Paradise Has Teeth: Travels in French Polynesia

Copyright © Mark Moxon 2024

All rights reserved

This version was compiled on 30 March 2024

This work has been released under the Creative Commons licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This means you are free to distribute this work to others as long as you retain this copyright notice, do not use the work for commercial purposes and do not alter, transform or build upon this work. For more details please read the full licence.

Front cover: On the beach at Amanu

See www.moxon.net for more information

Preface

This book is a collection of writing from the road, covering a four-month trip I made to French Polynesia in 1997. This was part of a much larger, three-year journey that took me through Australia, New Zealand, French Polynesia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India and Nepal, from 1995 to 1998.

The travelogue for all these countries and more can be found on my personal website at www.moxon.net, where you can also find travel tips, recommended journeys and further free books for you to download.

I’ve released this book and its companions via a Creative Commons Licence, which means you are free to distribute it to everyone and anyone, as long as you distribute it on a non-commercial basis and make no changes to it. If you know someone who might like this book, please pass it on; I make no money from it, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading it and recommending it to their friends.

Finally, please be aware that this book attempts to be humorous every now and then, so there’s a slight chance that it might cause offence to those who think my sense of humour is as amusing as a puddle of mud. On top of this, some parts will be out of date – which is why each article is dated – and others will betray the naivety of a traveller who discovered his way in the world by throwing himself into it headfirst. It is, however, an honest account of how I felt as I travelled the world for three years, and as such, I hope you enjoy it.

Mark Moxon

June 2014

New Zealand to Polynesia

Anatomy of a Yacht

Written: 24 April 1997

Let’s look at this yacht, then, all 36-feet of it. Zeke – a happy name, don’t you think? – is a home, a place to explore and explore in, an intriguing mixture of mod cons, traditional equipment and sea-salt-worn fittings that hold together as a safe environment. Let’s do a tour...

The main cabin is large, stretching from the bow of the boat to about three quarters of the way to the stern. It’s very open plan, with the front point being taken up by the forward locker, which is home to spare sails, ropes, the anchor chain, diving equipment and a huge collection of bits and bobs that are essential for an easy life on board. The rest of the room contains a v-shaped settee with a collapsible table that turns into a double bed; there are loads of lockers, with storage space for more tins of tomatoes, sweetcorn, corned beef and processed peas than you’ve ever seen in your life... all the provisions we bought in New Zealand are tucked away in here somewhere; further up near the mast is the toilet, or the ‘head’ as it’s called on a boat, which also contains a hot shower (though it’s only usable when there’s enough fresh water and the engine’s been running); opposite the head is the kitchen, or ‘galley’, which comes complete with a kerosene stove, a fridge and a spice collection to rival the best; then there’s the navigation table, where the charts, radios and GPS (Global Positioning System) live; and finally, right at the back of the boat and separated from the main cabin by the engine compartment, is Rob’s cabin. The only other area is the cockpit, above the engine, where the actual sailing is done and where the ropes all come back to.

Ah yes, the ropes. My first sailing experience back in the Coromandel was confusing, to say the least, and one reason is the terminology. Sailing language isn’t English, at least it’s not the English normal people use, and the rope names cloud the issue on what is, at heart, a relatively easy system. Halyards are ropes that pull sails up, sheets are ropes that alter angles of sails, and then you have the more specialised ropes.

Zeke is a sloop, which means it has one mast in the middle of the boat, with the mainsail attached to the back of it, and a boom along the bottom of the sail. There’s also another sail in front of the mast, called the jib, which rolls up around a rigid wire, the forestay, which goes from the top of the mast to the bow. The main and jib halyards raise and lower the mainsail and jib respectively, and the main sheet and port and starboard jib sheets alter the angles of the mainsail and jib. The boom vang pulls the boom down, the topping lift lifts the boom up, the preventer stops the boom from swinging from side to side... and now you know enough to blag your way through a crew position on a yacht. All you have to perfect now is the ‘blurrghhh’ sound that marks the graduation from landlubber to seasick mariner, and you’re sorted.

Though if you can remember all that when the sea’s pitching at 45° and the sea is breaking over your head, you’re doing better than I ever did...

Sailing to French Polynesia

Written: 13 May 1997

The journey to the Gambier Islands was as near to a living hell as I have ever been. I had never been sailing on the open ocean before, and I discovered early on that there was a reason for that. I hated it.

The final stages before leaving involved shopping for supplies – a total of about NZ$1400 at Pak ‘n’ Save, in eight baskets, covering us for five months for items that would be expensive in French Polynesia, like canned food, and about three or four months for everything else – and finishing off all those little jobs that had to be done. I’d spent a total of about four weeks on the boat, painting it when it came out of the water, working on all sorts of jobs from stripping plastic off the rails to fixing electrical switches in the bathroom, and by the time we finally got out of Whangarei, I was getting pretty impatient. There’s always too much to do on a boat, but four weeks was getting ridiculous. Luckily the immigration man was very understanding and didn’t give a hoot about my lack of visa.

We finally left New Zealand on Wednesday 16th April, saying farewell to Whangarei after an overstay, for me, of 17 days, something that the immigration people didn’t seem to mind much at all. The crew: Rob, Australian captain and owner of the yacht Zeke; Laurent, Swiss-French chef and pending disaster; and me, still slightly bewildered from plan changes and the enormity of the coming challenge.

As with all strange departures from normality, I had done my research: it’s surely easier to be aloof and nominally detached from reality if you’re well informed. Boats, the sea, diving, swells and maritime climates were all a mystery, slowly unravelled by books and other people’s advice (the latter mainly consisting of ‘Have you ever been on yacht before? No? You must be crazy... but I’m as jealous as hell!’). I still know relatively little, but I can get by at cocktail parties on the subject of cruising, even if I end up explaining in graphic detail how much I loathe it.

So I had lots of theory – sailing theory, weather theory, outdoor survival theory, even social interaction theory – but theory is no use when the mind is no longer in control of the body. The concentration slips, and before long the wrong thoughts are slipping in: too much saliva, goddamn it; stomach contents slopping; another hard roll of the boat; don’t whatever you do think of badly made meringue; a cold sweat; slightly itchy palms; logic goes out of the window; and it feels like your first alcoholic experience again...

Shit. Over the side for the fifth time, unintentionally feeding the fish. I was stuck in the middle of the South Pacific, and my very worst fear had struck. I had le mal de mer, and it hurt.

No Peace, No Quiet

The first week of the trip was probably the worst week of my entire life: the seasickness was pretty severe, though totally normal according to the captain, who managed to keep his colour only because of the time he’d already spent over the years hurling his guts up over the side. As I ran for the side again I couldn’t help picturing that split second when the last glass of port suddenly makes itself known, awkwardly sitting on top of too much Stilton and cheddar biscuits, and the world switches from a rosy glow to a shaky sweat. The toilet beckons, there’s no escape, but once the dinner’s been dispatched, it’s back to the party as a great feeling of relief sweeps over you...

Except with seasickness the relief is only a reprieve, and the feeling’s back within an hour, as rough as ever and worse on an empty stomach. On top of the nausea, though, is the real killer: the feeling of having absolutely no energy. I had never felt so consistently exhausted in my life, and the resulting lack of interest in life and the art of sailing didn’t help me to appreciate my situation. Truth be told, at times I found myself regretting ever seeing the advert for the position: surely nothing is worth four weeks of feeling as rough as the human body can, while still having to do things like sail the boat, do the washing up, go on watch and so on.

There’s another aspect to ocean passages that’s particularly unpleasant (and bear in mind that the vast majority of yachties haven’t done even a few days at sea, let alone the long four-week haul to the Gambier Islands, something that I can totally understand after enduring such a journey). The boat’s moving: fine. But it moves a hell of a lot, because the swell out in the Pacific is huge, and it’s incessant: when Magellan named the ocean after his word for ‘peace’ because it was so calm compared to the Atlantic, he obviously wasn’t in the same ocean as I was.

When the boat’s moving – rolling constantly, pitching and yawing most of the time, and getting smacked on the side by hefty waves that knock you over reasonably regularly – imagine trying to wash up, when anything you put down rolls away unless you wedge it in. Or how about cooking, something that mutates from a simple act of combining and heating into a test of endurance? Even simply existing – standing up, sitting down, and, surprisingly, just lying down – is a major effort, because your body is constantly tensing and relaxing muscles to maintain its balance, and it takes it out of you even when you’re doing nothing. Even sleeping is an effort if you’re being thrown from one side of the boat to the other every two seconds, and on top of the debilitating effect of seasickness, it’s a serious shock to the system.

The Ship’s Watch

The other main aspect of sailing that your average crewmember gets to know and love is being on watch. You might think that the chance of boats colliding in the middle of the ocean is minimal – and you’d be right, as the chances are ridiculously small – but it is possible that you might hit another boat and die, so keeping a good watch for 24 hours of every day of every week is essential, until you’re safely anchored. It’s simply not worth risking death for want of checking the sea every so often.

Being on watch is, unfortunately, the most boring part of sailing, but in a strange way. On one hand sitting in the cockpit for three-and-a-half hours, scanning the horizon every 20 minutes, is pretty tedious, especially on the 12am to 3.30am shift, and if the weather’s lousy then it’s simply miserable. On the other hand, though, is the realisation that you’re a good 1000 nautical miles from the nearest land, surrounded by water that is kilometres deep, and that you’re surviving... that’s quite a thought, though I think you appreciate it more when the trip is over and you can sit down and examine the marine charts of the voyage.

Cravings

I also developed more cravings than a pregnant mother. I had passionate feelings for pizza, a craving such as I had never experienced before. Visions of pepperoni, ham and mushroom on a thick crust brought back memories of Pizza Huts and the exquisite pizzas in Spain, where they crack an egg in the middle just before taking it out, so the yolk goes everywhere and is still runny when they serve it. I simply adore pizza, and the fact that I couldn’t get any on board Zeke made the longing even keener.

