TUPA Land crab

TUPA
Land crab

Tupas are very much part of the world I live in.

I grew up being accustomed to having them around me.
Tupas are night creatures. During the day they chose to stay in their holes. In the dark they love to wonder freely around my home. Tupas like to leave their “Apoo Tupa” (Tupa Holes) in the pitch dark to find leaves to nourish themselves.

In their holes they work and dig galleries leading very often to roots of a lot of beautiful plants.

I must say Tupas are a nuisance to so many of my plants. Archeologists would love them and should seriously look into hiring them as assistants because as they dig they bring out along with the soil all kind of great things but unfortunately they’re very often mostly pollution. In their doing though they are keeping Mother Earth pretty clean!

Although one is a predator to the other…I love to be surrounded by plants and at the same time at night I love to be greeted back home by the Tupas. Some of them are very brave and don’t budge when I walk closely by. Others do get scared. You can tell by the noise they make when they swiftly run away to hide.

My mother grew up in a Tahitian Hut. Her parents had their dirt floor covered with white sand. They had a great cohabitation with the tupas. Every morning my mother had a routine… To keep their house floor looking clean and pretty, she did not vacuum but had to plug all of the Tupa holes before she could cover it back again with sand.

Little, I remember finding them in our house. They apparently let themselves in through the open door at night. The enchanting scratching noise they made always led me to quickly locate where they were hiding and it is with the help of a broom that they were swept right out of the house. What is it with those tupas liking to come into our house!? Could it be that they are missing living among human and with a roof over their heads? (Ha ha ha) or is it that we are the one who are trespassing and living on their territory?

Nowadays let me reassure you that all houses in Tahiti do have modern floors. My father is telling me that rare were the occasions he had to sweep a tupa out of his house…

Ah! Those stubborn Tupas! I just love them.

In her living my Great-Grandmother “Mama TANE” loved to fish. She fished until late in life. She would paddle her outrigger canoe from home to MOTU TAHIRI (TAHIRI ISLET) which is where the FAA’A International Airport is located today. That place used to be a virgin islet. Mama TANE would go fishing at night around that area and when there was too much current and wind to paddle back home…she would get off on that Motu…dig a big but not too dip of a hole in the sand with her paddle and sleep in it until dawn. When morning came she would find these same kind of tupas running all over the place. She would collect them and take them home…keep them in a cage for a couple of days to cleanse them by feeding them grated coconut. When this was all done she boiled them in water and ate them with coconut milk.
Bon appetit!

Written by Tararaina