The Marquesa Islands

A two day push through rolling seas from Takapoto. This is a trip we have been thinking about for over 15 years from when we first heard about these remote islands on a previous trip to some of the outer French Society Islands. But it wasn’t until about 5 years later that we learned of the Aranui cargo ship when a friend gave us the book by Larry MacMurty, “Paradise”. In it MacMurty takes the Aranui voyage as his first South Seas trip. His reasons for going are different than ours but he told us the way starting a long planning project of checking into it, and going and not going. Now we are finally on our way.

The Marquesa group of islands is the most remote archipelago in the world as measured by the distance to it from a continental land mass. It is 3100 miles from North America. You can find them on an atlas by looking at the 7 degree south line of latitude somewhere west of the Hawaiian Islands.

The name Marquesa means “The Land of Men” and they are arranged into two groups, the northern islands and the southern island groups. Each were formed by ancient volcanoes and are the youngest of the Polynesian Islands. They are marked by steep, often vertical mountainous areas sliced with deep, tree filled crevasses.

They are one of the last group of islands to be inhabited when people from Southeast Asia first took to exploring. They populated the Solomons, Somoa, Vanuatu, and later on their way to the Society Islands and then the Marquesas followed by Hawaii. Go ahead, look it up.

So the Marquesan people will be treated again to a group of pale and sunburned Caucasians with us leading the sunburned group.