French Polynesia – Sea People

Shifting Gears

Five islands (7 if you count the ones we landed on) and 3 archipelagoes later, we have said farewell to French Polynesia. Our last day of travel was pretty challenging. We left Rangiroa around 10 am and flew back to Tahiti where, in a moment of clarity, I had booked us into a hotel. We had to be at the airport at midnight for a 2:30 am flight to New Zealand and originally the plan was just to wait it out somewhere. Fortunately, I realized that this was a really bad idea and instead we went to a hotel with a pool and a restaurant. The room was ordinary enough, but the view from the lobby was impressive.

Abraham and I took a taxi in to Papeete around 4 pm just to have a look around, but when we got there we found that they were hosing down the sidewalks and most of the shops had put up their shutters. The sun sets early in the tropics and we only had about another hour and a half of light. The city had what we both identified as a sort of Saigonesque feel. Of course, neither of us has ever been to Saigon, so I don’t know where we got that idea exactly. But it’s French and tropical and sort of seedily charming. I would have liked more time there but I didn’t much fancy wandering around after dark, so when the sun set we went back to the hotel to catch a couple of hours of sleep.

Well, that was a fond hope. Two single beds, 5 people; you do the math. Dani got a little bit of sleep, and I got a little, but I’m really not sure about the rest of them. Here’s a photo of the boys doing a really good imitation of Zombies at the Faa’a airport around 1 am:

Papeete airport

The only thing that salvaged the experience was this great group outside the international arrivals area, apparently waiting to serenade some homecoming friends. The woman with the guitar [sic] was particularly wonderful.

So, now it’s on to New Zealand. I think we’re all going to miss French Polynesia, having kind of gotten the hang of it by now. Another couple of weeks and I’d have had them all speaking a bit of French; Seven was well along and Matiu, who actually knows a little, was at least helping me translate the menus. We had even mastered a few words (of the hello, please, and thank you variety) of Tahitian. As for the bigger picture, I have been trying to ascertain what exactly I’ve learned but I think it’s going to be a while before I can process it all. On that point I was rather struck the other day by this passage in The Biographer’s Tale by A. S. Byatt:

“We see most clearly at a distance; details confuse us; we must get away from what we desire to judge; summer is best described on a winter day.”

The Prodigal Returns

Abraham Joins the Crew

We arrived back in Papeete after our whirlwind tour of Ra’iatea to find Abraham waiting for us at the airport. I wasn’t at all convinced that the rendezvous would come off, but there he was, just outside the domestic arrival area, bedraggled and a little edgy (as who would not be after nearly 25 hours?). He’d flown direct from Boston: 6 hours to LA, a 4-hour layover, 8.5 hours to Tahiti, and another 5 hours in the airport at Papeete waiting for us to turn up. And we still had to catch the ferry to Mo’orea, get a car, and drive to someplace called Fare Hamara, which was where I had arranged for us to stay.

For those of you who don’t know Abraham, here is a picture of him (after a shower and some sleep):

Fare Hamara was another of my gambles. It’s hard to find anywhere to stay with 5 people, and back when I starting making the arrangements for this trip, the first challenge was our comparatively long (6 days) stay on Mo’orea. In part I wanted to get this right because Abraham is only joining us for 2 weeks (he has to work the rest of the summer) and I wanted us all to be comfortable. I did a lot of looking around on the internet and was just beginning to despair when, late one night, I came across a link to this house you could rent in the ’Opunohu Valley. I fired off an email inquiry, not expecting very much, and fifteen minutes later I got a phone call from a guy named Bob Hammar in Seattle.

I told him a little about my project and it turned out that he was friends with Robert Suggs, one of the foremost archaeologists in French Polynesia, that the house was not far from the richest archaeological site on Mo’orea, that he had a huge and interesting library of books on the South Pacific (a catalogue of which he sent me, including a recommendation for a book which is NOT in Widener Library — imagine that!). He proved not only a fount of information but an extremely nice and generous guy. There was a touch of kismet to the whole encounter and it had a decidedly calming effect on me during a period of steadily building pre-departure anxiety.

So, we got the ferry to Mo’orea, picked up our rental car, and drove past the Sofitel and the Hilton and on around the island, with the kids gradually uniting in a chorus of mistrust, until we finally arrived at a steep, narrow, rather unprepossessing driveway. I was really holding my breath at this point; two kids in revolt are hard to handle, but three is a serious problem.

Here, then, is what we encountered: a fabulous two-bedroom cedar house built in the round with an open ceiling in the main room, an encircling deck, and a freestanding bathhouse with a sunken tiled double shower. Like the very best of Northern California transplanted to French Polynesia (minus the hot tub; which is fine by me). None of the pictures do it justice, but this should give you an idea.

This is from the outside:

this is from the inside:

this is the view up the valley from the deck:

and out to the reef:

Needless to say we are all completely happy, as you can see from this photo (shot through the screen door) of us playing Scrabble…

playing scrabble

It’s All Relative

Weather, Food, and My Bad French

Kaoha from the sometimes sunny Marquesas!

So, that turboprop I was worried about was actually remarkably smooth until we came in to land. I never mind coming back to earth but Seven was looking a little anxious as we bounced our way down through the last 1000 feet onto what appeared to be not a tropical island at all but a kind of desert.

The airport at Nuku Hiva is basically an open-air A-frame shed with counter, a couple of benches, a large shelf where you pick up your baggage, and a couple of bathrooms with signs on the doors that said: “Fermé: pas de l’eau.”

“Quite dry here,” I said to the woman was there to pick us up.

“Il pleut de l’autre côté,” she said.

For those of you who do not yet have a complete grasp of the geography, this is where we are:

The Marquesas, which are part of French Polynesia, lie northeast of Tahiti about 3 hours by plane. The islands are volcanic in origin and have no fringeing reef and very little coastal plain. Except for the bays, most of the coastline consists of sheer black and reddish cliffs that plunge straight into the sea. The mountains are extremely rugged, at least on Nuku Hiva, and the people live in deep valleys separated from one another by razor-sharp mountain ridges. The valleys each have a different character depending upon which way they face, drier, wetter, brighter, darker. Taipivai, for instance, Melville’s Typee Valley, runs east-west and has longer slanting afternoon (and presumably morning) light, whereas the sun is already high in the sky by the time it reaches the north-south running valleys.

Taiohae, where we have been staying, faces south, and for the first couple of days we had a southerly wind which brought rain, and that meant, in turn, a copious amount of slippery red mud on the roads and pathways. The tropics can be pretty challenging when it’s wet, an there’s something about this place—it’s the hills, I think, and the feeling one has of being closed in—that is daunting even when the rain is not pouring down in sheets.

But then the wind swings round, the sun shines, the water changes color completely—from slate to turquoise—and if you’re smart you rent a car and make the wild drive north to Hatiheu and then walk an hour or so over another ridge to Anaho, which is one of the most beautiful bays I have ever seen.

Here is Matiu on his balcony at our hotel in Taiohae:

Maitu on his deck

Here we are walking through someone’s garden:

And here is where we ended up:

Tag: French Polynesia