Then there was the craving for anything fresh, prompted by the last of our fruit and vegetables disappearing after ten days at sea. Fresh tropical mango, pineapple straight off the tree, freshly squeezed orange juice... all these cravings were quite understandable in the circumstances. But the biggest craving I had was for fresh cream cakes or chocolate sponge in custard, and on top of that I wanted to start a long and deep relationship with a plate of chips.

And finally, I craved land. Land doesn’t move; land is predictable; land lets you get a good night’s sleep. And land doesn’t wash over the boat and crew when there’s a storm going. One particular night springs to mind, the night, quite early on in the trip, when all hell broke loose. We had to reef the sail in the middle of the night, while the waves lashed around us and the wind smashed the sails around, and we froze in our wet weather gear, falling asleep on one hand and desperately trying to save the boat on the other. It was a nightmare: the boat gybed twice – when the wind, coming from behind us, snatched the boom and swung it across from one side to the other, a frightening and dangerous event, smashing the GPS housing and compass mount – and the whole event stressed us out completely, enhancing the grief we felt at such a long voyage. On top of this I was being copiously seasick: I was totally miserable.

And yes, the sea really does wash over the boat and crew when there’s a storm going, just like in the movies. And yes, it really sucks.

Low Point

On the fourth day Laurent and I had a full-blooded but extremely short argument about nothing at all, and I swear if I had had a gun I would have blown his head off. We made up two minutes later, but as I sat outside afterwards, sitting in the unpleasant afterglow of altercation, I broke down and cried. All I craved was peace: peace from the constant rolling of the boat, peace from the continuing sickness, peace from the mundane rigours of conversation. I just wanted to be alone, and paradoxically it was the feeling of being totally alone that brought tears. They were brief, but signalled a low point from which I hoped things could only get better.

The real low point happened exactly halfway through the journey, after 14 days of rolling and throwing up. By this time I realised that I had to eat something if I was going to survive, so I went below decks to make myself something edible. It took forever: the smell of kerosene nearly knocked me out and I kept having to go outside for air and to stare at the horizon, but in a feat of sheer willpower I managed to make myself a bowl of perfect scrambled egg. I ate it very slowly, savouring the flavour, and the second I swallowed the last mouthful I felt that old familiar ache spreading through my stomach muscles and the whole lot came right back up, sitting in the bowl as if I had never touched it. I lay down in the bottom of the boat, curled up and cried my heart out.

I remember thinking that whatever happened to me in the future, things would never get worse than this. So far, they haven’t.

Fresh Tuna

On 28th April we caught a tuna. I’d never seen a whole tuna before, and they are the most gorgeous fish you’ve ever seen, with shiny silver flanks and yellow-green tints that make supermarket tins look positively dull. They’re big too: the one we caught was about four feet from tip to tail, and it tasted delicious, keeping us in fish for about three days. The fishing method? Drag a long line behind the boat, fitted with a big metal hook, shaped vaguely like a fish: this twists and turns like a little fish, luring the bigger fish to take an early lunch and become a late dinner (the system, not surprisingly, is called a lure).

This was the first time we’d used the lure on the trip, and it worked a treat: after that we were either too knackered to go through the rigmarole of scaling and gutting, or we were too close to the Tuamotus and the paranoia of contamination from the nuclear testing (though this was only paranoia, as the fish outside of the affected atolls are fine).

Phosphorescence

It was on board Zeke that I discovered the delights of ocean phosphorescence. There I was, pissing off the back of the boat, and thinking how beautifully the stars were reflected in the wake. And then I realised that it was cloudy, and that’s when I remembered about phosphorescence. There’s a certain type of plankton that lives throughout the oceans of the world, and when it gets excited, such as by the passage of a yacht, it lights up like a glow worm, so the boat leaves a trail of little lights behind it at night. Most eerie, I can tell you.

The Death of Doris

Perhaps the most annoying mishap on the trip was the death of Doris. Doris, the wind vane, steered the boat automatically, using the wind as a guide and as a power source, but on the fourth day of the trip an especially heavy swell ripped off Doris’s bottom part, breaking the stainless steel joint, totally removing the wooden rudder part of the vane, and rendering the whole thing useless.

So we moved onto Eric, the computerised autopilot, who steered us remarkably well to our destination, gobbling up electricity like buggery but preventing us from having to hand steer all the way. If we hadn’t had Eric we’d have been hand steering for 24 hours a day for the remaining 24 days, a particularly unpleasant concept (and something racing yachts do, the mad bastards).

Company... of a Sort

We saw one ship once we’d pulled out of New Zealand waters. Yes, one ship during the whole bloody trip. And there we were, scanning the horizon every 20 minutes, looking for potential collisions for 28 days and finding just one, one that was nowhere near hitting us anyway. Perhaps that’s why finally arriving in a place with human activity and other boats was such a momentous feeling.

I should add that when we spotted this ship, we decided to call it up on the radio so the crew could tell us how big our radar shadow was (a handy thing to know). So we cranked up the radio and raised the ship, finding out it was a Philippino cargo boat bound for somewhere far, far away.

‘Can you tell us how big our radar shadow is, please?’ asked Rob when the niceties were over.

‘Sure thing,’ said the radio operator on the other ship. ‘Hang on a second while I just turn our radar on...’

Makes you feel all safe and sound, doesn’t it?

The End in Sight

Relief arrived on May 14th... or, to be more accurate May 13th, because we’d done a Phileas Fogg and crossed the dateline, meaning we turned up to find ourselves a day ahead of ourselves, if you see what I mean. The final approach to the Gambier Islands was frustrated by three days of almost no wind, but finally on the last morning we saw land. The relief was like nothing I have experienced before: all the grief and stress of the last four weeks seemed to evaporate as the sun silhouetted the islands against the sky.

As we approached the islands, painfully slowly because of the serious reefs around the Gambiers, an amazing thing happened. I could smell land! It smells musty, damp and downright homely, and with the sensitised nose of someone who has only smelt salt and sea breezes for four weeks, I could smell pine trees, damp earth and the scents of civilisation. The final journey into the anchorage at Rikitea on the island of Mangareva was idyllic, and after a quick but necessary shower the three of us piled onto land to clear immigration and customs.

And the land swayed. I fell around like a drunken sailor, tripping over invisible obstacles and falling sideways for no apparent reason. I felt like you do when you come off a particularly violent fairground ride, and I spent the whole day in a haze. I clearly remember finding ice creams for sale, and almost freaking out on the taste sensation, but a lot of the rest of the day was a haze of delight and relief. The long trip was finally over.

As soon as we arrived, Laurent jumped ship to await any other yacht to take him away – he was sick of arguing with Rob, and Rob was sick of him. I was just incredibly relieved that I survived 28 days of mental and physical stress – the likes of which I have never experienced before and hope never to experience again – without falling out with anyone, and without leaving the boat myself. That’s no mean feat.

And just for the statisticians out there, the length of the trip was 3000 nautical miles (3450 normal miles, or 5550km). To put that in perspective, that’s exactly the distance from London to New York, and is further than the distance Columbus sailed when he discovered America. From stepping off land at Whangarei to stepping on land in Rikitea, the trip took exactly 28 days in real time (but only 27 days on the calendar). It’s the longest sea voyage I’ve ever done, and I’m sure it will always be the longest sea voyage I’ve ever done.

‘Never again’ is a phrase that springs to mind... but I don’t regret going. I’ll just never get on an ocean-going yacht again.

The Strange World of Sailing

Written: 1 May 1997

On the Pacific, my dreams have become rather numbed (and by ‘dreams’ I mean my aspirations rather than REM sleep, of which there is precious little to be had). For some reason, my usual concerns – destination, cash flow, cultural experience, maintaining a reasonable social life, wishing I’d been around in the sixties, the normal sort of thing – become both irrelevant and disconnected when I’m surrounded by sea for weeks, with no contact for so long. The desert was never like this, because however desolate the outback might be, it’s teeming with folklore, wildlife, mountains, gorges, strange plants and, above all, amazing people and settlements. The Pacific is totally different, and although I wasn’t expecting the sea to be anything like the desert in terms of psychological effect, it’s surprised me to feel so detached.

So what if I’ve got so-and-so dollars in the bank? It’s no use to me in the middle of the ocean. So what if I meant to write a letter to blah-de-blah? There aren’t any post offices halfway to the Gambier Islands. So what if I haven’t showered in two weeks, and all my clothes are smothered in salt crystals? There aren’t any people here to meet anyway. The situation is like no other; if it wasn’t for the daily radio contact, the whole world could disappear and we wouldn’t have a clue. (In fact, I arrived at the Gambiers knowing that the UK had had a General Election about two weeks before, but I didn’t have any idea as to the result. It took quite a bit of effort to find out, too; apparently Tony Blair won for Labour.)

The world of Zeke on the open ocean makes me feel like I’m in a play; a play is self-contained, with a few actors, a handful of different scenes, and a plot (or, in this case, a destination), and just like on Zeke, a play is an escape from reality. Sure, plays are normally set in familiar environments – houses, gardens, cities, and so on – but the connections to reality are all in the audience’s imagination, and taken as a self-contained entity, a play exists apart from the world in which it plays. How else can one play be a story of everyday life in one country, and a seriously subversive piece of literature in another? So Zeke is like a play, and like all plays the actors don’t necessarily behave like normal humans would; there’s melodrama, comedy, soliloquy and so on, things that happen in everyday life, but which occur more intensely or dramatically in a play than in the real world. Believe me, four weeks on the ocean in Zeke is nothing if not melodramatic.

One particularly memorable example of the tragicomic nature of Zeke’s script happened deep in the voyage, around halfway to the Gambiers. Rob and Laurent were not getting on by this stage: Laurent’s gallic shrug of a character wasn’t compatible with the control freak that Rob became on the sea, and by the third week, they were no longer speaking. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except they decided to treat me like the lawyer in their messy divorce, so all I got was an earful of, ‘Tell the chef that it’s time he got cooking,’ and ‘Tell the captain I’ll cook when I’m goddamn ready.’ Which was all very well, but I was over the side of the boat most of the time, wondering when this seasickness hell would stop, so all they heard from each other was, ‘Tell the chef that it’s time he got bleaurghh...’ and ‘Tell the captain I’ll hueaurghh when I’m goddamn ready.’ I didn’t particularly enjoy that part of the plot.

