Pitufa.at

In the Gambier the nights are getting colder and summer is coming to its end while here in Austria the first flowers are blooming and tender new leaves are growing on trees and shrubs. After so many years in the tropics I marvel at the miracle of spring even though I’m shivering in temperatures that seem freezing cold to me, while the rest of Austria… Continue reading »

Living in peaceful, happy French Polynesia we sometimes manage to forget about the political and economical crises that buffet the planet, but whenever we open news pages and often when we receive e-mails the vibes are decidedly negative. More crimes, more wars, more terrorist attacks, more refugees, more scandals, more unemployed people, more fear and a general feeling that things are getting worse. The mass… Continue reading »

Getting from the Gambier via Tahiti, Los Angeles, Paris and Vienna to my Mom’s home in Upper Austria is a tiring journey even when all connections work out perfectly, but with the friendly help of the US government it turned into a 6 day odyssey. In Tahiti the Air France personnel didn’t let me check in due to a problem with my ESTA visa (necessary… Continue reading »

We’ve been crazy busy during the past week. We finished the watertank project: cut the aluminium plates for the cover, drilled 140 holes, cut threads for the 140 screws, put it in place, adjusted the height on the wooden board under the sofa and got the saloon back into living-room shape, etc. Other cruisers were willing to take over the house-sitting, so we got garden… Continue reading »

When we wanted to head back to Taravai after the festival the windlass quit on us. We’d been carrying around new brushes for it for a month already, but had never got round to installing them between the work on the watertank, the house, the garden and everything around. Christian had to manually lift the anchor (no fun with 60 metres of chain down in… Continue reading »

Last weekend the first cultural festival of the Gambier took place, it was a surprisingly big event (given that only about 1400 people live in the Gambier) with exhibitions and info about plants, traditional food, etc. and of course handicraft stalls during the day on Friday and Saturday. In the evenings two phantastic dance events took place, with the groups dancing complicated legends and the… Continue reading »

This morning we took out our coffee to the little dock in front of our garden. It was already sunny, but the air was still fresh with dew sparkling on the grass and the flowering shrubs around the house. Behind the house the coconut trees, acacias further up on the slope and pinetrees high up on the steep mountains were gleaming in different shades of… Continue reading »

We are still enjoying house-sitting on the southern side of Taravai. Yesterday it was sunny with blue skies and as we’re just in between projects we used the beautiful day to go hiking up the ridge behind our house. The view over Taravai, the other islands, the turquoise gleaming lagoon, the reefs inside the lagoon and the breakers on the outer reef was just breathtaking.… Continue reading »

There is no dentist in the Gambier, so after discovering a cavity two weeks ago I got increasingly worried. I didn’t know how serious it was, but in the end I decided to book an (expensive) flight to Tahiti to deal with this problem. I was lucky: the tooth problem was easily fixed, Adrian (SY Attila) organised everything beforehand for me in Tahiti, SY Liward… Continue reading »

When you live ashore in the tropics you have to arrange yourself with mosquitoes and lots of other bugs. Around towns authorities spray against bugs in many areas, but here on Taravai everything’s organic and non-toxic, so we have to live with and around the winged fiends. They are worse on rainy days and less on sunny and breezy days, but they’re always around. The… Continue reading »

One of our aluminium watertanks (250 litres volume) started leaking a while ago. No big deal as we have a second one and a watertank, but now that we’ve settled into the little house on Taravai we have started the repair project. The tank is built in underneath the sofa (the rounded wound covers it partly) and the inspection holes we cut into the aluminium… Continue reading »

Last week we worked every day in the garden, got rid of the metre high weed in the veggie garden behind the house, removed fallen over trees from the garden, mowed the grass on the big property, got rid of old rubbish, etc. On Sunday we hosted a house-warming party with 25 people (6 boats and some Polynesian neighbours), a BBQ and a big potluck… Continue reading »

We have 5 lemon trees full of big, juicy fruits in our garden, a mango tree with loaded branches and two papaya trees that we can harvest from every day. Leaving the fruities to rot under the trees doesn’t feel right, so we do our best to make use of them. Today we made 3 litres of papaya-mango sorbet (we have a gigantic freezer in… Continue reading »

It seems that always when things are just a little bit too perfect, something annoying has to happen. These nuisances usually involve either the engine, the fridge, the watermaker or the kerosene stove–the big 4 that worry us in remote places where there’s no professional help available in case of a problem. This time it was Bertie’s turn (that’s the name of our malevolent kerosene… Continue reading »