4/29/13 Nuku Hiva

Sometimes you just get lucky.  Something weird happens and it comes out in your favor.  Today was kind of like that. 


Yesterday I was first call and a man comes in to the infirmary to be seen for a cough/cold.  During the routine vital signs something is noticed that is critical and requires the man to be immediately disembarked.  Of course, we were at sea yesterday and couldn't.  So, we spent a good portion of the evening working with the local travel assistance/medical evacuation team.  We had already done several successful disembarkations with them.  This one wasn't going so well for reasons I can't really mention.  In the end, after several hours of working on it, we called in a U.S. based air ambulance company we have worked with before who agreed to fly in from San Diego.  They rock. 

So, instead of having the local people come out, possible in their own boat, and transfer the patient over, we had to do it.  This was somewhat problematic because Nuku Hiva is so small that there is only one spot on the pier to which a tender can pull up.  And it was low tide causing about a two foot step up to be taken.  Our tendering operation was taking a long time.  So, we had to arrange a priority tender just for this medical evacuation.  Well, he had to be escorted over by medical. Since there would be room on the tender, I was allowed to take my family on and go ashore early.  Cool.

So, we get the guy ashore and off to the local hospital. 

When we arrive at the pier we were greeted by a line of school children doing a Haka for the arriving passengers.  It was brilliant.  I have some video I will share some day soon. 

 They set up the drums and the arriving passengers walked a gauntlet between dancing and chanting kids. 

You can see that the kids just hated all the attention. 

After dancing, the kids went off to school.  Apparently this was their last show of the day.  We were lucky to catch it. 

You could rent a horse ride along the beach.  This is one of the young ladies taking care of her horse. 

So we went to the little market area that seems to arise at every cruise port.  The people there were busily hand crafting and selling their wares.  I finally broke down and bought my own little trinket souvenir:  A little tiki pendant.

Then we wandered around and found some tide pools.  The only real problem was the oppressive heat.  Man it is hot here, the ocean breeze was what kept us alive.  I am happy we decide to do this instead of our original hike up the mountain because of the heat.  We didn't have time for a long hike either. 

Then we paused in the market on the way back to the ship.  Note the Tiki in the background.

It was a fun day on a beautiful island and a memorable send off to the South Pacific.  When we made it back to the ship we discovered that due to the long tender times, no crew had been allowed ashore.  Only the doctor, his wife, and us made it ashore.