Another result of Zeke being like a play is this feeling of being totally cut off from reality. I have never felt so truly alone before, yet this doesn’t imply loneliness, more an appreciation of isolation. We’ve sailed 2000 miles and the nearest land is 1000 miles away, and the progress of Zeke at around 100 nautical miles per day makes this distance feel sizable. We’re getting there, but it’s a slow process, and it’s such a radical change from the hustle and bustle of normal life. I’m not particularly enjoying it, but it’s certainly an experience I won’t forget in a hurry.

The Gambier Islands

Gambier Islands

Written: 16 May 1997

The Gambier Islands are part of French Polynesia, the French-controlled area of paradise that comprises the following:

- The Society Islands, which include Tahiti and Bora Bora and most of the tourism in French Polynesia.

- The Marquesas Islands, a collection of 12 islands some distance to the northeast of the Society Islands and north of the Tuamotus.

- The Austral Archipelago, seven islands lying due south of the Society Islands, and home to the southern islands in French Polynesia.

- The Tuamotu Archipelago, the biggest of the five archipelagos, which stretches in a 1000-mile line southeast from Tahiti and contains Hao, Makemo, Amanu and Mururoa among the 76 Tuamotuan islands.

- The Gambier Archipelago at the southeastern tip of Polynesia. This archipelago is made up of the main Gambier lagoon, plus the Actéon (or Actaeon) group of islands and the atolls of Marutea Sud, Maria and Morane. The Gambier lagoon comprises four main islands (Mangareva, Taravai, Akamaru and Aukena) and ten smaller islands or motus (including Agakauitai, and the coral motu of Totegegie, home to the airport).

The Gambier lagoon is a classic atoll surrounding the inner Gambier Islands. An atoll (pronounced ‘ah-toll’, not ‘ay-toll’) is one of the archetypal natural phenomena in the Pacific, and is responsible for beautiful coral reef, motus and protected anchorages galore. The islands of the southwest Pacific are all volcanic in origin, being formed by the clash of the Pacific, Indian, Eurasian and Philippines tectonic plates; the clashes force magma up into the sea, which creates islands in the ocean, and with the perpetual drift of the plates, this has formed a string of islands from Pitcairn Island and the Gambiers in the east, to Indonesia in the west and Japan in the north.

As the volcanoes form, they cool and harden to form islands, and over time the islands are slowly eroded away by the sea, and this process gives rise to the atoll; coral forms around the islands, and as these islands erode and disappear the coral remains, leaving large strung-out rings of coral reefs, sometimes containing islands (as in the Gambiers). The resultant lagoons inside coral atolls are placid and full of life, and assuming there’s an entrance into the lagoon (which is not that common), the anchorage is wonderfully sheltered from the ocean swell. A motu (pronounced ‘mow-too’) is an island formed by debris and sand collecting on top of an atoll reef, and normally consists of a thin strip of sand, a few coconut palms, and wonderful diving opportunities. The Tuamotus are mainly atolls, and as such they’re beautiful but a pain to navigate because atolls aren’t visible until you’re very close; then again, that’s part of their charm.

The Gambiers are in the remotest part of French Polynesia, some 1643km from Tahiti; if you head east from the Gambiers you will come across Pitcairn Island (owned by the British, at the continuing behest of the inhabitants), Easter Island (which is Chilean), and then after a long, long stretch of ocean you reach South America. The biggest of the Gambiers at 14km^2 is Île Mangareva, which contains the capital of the Gambiers, Rikitea. That’s not a large area when you consider how remote these islands are and that the total land area of the archipelago is a mere 35km^2...

The first people to visit the Gambiers probably came from the Marquesas around 1200 AD. The remains of houses and burial grounds have been found on the smaller islands, but some of the more interesting archaeological remains were destroyed in the euphoric insanity of the Jesuit mission that arrived in the 19th century. Before then, the first European to arrive in the Gambiers was Captain John Wilson of the London Missionary Society, who explored the islands in 1797 aboard HMS Duff, naming the islands after Captain Gambier, a Frenchman who had supported his expedition.

But it was the French evangelists who had the biggest impact on these remote islands. The record of Honoré Laval, the Jesuit priest who came to the Gambiers in 1834 with Father François Caret and Friar Columban Murphy in tow, is shameful and, unfortunately, typical. After converting and completely dominating Maputeoa, the last king, Laval ruled the islands as a despot. He set stringent rules (called the Mangarevan Code) and started a huge building programme in which he forced the people to erect more than 116 coral stone churches, convents, mills and other buildings, some of which are strewn all over Mangareva as ruins, and some of which are still standing and cared for, like the monstrously large cathedral in Rikitea. In the process Laval caused the death of over 5000 people, eliminating the will of the people to survive, and destroying an entire culture. The cathedral and ruins stand as monuments to his egomania, yet the inscription on the statue donated by France reads, ‘His memory is blessed in these islands.’ Laval’s rule came to an end when Tahiti was declared a French protectorate in 1871; today, only a few pure blood Mangarevans are left, and there certainly aren’t many people blessing Laval’s memory.

Rikitea is an interesting mixture of tropical primitiveness and modern influence. The islands are full of lush vegetation, with fruit trees everywhere that provide more fruit than the population can eat; the result is a paradise where you can walk around picking fruit whenever you want it, or even plucking one of the plentiful fishes or lobsters from the sea. On the other hand, the shops sell canned fruit, canned fish and other western delicacies like Coca Cola and ice cream, and the islanders find it easier to buy cans than catch their own meals. It’s a bizarre turnaround when you consider how westerners think of cans as a poor substitute for fresh produce.

There are other problems too. The lobsters and fish inside the lagoon are not fit to eat for two reasons: there’s a nasty red algae that originates in the vicinity of L’Île des Lapins, and then there’s the bacterial contamination from raw sewage released off Île Mangareva. The locals told me that their lobsters were bad to eat because of the nuclear tests in nearby Mururoa; they said that the French had washed their contaminated ships down inside the atoll and had poisoned the fish. However this, like much of the local gossip relating to the nuclear tests, is just a myth; in fact the 1995 tests in Mururoa were performed underground in sealed chambers and no external contamination was possible, and in 1996 a test by the International Commission found no contamination in the Gambiers. The only two instances of contaminated maritime vessels in the area happened when two rockets were launched through a mushroom cloud in a 1967 experiment to collect samples, but these were decontaminated at Hao in a dedicated facility. Nobody would deny that the 1995 tests were unfortunate given the gradual turn away from nuclear weaponry in the West, but it’s easy – and unfair – to blame France for everything just because we can’t fathom how anyone could think of performing nuclear tests in such a paradise.

And it is a paradise. The weather is balmy with little rain at this time of year, the local wildlife is exquisite, the water is warm and fresh and away from the settlements it’s incredibly clear. The sight of coconut palms fronting an idyllic island beach where nobody goes and sunbathes is enough to make you understand why the locals are so friendly and are always smiling. And as for the little kids... they’re a picture of innocence and happiness, which bodes well for the islands’ future.

Gambier Islands (Mangareva)

Written: 4 June 1997

Soon after arriving in the Gambier Islands the chef, Laurent, jumped ship onto another yacht. Rob (the captain) and Laurent had spent considerable periods of the trip from New Zealand arguing and threatening to kill each other, so it was a pleasant change to have just two of us on board as we settled into island life.

All through the long haul to the Gambiers it had never felt as if we were anywhere particularly foreign; the sea is the sea wherever you are, and it doesn’t have any cultural or geographical differences between the various seas and oceans (apart from the weather, perhaps). The Gambier Islands, however, were a wonderful culture shock.

‘It’s the television that’s really destroying the island’s culture,’ said Napoleon, sipping his sake and sampling the latest batch of Rob’s award-winning pancakes. ‘Before we got TV a year ago, the main street would be full at night with people walking over to see their friends, and the place would be buzzing. Now the town is dead, because everyone’s watching TV. They watch it all day, and do nothing. It’s destroying our culture.’

Napoleon lived over the hill from the main harbour in a bay called Baie Ngatavake, and he was a real find; one of only three people on the island who could speak English, he transformed us from lost tourists to informed experts in the space of one day. It all started on the morning of Thursday 15th May; we’d decided to get some fruit, not a tricky procedure given the number of communal fruit trees around, but we figured it was only polite to ask the people in the nearby houses if would be all right to pick their fruit. So we waltzed up to this young guy who had just turned up in a jeep, and asked him if he knew where we could get some fruit, especially some mangoes.

He introduced himself as Napoleon, a twenty-six year old farmer from Ngatavake, and he told us that if we wanted some really good fruit, we could hop in his jeep and get a lift over to his house on the other side of the island. That wasn’t the sort of offer we could turn down, so before long we were bouncing along the dirt road, hanging on for dear life as the jeep careened over the hill to Ngatavake, a collection of two or three houses looking over the most stunning bay you’re ever likely to see. Napoleon’s house was surrounded by fruit trees of all descriptions, and as we wandered around, he pointed out all the goodies we could pluck.

Top of my list were the mangoes, which have to be one of the most delicious fruits in existence. I first came across the sweet taste of mango in Melbourne, where they correctly proclaimed it was the food of the gods and showed me how to eat it by slicing off one side of the fruit, scoring it crisscross and turning it inside out so the flesh stands up like a grid of cocktail cheese cubes. But the mangoes in the Pacific islands are from another world, with a flavour that makes Melbournian mangoes taste like old boots, and I soon became quite an expert at spotting mango trees and hunting for any mangoes that had fallen to the forest floor.

With our mangoes safely stashed, we happily wandered off down the road towards Rikitea, stopping every few metres as Napoleon spotted another fruit tree and insisted that we fill our bags. We had mangoes, grapefruit, papaya, mandarins, guavas, lemons, breadfruit, pistache, coconut, little red tomatoes and oranges, all as fresh as they come; by the time we got back to the boat we figured Napoleon deserved a drink, so we pulled out the bottle of sake that Rob had stashed away in the bottom of the cupboard (the only alcohol we had on board) and treated ourselves to a glass each.

