What Do You Hear in a Tropical Wilderness?

Not much.

If it's dawn you hear roosters, but once they shut up it's pretty quiet. It's pretty much trees in the wind, birds, and then nothing. You don’t even hear waves because they break on the coral about half a mile out.

It’s crazy how loud the quiet can be. And although I feel so comfortable in a group of strangers, the isolation can be unsettling.

For example, in Fare (the "major" village in Huahine) there was a hike we could take as recommended by Moon Tahiti. The directions to get there were simple - Walk two dirt paths north of the total station, and turn inland."

It was really hot and we were in flip flops, but the Te Tiare boat wasn't coming back for an hour and a half, so we were sort of stuck in Fare, and I wanted to see the vanilla vines, pineapples and coconut plants anyway.

We turned down the road and started walking in past a few plots of land with plant husks and junk in the front yard. It was pretty empty and quiet as we walked inland, and we only saw one person - a guy with a pick up truck who dumped hundreds of coconuts in his yard to husk and clean.

Throughout the walk, the craziest thing to me was how quiet it was. The other thing that kept freaking me out was the realization that we were pretty language-handicapped, and pretty alone.

The only other time I’ve been so far off the beaten track was when I used to visit Victoria, Mexico with my church group (the middle of the Mexican countryside.) In some ways, the little town of Fare reminded me of that location, but back in the Mexico days I was with a group of 100+, I knew Spanish, and wasn’t really allowed off the beaten path.

The entire time we were on the islands, I always got nervous when walking into the jungle. I always felt like such a loser for being so anxious in Paradise. I would normally force myself to tough through it, but in Fare, as we sort of nervously walked down the road, it started raining—totally out of the blue.

So instead of walking into possible adventure that day, we we walked to the first little bar out of the Pension and drank Hinano until the boat returned.