"Niue" a Niue Island Travel Page by markcross

Since 1978 I have been comuting back and forward between Niue and New Zealand and live in both places. I first went there after meeting my wife Ahi in New Zealand and dragged her back to the Island of her birth. I say dragged because so many Niue people of the time were desperate to leave the country for greener pastures, where I was young and in need of some adventure.

I had never travelled outside New Zealand and so the tropics were new to me. With this and the lack of written or pictorial material about the island I was completely in the dark about what to expect. My first impressions go something like this:

We arrived at the Niue airport and were greeted by most of the people from Ahi's village, Liku who were crammed onto the back of a long wheel based Bedford truck. Coming down to the coastal terrace and the town of Alofi and I was mesmerised by the coastal colours, the aqua's and ultramarines of the sea and the yellow/greens of the large leave tropical foliage. I was unaccustomed to this sensual bombardment. Straight out of a damp cold Auckland winter I felt myself immersed in a warmth and fragrance that I'll never forget and those first warm feelings of belonging have never left me.

We stopped at the Burns-Philp grocery store to get provisions for the weekend and then headed inland toward Liku which is the Eastern most village in Niue, then a 40 minute ride across the Niue hinterland which consists of a rocky, saucer shaped plateau covered in Taro plantations and secondary and primary rain forest. Again I was in awe of the dusty "makatea" road and the forested landscape I was travelling through. The taros sqeezed between decayed coral rock was not my idea of a plantation but it immediately occurred to me that I was in the company of a resilient and hardworking people and this observation was reinforced over the follow weeks when I too began to learn the art of planting taro in the rocky landscape. But after travel further through large pockets of primary rain forest, where the land was just too rocky to utilise, we arrived at Liku, the place that was going to be my main home, probably for the rest of my Life.