Moorea, French Polynesia
Sunday night
I'm sitting in Chez Pauline this evening, over on the island of Moorea, just about half an hour's boat ride from Papeete. This is the oldest guest house in the area, established in 1918, the year my mother was born.

I'm still having the strange sensation that I really haven't left home, and except for the hassle of not being able to connect to the internet worth two hoots, I don't really feel that far away.

Typical internet cafe hassle: You have to pay in advance and through the nose: $7 for half an hour. $3.50 for 15 minutes, and the guy running the place doesn't know if my jump drive is going to work or not, and he can't tell me how to get to MyComputer to transfer stuff from the jump drive, and he won't let me first find out if it's going to work before charging me for at least 15 minutes of internet. And then, damn it, I wasted 15 minutes just trying to get TypePad to upload the Tahiti pictures I want to share. JF has had an amazing experience here so far, and has the photos to prove it.

He was staying with Uncle Michel for the first week or so. This uncle has been married to a Polynesian woman for years and Teura speaks passable French and is eager to let me in on all the details of her family life and culture. She's the one who gave me the PAREO, the cloth you wear as skirt, dress, pajamas, bath robe, and general all-around woman's everything wear.

JF went to the island of Rurutu, where Teura comes from, and stayed with Teura's brother. Rurutu is an island much less "spoiled" by civilization and rich tourists. JF met the local community, participated in a local celebration and hung out with the boys over New Year's.

Even Moorea, here, is calmer and less frenetic than Tahiti. Even so, both places are spilling over with flowers, pickup trucks with people riding in the back, and locals with drinking problems.

JF found this place, written up in the local newspaper, where we can go swim with the colorful aquarium fish on an island just off this one, and it looks as if we'll be doing that tomorrow.

Paea, Tahiti, French Polynesia
Sunday, 15 Jan
I didn't make it to the internet yesterday, mostly because of my own timidity. We went to visit a Servas couple, Isabel and Herve, for dinner. They're both teachers from France. The French have a centralized educational system, meaning that you can request a transfer, if you like, to Tahiti, or the Marquesa Islands, or Miquelon up near Nova Scotia, Canada, and if there's a slot open and you have enough of whatever points or seniority you need, you can go off with a decent living and school holidays.

That's how Michel got to Tahiti in the first place. He was a principal in the Parisian suburbs and went to Rurutu, the little island where JF spent New Year's with Teura's brother.

We know several people who have gone off to, say, Madagascar to teach. The closest we've got to this system is the network of military schools around the world.

Herve and Isabel, the Servas people, are the only ones listed in the host book for this corner of the globe, so they get plenty of visitors all year round. (Unlike us, in our less-than-fascinating location in the middle of the Piedmont Hills of North Where-the-hell-is-that? Carolina.) They have just moved onto a spectacular rental up on the side of the volcanic crater overlooking the city of Papeete. They have an awe-inspiring view of the sea and the island where JF and I are headed today, as well as a view of the steep green sides of the volcano, dropping for sharp-edged ridges. They have a little swimming pool for that after-work dip that cools, and an open-air terrace dining area.

Isabel did some kind of creative Chinese dumplings with shrimp, cabbage and carrots, and served that with grilled tuna steaks and grilled steaks of duck liver in a tamarind sauce with cold green beans in a salad on the side. For dessert, chocolate mousse with some kind of crunchy cookie as a kind of crust.

Then we went out on the town, to a bar in a restaurant with living room chairs and couches to hear Guitar Shorty and his group. I have an audio clip of one of his wild and wooly rifs. We heard that Mr. Shorty is Jimmy Hendricks' "beau-frere," which could translate as brother-in-law or step-brother, either one. I have never heard music like that live, I confess. I don't think that particular music is fashionable any more, but I admitted to Isabel that I'm not particularly drawn to music in my daily life.

If nobody puts music on at home, I'm perfectly content to do my chores, deal with my email and Worlds Touch work life, fold laundry, etc., without it. I will put on a book and listen to a story rather than put on music. This blues guitar that talks, that makes love, that whines and sings and runs all over the emotional spectrum is not something I'd listen to, anyway. It demands your attention. It wants you to stop what you're doing a PAY it attention.

