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If you travel to some of the remotest islands of Polynesia, churches are probably not uppermost in your mind — sensuous wahines perhaps, slowly gyrating grass-skirted hips, lilting music, Edenic beaches, but churches?
Yet they are among the more striking sights you’ll find on the furthest-flung islands in the South Pacific.
It’s hard to get further away from anywhere than Futuna, the mountainous 32-square-mile speck of land that forms part of the French overseas collectivity of Wallis and Futuna.
The jungle-clad island is still divided into two traditional kingdoms — Alo and Sigave — that are fortunately no longer mostly at war, and its only link with the outside world is by small turbo-prop plane and the occasional ship to Wallis, about 150 miles to the north-east and itself pretty far off the traveller’s beaten track.
But if you brave the distance and airline schedules, you’ll be amazed by the fanciful stone churches that now grace the bays and hills of an island whose warrior inhabitants are credited with allegedly woolfing down the whole population of the nearby islet of Alofi in one cannibal sitting in the 19th century.
In Sausau, a stone’s throw from Leava, the island’s main town and capital of Sigave, a triple towered semi-pagoda-like church adorned with red turrets and baby blue balustrades rises on a leafy headland against precipitous green escarpments and a craggy mountain backdrop — straight out of Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Continue reading
Source: Huffington Post Travel
Image: Mike Arkus/HuffingtonPost
Mike Arkus worked for more than four decades as a Reuters journalist, much of it as foreign correspondent, based in posts as disparate as France and Cuba, Israel and Brazil.
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