It was then that we cooked up the pancakes and started talking about the island. We learned lots of intriguing facts about the Gambiers that you wouldn’t read in books, like the fact that the islanders used to make their own fruit wine, but the French made it illegal so the locals would have to buy beer and wine at inflated prices from the local shops; indeed, the attitude of the local gendarmes (two French and one local) towards the natives was apparently quite arrogant, something the islanders didn’t like at all. It’s a sad story, but a familiar one if you know anything about the exploitation of the Pacific, and it was made all the more real by Napoleon’s explanations. It was a very interesting afternoon.

Meeting the Other Yachties

That night we expanded our social circle even further by meeting some of the other yacht crews in the harbour (there were five other yachts in Rikitea harbour when we arrived). Joe and Janet from the Canadian sloop Tegan dropped by for a chat on the way to their boat; their visit soon extended into a couple of beers and a sampling of my freshly baked mango cake, of which I was rather proud. Joe and Janet were to turn out to be excellent company during our Gambier stay, and told us lots about the other yachties in the harbour. It never ceases to amaze me how the world of yachting is like an extended family, with people just striking up conversations with other yachts, and extending the warm hand of friendship to complete strangers for no other reason than the fact that they have a boat too. It’s a very pleasant club, and it makes distant harbours feel like home in the space of a few days.

Joe and Janet also mentioned that one of the boats had a welding machine on it, and that the owner – known as ‘Peeyoo’ for no better reason than his initials were P.U. – was a very friendly guy who, if we asked him nicely, would probably help us out with fixing Doris, our broken wind vane. Rob jumped at the chance, and the next day he went over to Peeyoo and enlisted his help to spend half a day welding steel; as a thank-you we invited him round for dinner and yarned the night away. Peeyoo, a fascinating man from Sweden, was sailing round the world single-handed – no mean feat! – and proved highly entertaining company.

Initial Exploration of Mangareva

The next day, Friday 16th May, I explored the southeast corner of Île Mangareva, following the road to what I hoped would be a beach, but which turned out to be a dead-end in the hilly forests of the island. Undeterred, I decided to bush-bash my way to the beach, but I wasn’t expecting such seriously spiky plants (it wasn’t quite bush lawyer, but enough to lacerate my legs) and towering fern thickets, so after half an hour of struggling downhill towards the shore and getting Pyke-like déjà vu, I turned round, made my way back to the road, sat down and ate a couple of mangoes. The moral of the story: rainforest is a nightmare to bash through, whatever the country.

To make up for my bleeding legs, I got a lift back with a passing jeep, full to the brim with young teenage kids, who were squeezed in between sacksful of oranges that they’d spent the day picking. They filled my bag with oranges, gave me chilled orange juice to drink when we stopped at one of their houses, and deposited me safely back in town with huge smiles and waves all around. It’s a wonderfully friendly world out here in Polynesia, it really is.

Water Catchers

You may wonder how yachts survive in terms of water; after all, you can envisage months’ worth of food, but water? Surely it runs out?

Indeed, it does, and our tanks ran out along with the month of May, not surprisingly seeing as we hadn’t filled them since leaving New Zealand in April. But where do you get water in a place like the Gambiers, where the local mains water isn’t fit to drink – even for the islanders – and there are no taps on the quay? The answer is to use a rain catcher.

A rain catcher does just what it sounds like: it catches rain and puts it into your tank. Your average rain catcher is simply a tarpaulin with a hole in the middle, to which you attach a hose that feeds into your water tank. Zeke had a rain catcher – at least it did when we arrived in the Gambiers – and we decided to set it up on the morning of Monday 26th. The rain had been streaming down all night with a persistency that made us think it would keep on going for days, but we’d been entertaining Joe and Janet to a night of cookies and videos, so I’d only put up the small rain catcher, more as a gesture than a practicality. The next day, though, we decided to go for the big one.

Whoops. Zeke’s rain catcher, which Rob had never actually used before, turned out to be rubbish, being nothing more than a huge piece of porous (porous!) material and a kinked hose, down two sides of which you put wooden slats to retain the shape. The theory was fine, but in the strong gusts we were having, the material ripped right across the middle where the stitching had rotted, and one of the slats snapped in half as a result. So we got soaked to the skin and remained waterless while the heavens poured down more liquid than even Moses had had to cope with.

Tegan, bless them, had seen our plight, and offered us their rain catcher, seeing as they’d had theirs up all night and had filled their entire tank, as well as all the other containers they could get their hands on. We gladly accepted, and in the next weather lull we dinghied over, picked up the catcher, and installed it on Zeke; as a result the sun came out and the rain disappeared faster than a shoplifter who’s seen a blue flashing light.

My only other experience with rain catchers was during a later storm, when we again borrowed Joe and Janet’s system. I have no idea how much water we collected, but when Bob Geldof wrote, ‘There’s nothing more useless than a car that won’t start/But it’s even more useless at the end of the world,’ he’d obviously never had to use a bloody rain catcher. We finally filled our tanks by doing three dinghy journeys to the local school, run by the Frères du Sacré Coeur, filling up jerry cans from their rain water tank until the dinghy was close to sinking, and siphoning it into our tanks. It cost us sweat and effort, but it was still far less grief than getting the rain catcher to work.

Fixing Doris

The Frères were useful for more than water, too. Being the local school – or one of them, I should say, the other being a state school rather than a convent – they were well equipped in the workshop stakes. We visited them on Tuesday 27th May to ask them if they could complete the repairs to Doris by making a new rudder for it, and we spent an interesting morning communicating in pidgin French what we wanted, and making sure that the pupils who did the work drilled holes in the right place and knew what shape we wanted the rudder to be.

The job was very polished, and the cost was peanuts; we paid them US$25 for the piece of wood, and US$25 for something like four hours’ labour, probably a quarter of what it would have cost in New Zealand. Some things, like labour, are very cheap in the middle of nowhere, and some things, like chocolate, alcohol and electrical parts, are extortionate. Depending on your lifestyle, it either balances out, or it’s a very expensive life in paradise.

Mont Duff

That afternoon saw Rob and I climb to the highest point in the Gambiers – nay, in the whole Tuamotu Archipelago. Mont Duff towers above the area to a snow-brushing height of 411m, and the climb up is something everyone who visits the Gambiers should do. We, however, managed to get our bearings completely confused, and ended up climbing the wrong mountain, Mont Mokoto, the second highest peak in the Tuamotus.

Still, with the mountains being so huge, we simply slid down one and up the other, so after beating through some beautiful bush we finally got to the top of Mont Duff, admired the quite stunning view, and discovered a marked path all the way down to the main road, something we’d missed on the way up. The grapefruit we found at the bottom never tasted so sweet...

Six People and a Boat

On our way back to the quay we got talking to a new couple on the block, Laurent and Sonia from Chile, who invited us over for tea and a natter. I remember a number of things about our visit: excellent conversation, despite a language barrier (only Laurent spoke English); two adults and four kids crammed into a boat not that much larger than Zeke; wonderful ham sandwiches, fulfilling one of my most intense ocean passage fantasies; harrowing stories of the family coming through the Straits of Magellan, at the southern tip of South America; the kids showing me their homework, and the courses they had to follow by correspondence; and a delightful caramel spread that transformed toast into something special, created by simply boiling an unopened can of condensed milk in water for two hours.

It’s amazing what you can learn from one quick visit to another person’s boat.

Walking Round Mangareva

To alleviate the potential boredom and frustration associated with staying in the harbour and spending most of the time fixing things on the boat – our current project was to paint all the rust spots on the deck, which was pretty tedious – I decided to circumnavigate Île Mangareva by foot. The total distance looked fairly large on the map – something like 20km – but that wasn’t enough to deter a tramper like me, so armed with lunch, some water and a compass, I set off on the morning of Friday 30th May for a good, long walk.

It went well. The walk round Mangareva is beautiful, to say the least, with bay after bay stretching out into the pale blue sea, with lots of little pearl farms standing in the sea and houses every now and then along the way. As I was leaving the outskirts of Rikitea – if a village that small can be said to have outskirts – I managed to pick up a dog, who started to follow me and wouldn’t take the hint when I made a point of ignoring him and not being at all friendly. After a couple of miles I realised that the little blighter was going to hang around for the duration, so I started to make polite conversation, asking him if he knew any good spots for a swim.

The response was pretty poor; all he did was run off the road every now and chase chickens, much to my embarrassment, so I named him ‘Colonel’ after the finger-lickin’ father of Kentucky Fried, Colonel Sanders. Unfortunately, Colonel had one bad trait when it came to human obedience; like an experienced lover he only came when it suited him, which meant I ended up feeling responsible for him every time the farm dogs started their frenzied ‘he be a stranger round these parts’ barking. Still, he deserved part of my sandwich just for sticking with me all the way round.

The end arrived prematurely; I’d assumed I was no more than halfway round, but straight after lunch I arrived in Baie de Ngatavake, home to Napoleon and just over the hill from Rikitea, and true to form, as I wandered past Napoleon’s house, his family called over and asked, in French, if I would like any pamplemousse. Now I was pretty thirsty – thinking I had miles to go, I’d been rationing my water – so I took up the offer and wolfed down the grapefruit like there was no tomorrow. The conversation flowed like the juice dribbling down my beard, despite the low level of my French, and after about ten minutes I discovered that Napoleon’s brother, Terii, spoke good English, and we continued the conversation to my advantage. Napoleon was working that day – and, it being pay day, would be getting plastered that night – but Terii, the older brother and more mature, told me all about his 12 years working for Marlon Brando on his private island near Tahiti, the reasons why he moved to Mangareva, what work was like on his own private pearl farm, his experiences of Tahiti, and plenty more. Needless to say, he filled up my backpack with fruit, and when he offered me a lift back to Rikitea, he chopped down the biggest bunch of bananas you’ve ever seen and handed it to me. Fruit might be ubiquitous in the Gambiers, but the kindness of the locals is still something to marvel at.

