Lauren Rebbeck
I could feel the humpback in my heart—and not in a woo-woo way. The chance to snorkel with humpbacks on their annual migration north from Antarctica brought me to Niue last summer. But even more than what I saw, I was unprepared for what I heard.
Niue is unique for many reasons. The tiny South Pacific island is home to roughly 1,800 people and can only be reached via flights from Auckland, New Zealand (unless, of course, you have your own yacht or pass through aboard one of the very few cruise ships that call into this remote location between the Cook Islands and Fiji).
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Once a low-lying coral atoll like many others across the Pacific, the island rises like a birthday cake—steep on the sides and mostly flat on top—perched on a platter of coral shelf and surrounded by deep, blue waters plunging to more than 900 feet just a short swim out. Unlike many Pacific islands, Niue isn’t a place to lounge on wide, sandy beaches after a dive—because there aren’t any.
The world’s largest upraised coral atoll—a rarity of geology that resulted from the Pacific Plate’s march eastward—Niue is fringed with plunging limestone cliffs where “sea tracks” (the local name for pathways leading down from the clifftops to the water) descend to something even better than a beach. That’s where I found tidal pools so large and deep I could snorkel in them, surrounded by pristine hard corals reaching their fingers all the way to the water’s surface and with a kaleidoscope of Indo-Pacific fish filtering in with the tide.
But the main reason people visit Niue between July and late September is the humpback whales. Ever since a fleeting underwater encounter years ago in the challenging conditions of a Norwegian winter, I’d longed to see the cetaceans in broad daylight and warm, blue water. French Polynesia and Tonga were on my radar, but when an invitation to snorkel with humpbacks in Niue came along, I went straight to Google. I’m a travel writer, for crying out loud, and I’d never even heard of the place. I was intrigued.
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From my room at Scenic Matavai Resort Niue, where a “whale bell” on the oceanfront terrace rings nearly around the clock to indicate sightings, I was still unzipping my luggage when I spotted whales frolicking yards offshore from where I’d seen people walking at low tide. Out with Niue Blue the next day, I was incredulous to discover we didn’t even need to drop the hydrophone overboard to hear a male whale vocalizing from deep underwater, his chirps and moan keeping us mesmerized on the boat.
When our guide got a visual and gave us the signal to slip into the water to join her, those vocalizations were all the louder. But the memory I carry with me most, before the leviathan rose in the water column and passed so close I could look into its eye, was the way its language thudded in my chest. “You can feel it in your sternum,” said a friend when we were back at the bar, recounting the glory of such a day at sea. When another whale fluked offshore, all we could do was listen to the cheers around us and smile.
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