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.