To cap it all, Terii gave me a lift over to Zeke in his canoe when we got to Rikitea. Mangarevan canoes are very fast (they use outboard motors to burn through the surf) and have outriggers to make them really stable. Arriving at Zeke via local transport with sacks of fruit felt pretty good, and we happily ate bananas for the rest of our stay in Mangareva.

The Supply Boat

On Saturday 31st May a huge boat came into port, docked, dropped off lots of containers and fuel, and left again. I only say this to highlight the supply system here: you wait for the supply ship, buy everything you can while the shops are well stocked, and then you hold out for another four weeks or so until the next one arrives.

The only other commercial traffic is by air, with three flights a month to Tahiti that are mainly used by the locals to get to Tahiti for medical treatment or to discuss business there. The flight costs a lot of money – not surprisingly when you consider the remoteness of the islands – which might help to explain why the Gambiers aren’t a major tourist spot.

Even when the supply ship has unloaded its goods, it can be challenging to buy anything. The shops shut for siesta in the Gambier Islands between 12 noon and 3pm, even the shop that sells sandwiches...

Welcome to Rikitea, the only place in the world where the lunch bars shut for lunch.

Ships’ Party

Tuesday 3rd June was party night; Richard and Gail on the schooner Jan van Gent invited everybody who was anybody to a ‘bring a dessert and a musical instrument’ evening, a very well attended do that saw some amazing desserts (oh, and some of my ANZAC cookies from Zeke). I took my penny whistle, on which I could play ‘Molly Malone’, but that was about all I could manage until Laurent fished out his guitar. I scraped together a solo performance of The Senators’ ‘The Girl I Adore’ and Billy Bragg’s ‘The Man in the Iron Mask’ – it was good to play a guitar after so long without one – and we all saw the wee hours in with beer and good cheer.

It was a wonderful evening, especially as we arrived with a bowl of ANZAC cookies and left with a goody bag filled with chocolate cake, guava and peach pie, chocolate cookies, coconut balls, and a couple of leftover ANZACs... quite a trade!

Come and Go

Sometime during our stay in Rikitea, the gorgeous yacht Illusion arrived, complete with Jim and Ami, the American couple sailing it. Joe and Janet from Tegan had met Jim and Ami in South America, and their induction into the Gambier knitting circle was swift and welcome.

Illusion was also interesting because it was there that I got my first look at an American map of the world. As a European I’m used to seeing maps with the Americas on the left, Australia in the bottom-right, the zero degrees line sensibly arranged in the middle of the map, and the equator halfway down the page, equidistant between the top and bottom. Of course this is a fairly Euro-centric view of the world, and I’ve seen amusing maps in Australia and New Zealand where the world is upside down, with south at the top and north at the bottom, thus showing Australia at the top of the map. However, every map in the USA – yes, apparently every map, because Jim said he’d never seen a Euro-centric map until he left the States, and it had blown his mind – has the Americas in the middle of the page, with Europe and Africa on the right, and Japan, Australia and so on to the left.

That’s not the weird bit though, because it’s only fair and understandable that the Americans should have USA-centric maps; but on closer inspection, they’ve also moved the equator down the page, so the northern hemisphere is bigger than the southern, making North America look huge and pushing Antarctica off the bottom of the map; and, even better, they’ve arbitrarily chopped Asia down the middle, with one half on the right and one on the left, but without any real overlap, so some countries simply disappear, or become so crushed onto the periphery that they’re easily missed. The position of the dividing line? Uncannily close to Vietnam. At least we have the decency to chop the world in half along a line between Russia and Alaska, which doesn’t cut through any continents and only sacrifices a couple of mid-Pacific islands that wouldn’t show up on a map of the world anyway. I suppose I should be grateful that the landmasses that aren’t in North America weren’t labelled terra incognita... but if you’ve ever wondered why Americans consider Vietnam to be at the ends of the earth, perhaps this might be the reason why.

The Sociability of Yachties

Written: 18 May 1997

The sociability of the Rikitea yachties really hit home on Saturday 17th May, when Joe and Janet came up with an idea for a party on their boat, Tegan: a pot-luck party where everyone provided something. We provided the meat, because when we left New Zealand we had 42kg of vacuum-packed frozen meat in the oversized freezer on Zeke, which had lasted very well and meant we had meat for longer than most yachts (who can normally only store a couple of weeks’ worth). Our kilogram of gravy beef was like manna from heaven for Joe, Janet and Peeyoo, the other party-goers (Peeyoo being the solo captain of the yacht Rammen).

The night was pure delight. Joe is a gourmet chef, no doubt about it, and his marinade transformed our slightly turning beef into a succulent delight that barbecued up a treat; the jacket potatoes, fresh salad and copious rum from Panama made even my cooking look humble. Stuffed and sated, we settled back for a night on Tegan, sitting in sheltered Rikitea harbour as the stars twinkled and the waves gently lapped.

Balmy evenings on a yacht don’t get much better than this: perfect temperature (shorts and T-shirts all day and all night, without too much humidity), no annoying insects (they get more serious further north), a gentle breeze, perfect peace (a total lack of tourists means a total lack of noisy all-night bars, nightclubs and so on), and wonderful company. Yachts are also immeasurably cosy, with dim lights casting homely shadows inside the alfresco cockpit, and comfortable settees inside with pub-like combinations of wood panelling and memorabilia. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that yachts pitch and roll, and take a serious amount of effort and expense to maintain, it would be a pretty close thing to a perfect living environment for one or two people. Maybe a canal boat is the compromise, but sitting out on the Trent and Mersey isn’t quite the same as decking out under the Polynesian moon...

The party went on until 5.30am, by which time Rob had gone to bed, the rest of us had quaffed a fair amount of alcohol, and we’d had a good ol’ sing-along to a collection of songs, most of which I either didn’t know or wouldn’t admit to knowing. True to form, I lost all public-performance nerves after the rum, and we sang into the wee hours; but surely the best part of the whole evening was when Joe asked if any of us smoked cigars, and my face lit up like a beacon. That was when Joe showed us his cigar collection.

I should add at this point that Tegan had spent the last goodness only knows how many months making its way from Vancouver (Joe and Janet’s home) down the west coast of the USA, and down to Panama and South America, where Joe had been able to pick up stunning Cuban and Panamanian cigars for next to nothing, the sort of delights that people, literally, pay US$50 each for in the USA and London. Imagine my delight, then, to find that Joe was as pleased to have someone to smoke cigars with as I was to be someone with whom to smoke cigars, and we whiled away the moonlight talking about fine port, good whisky, excellent food and the art of enjoying life to the maximum, Cubans gently glowing in the gloom.

What wonderful people with whom to explore the Gambiers...

Cooking on Board

Written: 18 May 1997

My culinary skills have improved immeasurably since Laurent left the boat and I became honorary cook. It’s been quite an awakening to discover a latent interest in something I’ve traditionally regarded as a pain in the proverbials; cooking in the bush was OK, because I had such a long time in which to do it, but my kitchen was little more than a camping stove, so the standard of my meals was pretty lousy (although very good in terms of nutrients, vitamins, carbohydrates, fibre and all that). I now have a whole galley to myself, a huge stock of ingredients, and time to be creative. It’ll be a different story when the boat’s pitching and rolling to 45°, but while we’re in a nice calm anchorage, it’s wonderful.

And by ‘cooking’ I don’t mean the reasonably standard spaghetti bolognese, stir fry, bangers and beans kind of meal, I mean real feasts with inventive use of spices; proper cooking with a modicum of help from recipe books. Witness the following successes from the kitchen of Zeke, all in the first few days of my self-appointment as chef...

On 14th May, we got given a rib cage from a goat that had been slaughtered that afternoon, so I cleaned it up, cut up the ribs and roasted them in a garlic and thyme concoction, producing spare ribs that would have made a restaurant proud. The main course of chicken in a creamy mushroom sauce with roast potatoes knocked every meal we’d had on the ocean into a hat. We finished off with a banana cake I’d thrown together, and which tasted delicious (though I say so myself).

The next day, encouraged by my success with the banana cake, I made a less successful, but perfectly delightful mango cake from the fruits of our day with Napoleon, and for a main course we had pancakes with a pork curry filling (the pork had to be curried, as it was about to walk out of the fridge and demand squatter’s rights). It went down a treat.

The night of Peeyoo’s visit, I concocted a meat loaf, something I’d never even thought of making before. Damn, it’s easy, and tastes bloody good with sautéed potatoes in garlic and basil. It makes me hungry just thinking about it.

I’ve even cooked a pizza (and I now know two different ways of making the dough), and I’ve become a complete expert at making the most flavoursome and filling white bread. Meanwhile, all this fresh fruit has spawned a collection of fruity and milky drinks that are heaven after a heavy snorkelling session.

I can even cook ANZAC biscuits, a traditional Australian cookie. The English know them as flapjacks, but the Aussie story is that the ANZAC soldiers at Gallipoli only had access to golden syrup, oats, sugar and flour, so they combined them to come up with these delicious cookies. I decided to cook some to try to make a dent in the massive supply of rolled oats we had on board; we’d bought loads of oats in New Zealand because we’d thought that porridge would be the best breakfast idea on the boat, but I’ve thrown up so much of it that I’m simply not interested any more, and we’ve still got about ten huge bags of the stuff. One day I’ll discover something that requires mountains of rolled oats, but until then it’s acting as padding for all the cans so they don’t rattle in the night. They were damn fine cookies, though.

On the subject of food, I’ve bloated since arriving in paradise. To be fair, when I arrived after 28 days of appetite and breakfast loss I was as thin as a rake, and my hips stuck out like Karen Carpenter’s rib cage. I am glad to report, then, that after only a few weeks of fine and copious food, I am beginning to grow fat (at least, fat by my standards) and can, once again, pinch an inch. It’s good to be back, especially as this gut was replenished without the aid of beer, which at over US$2 a bottle here is a definite luxury.

Marvellous.

Rikitea Harbour

Written: 26 May 1997

Quick! Let me grab the moment and describe the feeling, as it’s a succinct summary of the sub-tropical paradise of anchoring off Île Mangareva. The date – I have to check this electronically as I have absolutely no idea what day of the week it is, let alone what date – is Monday 26th May, and it’s 9.30pm, after dark.