Today is Sunday, and I'm aware of missing my weekly meeting with Sobina.

Haapiti, Moorea, French Polynesia
Monday, 16 Jan
It's now afternoon, a fan blowing directly on me as I sit at the table in a modern little dormitory at Mark's Place, a campground, backpacker dorm, upscale dorm (where we are for $10 more), and cute little bungalows for people who want modern hotel-like accomodations. Something for everyone. This is an A-Frame with beds built into the eaves, little mezzanine platforms up near the roof peak with mattresses. This has got a kitchen, a CD player and a central table. Varnished plywood floors. A covered porch with table and chairs. In the camping area, there's an above-ground basin that looks REALLY inviting.

After breakfast (baguettes, butter and puree of mango and banana, with a plate of sliced avacado, papaya and banana, along with the usual instant coffee...I might even get used to it!) this morning, JF and I walked up to the Lagoonarium sign, spent $50 and got ourselves transported across to a tiny island owned and operated by a family. There, they have constructed a kind of holding tank that operates not unlike a lobster trap: the fish can swim in, but not out unless the folks let them out.

If you want to hear me gush about it from underneath the palm fronds, click any or all of the Lagoonarium clips here. I'll try to reflect in tranquility from the dormitory of Mark's:

It's the kind of setup you imagine before the coming of the big hotels. Coconut shells painted to show the path, shells and coral hanging on strings for curtains. Everything wood and palm fronds.



Driftwood is nailed crosswise and then hung with snorkels, masks and plastic shoes. You pick out a mask and snorkel and put on your sandals and walk out into what looks like a little swimming area, maybe the whole thing the size of a half a football field.

Right away, I got a shock because right in front of me were huge rays, rippling along the sand. When I was growing up, we had land on the Santa Rosa Sound near Pensacola, Florida. There was a strip of sand, and then waving grasses underwater. The one boogeyman out there were the rays. We called them Sting Rays and were terrified that we'd step on one of them and get stung to death.

And here they were, right at my feet; blocking, in fact, my path to the lagoon where I was supposed to be swimming with the acquarium fishes. One of them headed right for me. I backed quickly out of the water and went to see our guide, an amiable young woman, one of five daughters in the family. She spends half-years here, helping her folks out and the other six months in France as a camp counselor.

She explained to me that the rays were totally harmless, that I could even pet one if I liked...and she proceeded to do just that. I stood there while they rippled all around my legs, losing my childhood terror.

Then I put on my mask and put my face in the water. Immediately, I was in a whole different world, a world of purple and bright blue coral, of lemon-yellow fish, orange and white striped fish, fish that look like needles, sharks...yes...sharks. Big orange turtles with geometric designs on their backs.

We were the first customers, having showed up at 8 a.m. as we'd been advised, and so we had the lagoon to ourselves, to float face down over a scene that I've only seen before at Monaco's famous acquarium. After awhile, we went outside the lagoon to look at the "natural" habitat, where there was more coral scenery and fewer fish.

After that, we hitched a ride with a friendly grandmother to our next accomodations: Mark's Place. It's more modern than Pauline's, that's for sure. Pauline's had a kind of turn-of-the-century charm, along with one mysterious room that looked like a ceremonial hut. I didn't get a chance to quiz the owner about it.

This place even has internet...albeit $10 an hour. I may get this posted before you all go to bed tonight! I am working on getting photos and audio up, but so far I have not been successful. I'm headed over there now to see what I can accomplish.

Moorea Island, French Polynesia--Monday, Jan. 16, 2006:

5:30 a.m. Dawn over the island of Tahiti came in the open front door of our room and woke me from a fitful and sometimes unpleasant sleep. I dreamed we fought with the owner of this hotel over the price. He was a disagreeable man who, upon learning we had agreed on 6500 Francs (including breakfast and all taxes, about $65...I TOLD you it was expensive here!), ordered his dinner and proceeded to ignore us while he ate it.

