Vue de Rimatara avec au premier plan le village principal d'Amaru. La piste de l'aérodrome donne un bon aperçu de la taille de l'île./View of RiMATAra with the main village of Amaru in the foreground. The airstrip gives you an idea of the island’s size. destination Arriving by air, seeing Rimatara appear slowly on the horizon is an enchanting sight and the prelude to a complete change of scenery. A brilliant green oval of land, the island is picked-out by an intensely blue ocean, an astonishing color that is sometimes called Majorelle blue, after the French artist Jacques Majorelle who used a few secret ingredients to make his overseas blues ever richer and more striking. A color said to be relaxing and to soothe the soul. These are certainly feelings that this small island in the Australs stirsup, even at first sight. These color nuances subtly tell the visitor that he has arrived « elsewhere », in a Polynesia where the light, color, landscape, climate and culture are quite different from the other archipelagos. The Australs formFrench Polynesia’s southern limit, lying between 600 and 1,200km South of Tahiti, the five inhabited islands are scattered along a curved arc around 1,200 km long, the distance between the island the furthest West, Rimatara, and Rapa the easternmost of the chain. Here we are on the frontier. Maybe not quite the edge of the world, but the edge of French Polynesia. Looking out from the southern coasts of these islands, there is nothing but a vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, until we arrive on the Antarctic’s icy shores, 6,000 km below. Between the two coasts, nothing, not even the tiniest rock. This is the colossal South Pacific basin. These waters, that also wash the shores of the distant but technically neighboring frozen continent, are home to majestic humpback whales, who make an annual journey northward and can be sighted from Rimatara’s shores between June and October. They come to escape the Antarctic winter, basking in the warmer waters. The long journey is also made, and more often, by an icy wind that gives the archipelago it’s notably even surprisingly cooler climate, though the islands only just dally with the Tropic of Capricorn. A little Austral gem Rimatara is the smallest inhabited island in the Australs, with a surface area of just 8.6km², it is also the lowest of them, its highest point, the Mt. Uahu, standing just 84m tall. How did such a tiny gem come to exist in this gigantic ocean ? Much like all our islands, Rimatara is the remains – albeit much eroded- of a powerful volcano that grew on the ocean floor, 4,500m below the surface, after numerous eruptions, it managed to get its head above water. Such volcanic islands, found in this part of the Pacific, are the result of hotspots, that is zones of weakness within the earth’s crust that allow molten rock from deep within the mantle to reach the surface.