Welcome to the Marquesas! I hope these islands will blow your mind the way they are blowing mine.
It’s just too much to start with colour, so I’m easing you in with an almost black & white. We are way out in the South Pacific, on the edge of French Polynesia. Kaoha! Bonjour!
A place where Eric and I spent a few weeks and turned our thoughts, conversations, and creativity to a land of extremes: beauty, darkness, and connection.
I saw the Marquesas for the first time from the deck of a ship. The hillsides, captured above by photographer Eric Guth, foretold the natural beauty we would experience in this archipelago. One of our first stops, from that ship, was in Hatihe’u, where a group of local performers welcomed us at one of their…
We first visited the community of Hapatoni, on the island of Tahuata, aboard a ship called the National Geographic Orion. The village has a population of about 100 people, and many people of all ages took part in welcoming our vessel. This place made an immediate impression on me, and I resolved to return later…
Jennifer Kingsley is a journalist and storyteller who specializes in the modern culture of communities around the world. She is the Field Correspondent for Lindblad Expeditions-National Geographic and a National Geographic Explorer. In 2015, Jennifer founded Meet the North, a project that shares personal stories from some of the Arctic’s four million citizens. She has…
Teiki Pao gathers coconut from the hills of Nuku Hiva. Dried coconut, called copra, is sold to make coconut oil, and it is an important industry here. Teiki works with his horse, Légende, and when I asked Teiki about his tattoos, he told me some of them represent the horse that he spends so much…
Arriving to a new place I’m often drawn to the small things. A new landscape, in its entirety, is too overwhelming. I have to take it piece by piece. So this is one of the first encounters I had in French Polynesia once we embarked the National Geographic Orion and headed out into the blue….
Eric Guth is a photographer with extensive field experience in remote and polar regions. He is a naturalist with Lindblad Expeditions-National Geographic and a field technician for James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey in Antarctica as well as glacier cave research in Oregon, Washington, Patagonia, and Greenland. His portraiture spans both hemispheres, and his stories and photos…