PARADISE ON EARTH! (Waterfall Catch & Cook)

For the next three weeks, I'm here in a remote part of the Pacific Islands. And I want to do as best I can to take a deep dive into the adventure, the culture, the different types of hunting, food and way of life here in this remote part of the Pacific. Cheers to a great day fellas. Cheers. It was a cool experience. Give respect, get respect. That's how it works. This waterfall is just spilling out of the rainforest here. The tide's just about right, so we're going to jump in the boat. Let's explore some islands. Come along to the protected side of this island and we're just doing a little bit of a cove hop, having a look at the different fringing reef rock structure, the odd village or two that we're going past. It's honestly out of this world. We've just come around this next bend of this island and it's sheer rock faces with rainforest growing out the side. I don't know how it's surviving clinging onto this dense rock, but there's this cave that goes down the back here and you can hear that there's a bat colony. We don't know how long or far it goes back in there, but we're going to throw the gear on, jump in, see if there's any fish. Just getting a closer look at this black and white sea snake, but it can't actually do any harm because its mouth is so bloody small. It must be looking for a feed up here about three or four meters above the water. He's just cruising along going up the rock face. I hope it doesn't fall on my head. We hit him. We're trolling it, John. You excited, miss? Yeah, super excited. Keep diving and spearfishing all in one. Let's do it. See how we go. One of the reasons I love these trips is every day we're relying on catching or foraging a feed. So we often jump in the water with a spear gun. The ocean here is a true pleasure to hunt. It's so clean, it's pristine, and most of the fish in this spot are hiding within cracks and caves in the reef, like this Maori sea perch, which is one of my favorite fish to hunt. But this one here is a bit too switched on for me. It's really cool to be cave diving where I'm told very few people have ever dived. There's quite a few bats up in the back, hey? Sorry, bats. Feels like there's going to be a big crocodile or something. How cool is this? We left the coast to head to a wider seamount with a lot more fish life, and the pressure was on to get some tucker. Oh, beauty. Thanks, mate. See you in there. Just can't get over how clean it is. So refreshing. Oh, it was the perfect shot. So 500 meters that way, it's a kilometer deep. Under us is about 10 under the reef, and as I look that way, there's thick, lush rainforest and a waterfall just exploding out onto the edge of the beach. What is this place? Lunch! Well done, bro. Thanks, John. Thanks, bro. Threw out on the seamount about a K off this island. So this waterfall is just spilling out of the rainforest here. I'd say there's a pool at the base of it, which hopefully we can go and try and scale our way up there and get a look. And then it's coming down this almost secondary little waterfall and the fresh waters flushing out here into the salt. Pocket full of snails there. Pocket full of lunch. We've anchored the boat up. We've grabbed a little bit of gear and those couple of fish we got. We're going to swim in, find somewhere to cook up lunch. Oh, camera gear. What do you reckon, brother? Number one, eh? Number one. Go, go, go! Trying to guard the spray. It doesn't wreck the lens. We're going to try and find some freshwater yabbies. I've made up a few bamboo sticks with a noose on the end and they're getting the coconut flesh, chewing it up in their mouth. So it's grated. Sprinkling that in a bacchetti here at the bottom of this waterfall is a heap of freshwater yabbies or cherubin, which are amazing eating. Be a good entree. Well done. So we got wild cane with coconut stems to make a noose for catching prawns. What's our chances? Me and you, probably pretty minimal. Coconut to use as bait, but I think you've swallowed most of it. Definitely. We've got to feed this to the yabbies. This is a lot harder than it looks. That's a whopper! Well done! After catching an entree worth of yabbies, it was time to prep for a feed. But John cut up a few plates for the cook-up and we head back down through the scrub to the beach where Eddie, who's as legit as they come, had pre-sourced a couple of pieces of wood. One hard and one soft. And he didn't muck around and get in a fire going. All with friction. And it was extremely impressive just how quick he had this bush kitchen set up. Who'd have thought lunch would be so quick? These are some little mollusks of some description that the boys managed to lever off the rocks. These are the ones we went after in the shallows when we were diving. They're just little rock snails. No idea how they're planning to cook them but I'm sure they'll be delicious. There's a couple of different types. We've got a few there. Enough for a bit of a fee. Go with our fish and then underneath here we have trapped a few little freshwater yabbies. A bit of a seafood smorgasbord. These volcanic rocks when they're really hot are exploding. That's proper scary. Like flaming rocks just shooting out towards your eyeballs. So Eddie, John and myself have got the fire going and we're cooking up the feed. It's probably going to take 15-20 minutes to get everything cooked. And Nicky and Brett have gone out to the boat, grabbed the spear gear and they're going to try get a couple more fish because it turns out we need to pay a bit of a waterfall tax for being here. A couple of miles away there's a village and that village has traditional rights to this area here. So the thing to do is make sure you pay respect, pay the tax, keep their blessings