About 15 miles south of Nuku Hiva, Ua Pou was a nice day’s sail from Anaho bay. We left just after breakfast on Easter Sunday and we arrived into Hakahetau bay just before sunset. The topography of this island is mind boggling. Wide, coral-reefed bays give way to rolling v-shaped valleys with towering basalt peaks at the centre. They were so much taller than
anything around that they collected clouds greedily, only occasionally giving us peeks of their full splendour. Precipitously steep, the theory goes that they were made from molten lava pushed up through a weak point in the volcanic rock. My tiny brain struggled to see how that was plausible.
After a few hours of investigation in the sleepy little village, it appeared that there was a small shop with frozen baguettes and a restaurant which only opened by booking in advance.
We had heard on the boat-vine that there was an East German chocolatier who lived on a hill and who gave tours of his cocoa plantation.
This chap had no internet presence and there was no sign of Manfred or chocolate on the village info boards. Upon asking, the lady in the village shop begrudgingly said that she didn’t have his number but that he lived 15 minutes up ‘that’ way.
We booked lunch at the restaurant for the next day and the restaurant owner confirmed Manfred’s direction but said it was an hour and better to go early in the morning to avoid the mosquitoes.
So Lisa went for a swim and saw a turtle swimming right underneath her, and Will paddleboarded alongside so she didn’t get eaten by a shark with no-one to witness it.
The following day we embarked upon the grand quest for Manfred and his Mythical Chocolate.
Up an unmarked gravel track we went, until we started to think this was a ruse put together by the boaty people we had met.
Maybe they had smoked something excellent and fabricated a story about a crazy man who had fled East Germany 40 years ago on a rainbow to set up a Willy Wonka-style chocolate factory up a hill on a remote island in French Polynesia. After about half an hour we saw a hand-made sign with “Manfred – Schoko-Man,
1500m” and an arrow! He existed! We quickened our pace and made it up to an entrance with “Manfred Ville” and “Do not enter – Beware of dogs” on signs. There was also a wok strung up like a gong and a spanner on a rope. We announced ourselves using the odd
door bell and walked up the path into a clearing with a little swimming pool and garden with ducks, cats and the aforementioned dogs. These dogs were incredibly fat, likely subsisting on a diet of chocolate and cats.
And there was Manfred! A weathered face and cammo-gear-clad man who looked anywhere from 60 to 90 years old. Having not heard the ‘door bell’, he was surprised to see us but very quickly welcomed us in. Writing the following almost makes me think I had smoked the same stuff as the people who told us about this place. He spoke to us in French, and occasionally German when Will spoke to him. He was born in East Germany, toured the country as a national Ju-Jitsu champ, worked in a
Finnish massage parlour and was quite the ladies man (wink and smile from Manfred). He really didn’t know how many children he might have had from that job and so he had a vasectomy...
Within the first 5 minutes he was telling us dirty jokes of the sort that you might hear in a British pub at throwing out time. At age 30 he saw an article about climbers in French Polynesia who had just scaled one of Ua Pou’s peaks and decided to buy a one-way plane ticket. He only spoke German at the time. He then showed us newspaper clippings about his first job after he landed, as a helicopter pilot in Tahiti, ferrying royalty around and laying telephone cables. He had no background in chocolate making but had heard about some bloke who had a cocoa tree in Tahiti and so bought some cuttings and started planting. He said he gets about 1,500 visitors every year and some of the best French, Belgian and Swiss chocolatiers had visited and given him the thumbs up. The chocolate was really very good. We bought some with ginger, some with pistachios, and of course some plain.
He then led us through to his garden. Completely covered in cats (he estimated 60) and chickens (cats for the rats, and chicken for the centipedes), he sent Will up the pamplemousse tree and gave us those, plus pomegranates to take home. While Will was up the tree, he decided to teach Lisa some self-defence. Saying a fond farewell, we all left feeling completely baffled.
We went back down the hill via a waterfall to have lunch in the by-reservation-only restaurant. We were welcomed by a hugely friendly, and rotund, man who had just finished watching the French election debate. Without asking us what we wanted to eat, he went into the kitchen and brought out smoked fish salad, cooked fish and chow mein for the fish eaters, and some lentils and salad for the veggies. It was excellent and the chef was very excited to chat to us. To top off the day, we all donned snorkel gear and went to the reef, just near the boat. We saw sting rays, Moorish idols, and parrot fish, to name but a few.
At 4pm we lifted anchor and set sail for Hiva Oa, our last stop in the Marquesas before we leave the boat-Panks and go to Tahiti.
PS - that's our boat, Lucky Girl in the bay above!