Have you ever tried to make a rainproof shelter out of palm fronds – with a bush for framework? It sort of makes you feel like you’re on the Survivor TV show. One thing is mandatory: you need a machete!
We were out exploring in the dinghy and had found a motu (Tahitian for “small island”) with what looked like a temporary shelter on it. It wasn’t much – just a few dried up palm fronds stuck into a bush to make a roof – but we thought it would be fun to fix it up.
We started by cutting down the biggest green palm fronds we could find. We laid them on the bush, weaving them through the old palm fronds so that they couldn’t fall out. It took a lot of fronds to fix up the roof. To get them, we had to find a palm tree that was short enough so that we could reach the bases of the fronds, and then we took the machete and hacked the palm fronds down. Once, I tried using a palm frond growing on a tall tree as a rope to get to the base of the frond, but all I succeeded in doing was crumpling up the leaves and scaring away a little gecko!
While I was busy slashing at palm fronds, Jessie tackled the floor. She took the bottom part of a frond and used it as a scraper to make the ground inside the hut even and free of rocks, which was no small feat. Then, she laid down a palm frond floor that was thick + springy = Extra Comfy!
We decided to spend the afternoon at our shelter, so Mom and Jessie went back to the boat and packed a picnic lunch, matches, and other things. Dad and I had tried to start a fire Indian-style, but we couldn’t find good enough materials and hard enough wood for the drill and bow. It was a good thing Mom brought matches; they were very useful when our plan backfired. Actually, it did not fire at all. It wouldn’t even start smoking!
That was only the first hut that we built. The second shelter was closer to the boat, but it was harder to build since it was a lot bigger. We made the framework out of four 15-foot poles that we chopped down with the hatchet. We propped one up between two tall palm trees, and leaned one end of three other poles up on the horizontal pole with the other ends resting on short, forked sticks driven in the ground. For the roof, we must have chopped down about fifty palm fronds! We split the fronds down the middle, laid three of the frond halves on the presently bare rafters, and tied them on with string we had gotten from a rope attached to a buoy (you can find a lot of almost-useless things washed up on the beach).
We laid down around fourteen rows of palm fronds for the roof, and then we chopped down even more fronds for the walls and floor! We made the walls by just cutting the fronds to the correct size and tucking them into the overhanging leaves on the sides of the roof. I had leveled out the dirt inside the hut before we started on the roof, and Jessie made another nice floor out of more palm fronds!
Our shelter was really fun to build, and we had a great time there! We brought out a little fold-up grill that Dad had welded, and set it up on the beach over our cooking fire. We also had two other fires to keep the bugs away, plus some smudge pots made out of half of a coconut. We tried to figure out how to use a cast net we bought in Costa Rica, but the only way we could catch any fish was to stretch the net out over a group of fish, drop it on them, and see if any of the fish were too large to fit through the net. We caught two juvenile groupers this way, and cooked them on the grill for lunch. They were delicious! To top everything off, I found two baby octopuses in the shallows, and we got to play with them!
We were sorry to have to leave our wonderful palm frond house behind, but hopefully other people can find it and enjoy it too. Who knows, maybe we’ll build another one soon!