and hopefully we can get a few pieces of seafood on the way home to drop off to them. That's there's the cooked yabbies or freshwater prawns and we've got the shells. Some boiling away still and these ones are done so we're just going to let them cool down because they're lava hot and that fish is not far off either. Still pretty hot but I'm hungry so let's give it a crack. Really nice flavour. Looks like a cooked oyster. Very savoury, very salty. Half is chewy but not unedible chewy. The other half's quite tender. Only between that and coconuts and a couple of fish you'd survive no worries. Yum. That waterfall right up the top where we just were this is the absolute bottom of it. The fresh and saltwater pool that feeds out here to this fringing rock bar and reef and straight out here where you can get dog tooth, wahoo, coral trout and all those saltwater sea snails we're going to be cooking up. Boat anchored there. We're going to have lunch under these trees here. In language this is called? That's lunch. Okay. We're going to eat it all. Amazing. Number one mate. Cooked over the fire to absolute perfection. That is really really delicious fish. Quite often at home I cook fish on the fire especially a fish like this has got thick scales I'll throw it directly on the coals but I really like how Eddie prepped it up this afternoon where made up a sharp stick that was green so it wasn't going to burn and then he used the back held him with these like heavier volcanic rocks and then just put it a foot or two above the fire and then constantly adjusted it as the fire changed its heat so it's ended up being like a slow cooked fish that is world-class taste. How'd you go mate? Oh mate, much to be said about my spear. Just super flighty the fish there but yeah nice sea bream. Nothing wrong with that sea bream. It's a great fish. Pretty simple rule I've found in life is that if you give respect you generally get respect so given some fish done the right thing they've asked us to come into the village to have a quick look around and get some carver. Pacific Ocean right there. Sunset. Rainforest. This is where your village would be. Let me know in the comments if you could honestly live here if this is like a romantic pipeline dream and just where you'd go for like a week a holiday or whether you could do a few years here. We're very curious to know. This is paradise. It's so beautiful. They've invited us in. Welcomed us into their home. Said if you want to have a shower, if you want to have a bathroom, have as much fresh water as you want. Just come straight out of the mountain. They've got an inch and a half ag pipe here that just runs the most pure pristine fresh water right to their doorstep and then 15 meters that way is the reef. Unbelievable. This is a cassava, sugarcane, bananas, taro. Very well kept orchard. Oh, this is so beautiful. Surrender. And how many people come to here on Sunday? Plenty. This is such a special space. Wow. A pretty self-sufficient setup here. They've got a church which is by far the grandest structure. They've got a kitchen, a common area and then three or four bedrooms which just mattress, mosquito net and then the floor where a slab would be or the floor is just coral that they've transported up from the beach, like thick coral. They're just thatched roof huts, bamboo walls and that's pretty much it. Very simple setup. They've got fresh water, roof over the head and a lot of fresh produce, an amazing garden, faith and as much seafood as they'd ever need. So no doubt challenging at times but they seem to be pretty happy, pretty stoked. Very hard to see but Eith is right up. Right up in that grapefruit tree. It's mine. God bless you. Love you. John's got his kava. He's a happy man. Yeah, tonight we drink kava? Yeah, sounds good. Oh, we just stayed up there for like an hour and now the sun is almost set so we need to pin it home. It's a couple of hour ride back to camp. Just coming back into base camp now. We had to give our fish away, which happily so and we've only got a few snails that we've come back home with so we're going to go out for a night dive when the sun sets in the next half an hour to hopefully get a few crays and a little bit more seafood for dinner. It's about eight o'clock at night and there's no moon. It's a new moon so it's really dark. We're going to swim out a few hundred meters to the edge of the reef and see what we can find. It is honestly pitch black. You just can't see anything. I really hope my battery doesn't die. Yeah, we'll just swim straight out. Hopefully there's no strong current. We'll end up in Samoa. I'll be honest with you, night diving on the reef would have to be my second favourite nocturnal activity. Most fish are asleep so it's pretty easy pickings at the supermarket but you don't know if there's like a shark behind your back or where the other divers are a lot of the time and there's this eerie yet peaceful nature to it. And if you're lucky, there are different types of crabs and lobsters that walk all over the ocean floor and this ideally is what we're after. I'd also be keen to know in the comments if you've ever night dived or speared in the dark or if you'd like to or would or whether this is crazy. Nice. There you go. One cray. It's a different species, hey? Beautiful. Holy! Right out the front of the camp. Nice green cray. I'm sure if you're going to be able to see me but that, that was special. Just getting surged along by the swell, by the waves and really, really clean. It was like you were in a pool, it was that clean. Probably 20 metres visibility. You could only see where your light was. Light goes off, you can't see anything. Just pitch, pitch black. A lot of crays, a lot of crabs. Not too many. I need to get out of the water.