Huahine is an island in French Polynesia, two landmasses joined by a bridge inside one reef, and it holds the densest concentration of ancient stone temples anywhere in Polynesia. Some two hundred structures stand on a single hill above the village of Maeva, the old seat of the Leeward chiefs. More than thirty restored marae — open-air platforms and courts of dark stone — are strung along the shore of Lake Fauna Nui and up the slope of Matairea, with house platforms among the trees. Nearby at Fa'ahia the waterlogged ground kept what Polynesian archaeology almost never gets: canoe planks, paddles, bailers, adze handles and war clubs, still sound after centuries, along with the bones of birds that no longer exist. But the part of Maeva still in use is out in the shallows. V-shaped walls of coral stone stand in the channel between the lake and the sea, and they are fish traps.
Each one opens its mouth to the incoming tide. Fish ride in on the rising water and are funnelled into a narrow stone pen as it falls, unable to find the way back out. Individual traps still belong to particular families, the rights handed down over generations along with the stones themselves. Away from Maeva the island stays quiet: Huahine keeps only a handful of overwater bungalows, so you wake to a lagoon with nothing much happening on it. Boats take you across to the motu, the coral islets on the reef, for white sand and a picnic of grilled fish, and you can slip in on the way over coral heads busy with parrotfish. The road climbs through vanilla plantations to the Belvedere on Mount Turi, with Maroe Bay deep blue below. At Faie, blue-eyed freshwater eels longer than your arm come up out of the shadows under the bridge to be fed, and the village holds them sacred. Huahine is one of the last places in Polynesia where the old traps are still worked for dinner rather than shown.