees, bright blue lagoons and lots of crabs, sharks, sea cucumbers and manta rays then Tikehau is the right place for you.  (I have not been sponsored by anyone, it's my own opinion 😜)

From Financial Times