Zeke is moored in the beautifully sheltered harbour at Rikitea, the water gently rippling against the sides and lapping the dinghy with slightly metallic slaps, a homely sound because it shows we haven’t lost our means of getting to shore. The last three days have been pretty miserable (in terms of weather, not lifestyle), and this is the calm after the storm.

That’s why the air feels so clean, so light, so cooling. The humidity that can build up in the sub-tropics is totally absent, and the gentle breeze wafts the smoky scent of the locals’ fires over the bow, where I’m sitting. Rikitea is spread around me like an arc, a crescent row of electric bulbs running from the town generator, reflecting in the water like lantern light reflecting off the river at Mardi Gras, like restaurant table light glimmering off the Seine as cognac and cigars are served, like pub firelight shining over the canal boats tied up alongside... it’s a painting, and the air is still.

But not totally still. Surrounding Zeke are the other boats that have been sheltering in Rikitea for the last few days: Tegan, where Joe and Janet are sitting outside, listening to music on their wonderful waterproof hi-fi, a cigar glowing in the dark and the occasional lilt of Canadian accent floating over the water (ironically the song’s ‘Another Day’ by Paul McCartney, a song all about the repetitiveness of working life); Teba, the huge French boat that we befriended in Whangarei and kept in contact with all the way over, where there is activity involving generators and flickering torchlight; the schooner[1] Jan van Gent, whose crew are the very friendly Canadians Richard and Gail; these boats and others are all here, creating a community feel in an otherwise empty arc of water.

When yachts get together, they synchronise. This isn’t a social phenomenon: it’s physical. When a number of yachts are anchored in the same spot, they do the maritime equivalent of synchronised swimming; when the wind blows, yachts turn bow into the wind because of the way they’re shaped, and to the casual observer it looks as if the yachts are obeying some cosmic law of conformity, all swinging in the same way like a ballroom dancing troupe. It’s yet another way the community feeling gets strengthened in the harbour, albeit subliminally.

This is the feeling, then, of the real sub-tropics. Here there are no work pressures, no western stresses, no traffic jams, no worries about where to get food, no pollution (beyond the French nuclear legacy and the dodgy fish) and no similarity to city life that I can see. Now I’ve been here for a little while, it’s become second nature to relax, procrastinate and live for the moment, with a healthy regard for doing those little jobs on the boat that still need to be done. It’s a pleasant feeling, one made more enjoyable by the fact that after the first few days, when the sheer joy of reaching land had worn off, life became surprisingly mundane.

It’s a weird concept, being morose in paradise, but it’s understandable. Both Rob and I found that having survived the voyage from hell, and having Laurent jump ship, life suddenly took a turn, a change from constant stress, both physical and mental, to an existence where all-night sleeping sessions were a reality, there were no watches to keep, the boat didn’t roll and the food was fresh. The thrill of this was great for a few days – I would say incredible, in all fairness – but it hits everyone sooner or later: paradise complacency. It only lasts for a couple of days, but the feeling of being strangely unimpressed and, I dare say, a little depressed in the midst of heaven is interesting, to say the least. It’s understandable as the psychological calm after the storm, but it’s still a strange phenomenon. Needless to say, we got over it pretty quickly.

That’s just one more reason why the gentle serenity of this nocturnal harbour scene is so beautiful. We’ve not only arrived, we’ve begun to adjust, and now the cruising really starts. Roll on the Pacific Islands...

Tonight truly is the calm after the storm.

[1] A quick course in yacht types might be handy. The most common is the sloop, of which Zeke is an example: a sloop has one main mast, with one sail on a boom behind it and one sail in front (the mainsail and jib, as previously explained). If there’s one mast and two sails in front of the mast, it’s a cutter, like Teba. A schooner like Jan van Gent has two masts, with the front mast being smaller than the back. A ketch has two masts, but the other way round to a schooner – the front mast is taller than the back – and a yawl is a ketch whose rear boom hangs over the back of the boat (normally the boom is totally inside the lines of the boat). So now you’ve got enough info to hop on down to Great Yarmouth and sound knowledgeable... and interestingly, at one point in our visit there was at least one of each of these types present at Rikitea, something of a rare occurrence in such a remote spot as the Gambiers.

Gambier Islands (Southeast)

Written: 23 May 1997

Given the way we were all getting on together it was logical that we should go off exploring the Gambiers together, so we teamed up with Joe and Janet on Tegan (unfortunately Peeyoo was about to leave for Tahiti on his yacht Rammen, so he was too busy to come with us). And so the four of us set off south towards a little sheltered spot off Île Akamaru, a reef-surrounded 246m-high peak just a short trip 7km southeast from Rikitea.

The Gambier lagoon is surrounded by a huge barrier reef (technically a large atoll) in the shape of a vertical diamond with points at north, south, east and west; this surrounds both the four main islands and the smaller islets dotted around. Île Mangareva, the northernmost island, is the largest and highest, and is home to almost all the people who live in the Gambiers (they mostly live in the village of Rikitea). The other islands are mostly uninhabited, and the only settlements you can see consist of one or two houses for workers on the pearl farms that form the basis for the islands’ wealth. The anchorage we found near Île Akamaru proved to be pretty idyllic, with no houses in sight (except for a work hut on the beach that nobody lived in anyway) and coral reef everywhere. Akamaru is only inhabited occasionally, and is (in)famous for being the island where Laval and Caret celebrated their first mass in the Gambiers after they’d arrived in 1834.

Come to think of it, it’s pretty damn hard for me to sit here on the deck of Zeke and describe how beautiful this paradise is, because however I rearrange phrases like ‘stunning coral reef’, ‘striking volcanic peaks’, ‘palm-fringed beaches’, ‘deep turquoise water’, ‘sparkling sunshine’, ‘cloudless skies’, ‘gently lapping water’, ‘cool sea breezes’, ‘sweet and succulent fruit’, ‘hot white sand’, ‘unspoilt and uninhabited’ and ‘refreshing swimming’, I still won’t be able to describe just how amazing this paradise really is. The first step is to understand that paradise has nothing to do with what you see in the tourist brochures – cocktail bars, crowded beaches and only two weeks in which to cram a sun tan, three James Clavell novels and at least one cultural experience – so it’s not all bumming around on the beach. This is the real thing, and we’re not tourists, we’re living here.

This became really apparent when we went for the beach barbecue experience, an off-the-cuff decision that simply isn’t possible in places like Tahiti. In thanks for hosting the wonderful party the Saturday before, Rob and I invited Joe and Janet to join us for a genuine Aussie beach barbie, complete with real-fire barbecue and great food. It turned into another amazing night.

Barbecue in Paradise

I spent most of the morning slaving over a hot oven, creating some wonderful fresh bread, a great creamy banana pudding and some pasta salad with homemade pesto. I did, however, manage to grab the dinghy and go exploring on my own for a couple of hours, one of the true pleasures of having your own transport and life-support system in an island setting. I discovered a beautiful and tiny beach with a little reef just off it, and spent the afternoon snorkelling and reading a Graham Greene novel in the shade of a tropical tree. It set the scene perfectly for the barbecue itself.

For the barbie we had good old snags (sausages for those not used to Aussie English); sweet potatoes that we wrapped in foil, chucked in the fire and ate with butter (and which tasted great, despite the purple colour of the insides, a shock to those of us who weren’t prepared for it); and possibly the strangest experiment of all, a breadfruit. This staple of the Pacific grows on trees all over the place, and is about the size of a football with a tough and knobbly green skin that looks totally unappetising. Shove a breadfruit in a roaring fire for a couple of hours, turning it regularly, and you end up with something about the size of a football with a tough and knobbly black skin that looks totally unappetising. However, smash it open when it’s ready, and you end up with a strange white doughy substance that’s vaguely bread-like and not at all bad with salt and butter. I prefer the other two ways to cook it – slice it up very thinly and fry it like potato chips, or chop it up into chunks and roast it – but there’s something fun about the whole breadfruit-in-the-fire experience, as it’s an essential part of Polynesian culture.

The cigars and rum made a welcome appearance too, with the rum adding a great kick to a milk and fruit juice concoction I’d whipped up, and as the almost full moon lit up the coral off the beach and the fire crackled away, casting shadows on the coconut palms above our heads and along the beautiful beach we’d decided to call home for the evening, I felt about as far away from the crazy world of commuting and stress as I’ll ever be. I’ve gained another fantastic memory, and I’ll gain a fair few more while cruising on Zeke; life can be very pleasant sometimes.

Under the Sea

We were enjoying ourselves so much that we decided to stay in the anchorage for the following day as well, and Joe made a fantastic Caesar salad for lunch, a thank-you for the night before. Real ground coffee made an appearance – wow, what a taste experience after all that instant coffee with powdered milk – and after relaxing for some hours, Joe and I took the dinghy over to the main reef and snorkelled for some time, exploring the reef and the local wildlife. As my first proper snorkelling session on coral it was quite an experience; the surreal shapes of the coral and the sheer intensity of the colours of fish you see are overwhelming.

The next day Rob and I decided to do some more serious diving, so we set off for the southernmost corner of the barrier reef, beyond all the islands. Here the coral looked promising for a Hookah dive, so we steamed out there and dropped anchor just before the seabed took a dive into the deep ol’ Pacific.

A Hookah dive isn’t scuba; with scuba you have everything in a self-contained unit, with an air tank strapped to your back and complete independence. A Hookah dive uses a compressor on the boat that feeds air down a long hose to a mouthpiece at the other end (hence the name, which comes from the tobacco pipes that people always claim they never use for marijuana, officer); the techniques for breathing are similar to scuba, but you don’t have a buoyancy jacket and the air never runs out. The disadvantage, of course, is that you have to stay within 60m or so of the boat, but there is one big plus: there’s nowhere in the Gambiers to refill scuba tanks, so once we’d emptied them, that would be the end of the diving until we found someone with a scuba compressor (unlikely until Tahiti). If your Hookah runs out of air, then it’s a safe assumption that the rest of the planet has too.