We haven't encountered any of this kind of behavior here at all. Why I would dream it, or dream the night before that all the women got into a taxi and, laughing at me, left for the party without me, I don't know. Perhaps it is just the dislocation of travel that sends me bad dreams.

My feet got bruised on our trek down the road to see about the "Lagunarium," the tiny island where we can swim with tropical fish as if we were in an aquarium.

This is a strange little hotel. I'm sitting on the veranda, listening to the roosters crowing from our yard and the neighbors'. How many years has it been since I heard a rooster crow at dawn? We left the doors to our room open last night, our stuff on the bed by the door. It feels that safe. Blue and white striped awnings shade this porch, everywhere that jumbled mixture of colors: on the bedspread where I'm sitting, brown and orange with pillows of blue and beige. Curtains, orange and white. Green and beige straw mats, finely woven, cover the red-painted wooden floor.

We are the only guests except for a stiff little Frenchman who could be a character in a Graham Greene novel. As we arrived yesterday, he was sitting in an open-air gazebo, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes (I resisted asking for one!) and reading some kind of biography of the next Mother Theresa, Sister Evangeline. He wore a prominent wooden cross around his neck.

He spoke with the bright, careful diction of a man already inebriated but unwilling to show it. Speaking within the course of the first conversation of his failures, he's been in this guest house for three months. His passport was stolen. His baggage stolen on Easter Island and when he tried to recouperate it (here he holds up his left had with a weird bump on it), "they" broke his hand. He teaches forestry, but for reasons that are explained only by eye-rolling and knowing nods, this has not succeeded here. There has been some family breakup. Some French Canadians came through about a month ago, he sighs, and told him there is plenty of wood to manage in the north of Quebec, he should come there.

A white cat pads out onto the veranda. There is a cool air this early in the morning, but soon enough it will be dripping with heat. The sheets on the bed felt damp all night. I remember this lhis kind of climate from the Gulf Coast of Florida, where you can put clothes that have dried on the line into your suitcase and when you unpack them in Michigan, they're damp. Your skin always feels greasy and there's a sheen of sweat that stays on your face all day. Except for these first couple of hours of the morning and after the sun goes down in the evening, when the air is caressing.

Behind me, I can hear a gaeko chittering. These are little lizards that live with you in the tropics, ...PLOP...it fell right onto the daybed where I'm writing! I was about to say how benign they are, but I did leap up and then gently help it onto the floor. They eat mosquitoes, these critters, so we like them.

Did I mention that we hitchhiked down here yesterday from the boat? The guidebook, as well as JF's experience since his arrival, says hitching works pretty well in French Polynesia. Picture these islands: there's a ring of coral around them that stop the waves and make the water's edge calm, like a lake shore more than a beach shore. The water itself is crystal clear. Then, along the shore runs the road that circles the island. The motor scooters, pickup trucks and cars, the occasional van and bus, all run in the circle. There's a flat area for maybe a half-mile, and then the walls of the old volcano that created this place rise up in steep ridges, deep valleys with rivers than come out of them down to the sea.

Herve and Isabel, our Servas hosts from Saturday night, live up a steep and winding road perched on the side of the volcano on Tahiti. Yesterday, Uncle Michel drove me up another one of the valleys into an exclusive housing estate where every house has a heart-stopping view (and a heart-stopping rent--$3,500 a month.)

Tahiti seemed bustling, though the downtown of Papeete itself was compact and unassuming (though I admit I've never been in town during weekday working hours when the place is full of tourists, either.) Moorea, the closest neighboring island, seems like country. People--the Polynesians, I mean-- speak French here, but imperfectly. They learn it in school and come home to their own language, called Maori. They have French baguettes for breakfast. This is definitely an island beach culture, as far as clothes go--shirts are optional for guys, everyone wears flip-flops or plastic shoes, and the pareo is at-home wear for the women. I'm even seeing pareo worn as skirt on the older women over here on this island.

Apparently, there's an internet at our next stop, so I'm hoping to post this and the photos and audio clips I've been collecting to share.

To view the whole Tahiti photo album, check out the Tahiti Album.



( Just a light sampling of the photos in the Tahiti Album )