traveller The lost world
our region
I slide on my butt down a slippery rock waterfall into the water, then jump five metres into the next pool and swim to the edge. From here, I can sit just above the 125-metre drop-off.
In fact, some of Tahiti’s most pristine areas can be found minutes outside its bustling capital city, Papeete. It’s here I’m beginning my quest, with a hike into the Fautaua Valley. There’s not another soul in sight. As we walk through thick rainforest, Luccioni walks me past ancient stone walls built by locals. “There are bodies buried all around us,” he says. I’m not sure it’s the fact I’m crossing such sacred turf or that the temperature has dropped 10 degrees from Papeete, but my sweat cools as we climb higher and higher: through a clearing in the trees I see a 125-metre-high waterfall and behind it on the horizon, the highest mountain in the Pacific, Mount Orohena. We walk to the top of the waterfall to three pristine mountain pools. I slide on my butt down a slippery rock waterfall into the water, then jump five metres into the next pool and swim to the edge. From here , I can sit just above the 125-metre drop-off.
52 Paradise – Air Niugini’s in-flight magazine
Water slide ... part of the thrills in Tahiti’s mountainous jungle-covered hinterland.
I look out across endless rainforest and soaring peaks and wonder if anything so untouched exists anywhere else, quite so close to a capital city. I spend the rest of the day in the forests, discovering new waterfalls, then drive with Luccioni past tiny fruit plantations up to a look-out 1400 metres above the lagoons, where the vegetation changes from tropical to sub-alpine – dominated by wispy, whitegreen old man’s beard and ferns. From here, we look down on the untouched Punaruu Valley. Low cloud drifts across the road as Luccioni battles his four-wheel-drive across near-unpassable corrugations caused by flash floods. At the top we watch a hang-glider leap into the air, soaring high above the valley. Here, there’s 78 species of birds calling out around us, 28 of which are endemic to Tahiti. The next day, I decide to venture under Tahiti’s mountainous hinterland.