The dive proved to be interesting, but probably not worth the few hours of travelling back into the wind we had to go through afterwards. If you add in the fact that I managed to get my hose in an almighty tangle, then it probably wasn’t the best introduction to Hookah diving, but I can’t complain; diving on coral is still a novelty for me, and even a mediocre reef is amazing at that stage in your diving career. The fish were pretty amazing, and the colours had to be seen to be believed; it truly is a different world on the bottom of the ocean.

Our return trip wasn’t back to Île Akamaru, but to Île Agakauitai over on the western side of the group. The reason was that Rob had a mission: to find the caves of the cannibal kings. The story goes that before Laval came and screwed up all the fun, the locals buried their dead kings in caves on Agakauitai. We’d heard that the introduction of goats had rather screwed things up, seeing as the caves on the island are no more that indents in the mountains, and goats are no great respecters of the dead, tending to turf anything out of a cave they fancy for a home. However, Rob wanted to explore the island anyway, just in case anything was left, so we decided to spend the day climbing and exploring Île Agakauitai.

Predictably we didn’t find any cannibal kings, but we did get some wonderful views, and there were some interesting bush-bashing opportunities. The weather wasn’t that flash, and as we headed back to the boat the rain came in and made the rest of the night somewhat bumpy and blowy; returning to Rikitea the next morning was a welcome move, as Rikitea is about as sheltered as anchorages get.

Back in Rikitea we found Joe and Janet and settled back into the routine. Ah... harbour life. It’s a home from home.

Gambier Islands (East)

Written: 15 June 1997

We made our last sortie from Rikitea on Thursday 5th June, accompanied by Tegan as per usual (no other yachts joined us, as they seemed to be far more interested in simply lazing around off Rikitea, probably a side-effect of visiting too many island paradises). Our mission: to head a couple of miles east towards the airport motu, Totegegie.

A motu has to be one of the most classic tropical formations – or, at least, an important part of one of the most classic tropical formations, the atoll – and Totegegie is a classic example. A motu is an island that forms when debris and sand collects on top of an atoll reef, normally in a long, thin line, and the motu at Totegegie stretches for about five miles (with a couple of small breaks where you can dinghy through to the ocean), is only about 100m wide at its widest point, and is smothered with coconut palms, firs and pandanus trees. It’s also the site of the Gambier Islands’ airport, a one-and-a-half mile sealed strip, presumably left over from the days of the military tests in the area, and which now hosts just three planes a month. One thing’s for sure: living under the flight path in the Gambiers doesn’t bring the property prices down by much.

The motu stretches north-south along the eastern side of the Gambier atoll, and we anchored just inside the atoll, opposite sandy beaches and swaying trees, and with the Pacific Ocean peeping through gaps in the reef. The sound of the sea crashing against the outside of the reef was particularly soothing as we relaxed in the smooth waters of the lagoon; when there’s a huge, living coral reef between you and the swell, it takes one hell of a storm to spoil the tranquillity.

Rob and I explored the airport and terminal shacks – which were surprisingly modern considering the total lack of tourists who fly to the Gambiers – and plunged into the bush to the south of the airstrip to tackle the rough-looking road that would, we hoped, lead us to a collection of abandoned buildings that we’d spotted from the boat. Sure enough, after wandering down the road for some time – avoiding the countless hermit crabs who were sunbathing right in our path and who would roll themselves into balls at our approach – we reached a group of old warehouses, relics from an earlier age when machinery was fixed on the motu. The buildings were totally abandoned and crumbling, a hopeful sign that the French have finally pulled the stopper on the military activity and tests that have plagued the area for far too long.

The day was rounded off with Joe’s homemade pizza, probably the best pizza I have ever tasted anywhere (not surprisingly, given my lucid dreams of pizza on the way to the Gambiers). Goodness knows how he did it – practice, he assured me – but his pizza dough was as good as any restaurant’s that I’d come across, and his jalapeno peppers really added zest to the experience. I might have been proud of my cooking on board Zeke, but some people are just born to the kitchen (or, rather, the galley).

Barbecues, Cigars and Scuba Diving

We spent the next day preparing for another beach barbecue, this time on the motu. As with our Île Akamaru barbecue, it all went swimmingly, with my first attempt at a marinade going down a treat. The cigars made an appearance – José Llopis Churchills, maduros and naturals, just for the record – and we all spent a sizable portion of the evening scouring the outside of the reef, exposed at low tide, for crabs and lobsters, but failed to catch a glimpse of even one. Never mind, walking round an exposed reef by torchlight after a large barbecue is an interesting experience even if you don’t spot anything.

The conversation turned to cigars, naturally, but this time with more gusto that at the last barbie. The reason? A couple of days before I had borrowed a copy of an American magazine off Joe called Cigar Aficionado, a wonderful and decadent quarterly publication that pays unbridled homage to the cigar. It contains interviews with famous people who smoke cigars, it discusses the latest Cuban harvest, it does taste tests on cigar types, it discusses anything to do with being a rich jetsetter... it was completely fascinating and surprisingly a rather good read, even if it shamelessly promoted an image of the incredibly rich that left a slightly bad taste in my mouth. Still, I learned an awful lot about cigars in one brief reading, and it helped to break up the afternoon of cooking, washing up and singing along to a Neil Diamond tape I discovered in the back of one of Zeke’s draws (which just goes to show how tolerant one becomes after months in a yacht).

The next couple of days we lazed and snorkelled, fixing the odd thing on the boat, and on Monday 9th, Rob and I decided to do a scuba dive, a momentous decision, for this was to be my first dive on coral with my new scuba equipment. It’s all very well snorkelling and Hookah diving, but scuba is the only real way to explore, and explore we did. We ended up diving separately, one after the other – which you should never do, if you follow the rule book to the letter – because Rob wanted to go spearing fish, and with sharks in the water, it’s a good idea to have someone in the dinghy ready to pick up any fish you might catch before the predators get in there. He didn’t get any fish, but it meant that I got an hour of solo diving round the reef, exploring and just sitting there watching the sea life, quite overwhelmed by the experience.

Diving round coral is hard to explain. The geography of the ocean floor – ‘bommies’ of coral pushing up from the sand; sheets of flat coral that you can poke your head under; valleys through coral that are great to swim down and thrilling to catch the ocean swell in; caves full of hiding fish – makes the exploring far more interesting than with a flat-bottomed sandy sea. On top of that there’s the life surrounding the coral: huge, brightly coloured fish in shoals that all turn to flee at the same time, like herds of swimming sheep; eels three metres long that hug the floor, slipping in and out of coral corridors; large, ugly grouper that look miserable but taste good; sharks that you basically try to avoid; coral trout hugging the bommies... the delights never end.

And on top of the fish and coral are the shellfish, from which I collected two spider conch and two trochus (the former proving to be delicious when smashed open, gutted and fried in a little flour and oil, a process that Richard from Jan van Gent showed us on our return to Rikitea). The whole dive, lasting an hour, was again a confirmation that despite the initial cost of scuba training and equipment, it’s worth every penny.

We returned to Rikitea through rain and high winds on Tuesday 10th, and spent the night watching videos on Illusion with Jim and Ami and the Tegan crew. We spent the last few days before our planned departure from the Gambiers living the harbour life, finalising preparations for the journey ahead, and cooking as many meals in advance as we could, ready for freezing, to make things easier for me in my new role as ship’s cook. Not that I was complaining; if you’re in charge of the food, you never go hungry, though that wasn’t much use as the seasickness returned for the trip to Amanu...

Heading for Tahiti

Man vs Cyclone Kelly

Written: 18 June 1997

We finally left the Gambier Islands on Sunday 15th June, at least as finally as is possible when your passage and plans depend on the weather. We had initially planned to leave on the Friday, but having checked out with the gendarmes, the other yachties pointed out that Friday was the 13th, and if there’s one thing that sailors are, it’s superstitious. Besides, we still had a few jobs to get done before leaving, so we spent Friday working on the boat and trying to get hold of the weather forecast for the area.

The next day we did a final check of everything – engine, rigging, below deck and so on – and discovered a large crack in one of the plates to which the lower starboard shrouds were attached (the shrouds being the thick steel cables that connect the mast to the boat, keeping it straight). We could have sailed with the crack, but there’s no point in risking something that might give way in a storm, potentially taking the mast with it, so we delayed departure until Sunday while the Frères did a quick welding job for us. After a delightful steak and baked potato meal courtesy of Tegan on Saturday night (a thank you to us for spending most of the afternoon trying to fix a leaky exhaust manifold on their engine), Sunday finally came, and we raised anchor and left Rikitea.

However, we didn’t leave the Gambiers straight away, but anchored off the southern coast of Mangareva. The reason: Cyclone Kelly had been ripping Fiji to bits over the previous few days, a real shock in the non-cyclone season, and it was slowly heading towards the southeast. Although this wasn’t straight for us, if it passed south of us the clockwise cyclonic winds would give us winds from the north or northeast, and seeing as we were planning to head north-northwest, that would mean an unpleasant bash almost straight into the wind; so we weighed anchor to try to get a better reception for the weather forecast broadcast from New Zealand, to see what the future held.

In the meantime, Jan van Gent and Illusion, who had both struck out northwest for Tahiti on Saturday while we were fixing the rigging, limped back into Rikitea, after studying the weather map and deciding that it wasn’t worth risking a confrontation with a cyclone, even if it had been reclassified as a tropical depression, a sign that the cyclone was slowly blowing itself out. Despite this worrying development, the winds were still supposed to be coming from the north, so we figured we’d be safe enough on the south side of Mangareva and stayed where we were, deciding to explore the beaches right next to us.

Beaches vary in much the same way gorges in Australia do; you might assume they’re all the same, but each beach has its own character, just like cities, deserts, forests and mountains, and the southern Mangarevan beaches were particularly beautiful. Unfortunately the weather was overcast, but even so we explored the area for a while, discovering old walls from a previous settlement, an old shack inhabited by chickens, and some wonderful palm-tree vistas. Returning through the colourful coral, we reckoned that our decision to stay the night just off the south coast was a good one.

Whoops: bad call. During supper the weather began to pick up, with some serious gusts of wind bursting round the corner from the east, and a swell slowly began to build up, sloshing the boat around enough to make us feel a bit uneasy (even though we had the whole anchor chain laid out, so there was no way we were going anywhere). We turned in early, with Rob getting up at 12.30am to get the weather from New Zealand. And that’s when he noticed the dinghy.

A cry of ‘Quick! Get up Mark, the dinghy’s flipped!’ woke me up at a quarter to one. The wind was crazy, but mercifully it wasn’t raining, so rushing onto deck I had to rely on the waves being blown over the sides to soak me to the skin. The dinghy, which we normally towed behind the boat (except on ocean passages, when it got lashed to the deck) had been blown over by the wind, flipping the oars out into the ocean and immersing the outboard in salt water. This was not a good thing.

It took total immersion from Rob and spiritual guidance and helpful torch lighting from me for us to get the outboard off the flipped dinghy and up onto the deck. We then managed to right the dinghy and hang it off the back of Zeke, only to have it flipped back over by the first wave that hit it, so we shrugged it off and left it to float upside down for the night. Saving the outboard was a higher priority.

When an outboard gets immersed in salt water, it gets water into the cylinder heads, and if you don’t flush it out, that’s one ruined motor (especially with salt water, a substance that makes concentrated acid look positively innocent). We spent until 3am disassembling, oiling, squirting and drying the outboard before finally turning in, and then we had to take it in turns to check our position every half hour through the night, to make sure we hadn’t dragged the anchor towards the surrounding coral reef.

Monday morning saw us battle to drag the upturned dinghy onto the deck in extreme winds – gusts of up to 50 miles per hour – and to pull up the anchor, with me at the helm and Rob at the anchor winch. The relief as we powered into the comparative shelter of Rikitea was huge, not dulled at all by the fact that we were supposed to have left for good. There was Illusion; there was Jan van Gent; and next to them Tegan; it felt like a homecoming, and we counted ourselves lucky to have lost no more than a couple of oars. Boats have been dashed on the reef in better conditions than that, and it drove home the message that sailing is sometimes a dangerous occupation, and people can get into trouble. That evening it was as if all the boats were nursing their wounds... dented pride for Jan van Gent and Illusion, who had had to turn back; engine headaches for Tegan, who had spent days fixing the bloody thing, only to have it still leaking and in need of an overhaul; and Zeke, happy to have fixed the outboard, but smarting from the loss of two oars (and wondering how to cope with only one spare oar on board). Such is the power of the weather.

Quite what a cyclone was doing cropping up in the middle of June, normally a totally cyclone-free month, was anybody’s guess. It wasn’t terribly sporting, having Kelly spoil our weather pattern, but I suppose I should have been glad that we weren’t inside the cyclone itself; that would have been dangerous.

We finally left the Gambiers on Wednesday 18th June, this time for good. We left Rikitea with the sadness reserved for leaving home... over a month in the one area is long enough to build up a pleasant social scene, and I looked back at the slowly disappearing Gambiers with great fondness.

Amanu

Written: 26 June 1997

The ocean passage from the Gambier Islands to the atoll of Amanu – some four days’ travel north-northwest to where the large atoll Hao dominates the map – was as uncomfortable as I thought it would be. I only lost one meal to the fish, and we didn’t get hit by any storms, but having already done one hugely unpleasant ocean passage (and a particularly long one too, judging by the reaction of the other yachties in Rikitea) I wasn’t exactly keen on doing any more.

At least this time the yacht didn’t pitch and roll as badly, and there were only two of us on board, which prevented overcrowding, but even though it was only a four-day trip to Amanu, I was desperate to hit land again. Memories of the trip from New Zealand flooded back – getting up at 3am while waves crashed over the side of the boat, the three of us desperately trying to reef the main sail while the wind whipped us to the bone for an hour; or having to put up with the sheer, exasperating boredom of 28 days on the sea – but while these feelings didn’t apply to the four days ambling through the smooth, pleasant-weather sailing of the trade winds, I still had to grit my teeth and persuade myself that Zeke was simply a means to an end, that end being the islands of incomparable beauty that we were exploring.

We eventually reached Amanu on Sunday 22nd June, after chalking up another 450 nautical miles. Let’s not dwell on the sailing and instead move swiftly on to the important part: the destination of Amanu.

Navigating the Pass

«Non, la bas c’est la passe deuxième,» said Marerenui, shaking his long-hair and looking for all the world like a Polynesian Shaggy temporarily without his Scooby Doo. «Vous voulez la première; c’est deux kilometres au sud.»

Squinting through the rain, I didn’t quite know what to make of Amanu. Our progress through the Dangerous Archipelago (the old name for the Tuamotus) had proved that without a GPS – the electronic gizmo that gives your latitude and longitude from satellite fixes – life in the Tuamotus would not only be dangerous, it would be downright suicidal. The Tuamotu atolls are invisible until you’re about five miles away from them – since they have no mountainous islands in the Tuamotus as they do in the Gambiers – and before you know it you can be run aground on a coral reef and sinking in the South Pacific with no means of escape. In the days before GPS, navigation by sextant would be petrifying in such an area, especially if the weather was cloudy, as it had been for most of our passage. Even with a GPS, it’s no picnic.

Amanu is a classic atoll, an oval-shaped ring of coral scattered with coconut palms and breaking surf, with only three passes into the lagoon. The problem, however, lies in actually getting through the passes, because the whole atoll is hugely tidal; the sea rushes into the narrow gaps in the reef, creating huge, swirling currents that suck in unsuspecting boats, and six hours later the tide turns and Amanu disgorges itself of all the flotsam it’s drawn in, like some huge sea monster’s lung. We arrived at what we thought was the main pass, and all we could see was a torrent of foamy water, rushing out of the lagoon over sharp rocks, jutting reef and treacherous-looking sand bars. Coupled with the squalls that blew in to add to the already atrocious visibility, and we were rapidly getting cold feet as to getting into the lagoon.

Our sketchy information and lack of good charts didn’t help. Until the last couple of years the whole of the south Tuamotu archipelago was interdit, as it was home to the French government’s nuclear testing and secret military training; nobody, absolutely nobody got in, bar the locals and the legionnaires. Now the exclusion zone is limited to an area around Mururoa and Fangatuafa atolls, home to the last nuclear tests in 1995, and you can go anywhere else without hindrance... that is, if you can get the information you need to explore the archipelago. All the guidebooks still list the Tuamotus as a no-go area, there is no information on passes, no up-to-date charts of the area, and all the yachties we’d met had the same problem: ils ne savent pas de tout. The typical reaction of the unadventurous sailor is to go straight to Tahiti, leaving the Tuamotus to the east, but the captain and I wanted to explore the Forbidden Zone and had spent some time doing the detective work on places we could visit in the southern Dangerous Archipelago.

Our options were limited by only considering atolls with passes into the lagoons; anchoring off the outside of an atoll is normally impossible because the ocean floor drops off too steeply on the ocean side, and even if you can drop anchor, it’s fatal if the wind turns and blows you onto the reef. The atolls in the southern Tuamotus that have passes are small in number: there are the Gambiers, where we’d already been; Mururoa, where we couldn’t sail without going via the inside of a French prison cell; Hao, home to the main military base in the Tuamotus, and not too desirable for just that reason, with its jets and legionnaires; Makemo, not far from Hao; and Amanu, an intriguing spot if only because there was so little information on it anywhere. The other atolls were either impossible to get into or were privately owned by pearl farmers, and were therefore out of bounds.

Our research had thrown up just two facts about Amanu: there were two passes into the lagoon (though we found out later there are actually three), and they were both ferociously tidal, far too swift at high or low tide for a yacht to motor through. In the books we also found a formula linking the time of moonrise and moonset to the best time to enter the passes, so we tried to measure the times of the moon’s passage as we sailed from Mangareva, though without any success; it was far too cloudy. The electronic almanac I’d picked up off the Internet for my faithful palmtop turned out to be as trustworthy as a cockney trying to sell genuine Yves Saint Laurent perfume for five quid on Oxford Street, so we arrived with very little to go on. Looking at the boiling inferno that we were supposed to tackle we felt our resolve buckle, despite our four-day journey to get there. Dejected, we decided to scoot south down the coast of the atoll to see if we had possibly missed another entrance.

Marerenui to the Rescue

That’s when the speedboat came planing over the surf, pounding along with three brown-skinned natives bouncing up and down in a synchronised dance that’s instantly familiar to anyone who has witnessed insane driving on tropical islands. We flagged them down, and in broken French I asked them about the pass. Marerenui, Angelo and Laurent were to turn into our saviours.

‘That’s the second of the three passes you’ve been looking at,’ said Marerenui, in one phrase making the facts and figures we’d creamed about Amanu look completely reliable. ‘You don’t want to go through that one unless you’ve been drinking too much champagne; the best pass is down there, by the village.’ And hopping onto Zeke with Angelo, leaving Laurent to motor off back home at breakneck speed, Marerenui pointed us south to the real pass. To be honest, it didn’t look that much more encouraging.

‘Give it an hour and a half,’ he said, ‘and then we can motor into the lagoon.’ The hour and a half was spent chatting in pidgin French, drinking coffee, listening to Bob Marley, and wondering quite what was going to happen to the apparent Niagara by two o’clock in the afternoon. But sure enough, after one and a half hours, the pass was as placid as a baby on methadone, and we set off, me at the wheel, responding to gauche, droit and tout droit with more confidence than the usual port and starboard, which I’ve never really managed to get the hang of.

It might have looked passive, but our new-found friends’ conversation was nagging at the back of my mind. There had been two yachts run aground on the reef in recent years, resulting in one angry Frenchman who lost his boat after getting drunk and screwing up his entry, and one even angrier German who had lost his life because he was playing his guitar in the cockpit and didn’t realise the reef had sucked him in. The locals had to pull the latter’s body from the wreckage and make sure it went through the right channels, something the owner of the body had quite obviously failed to do in the last moments of his life. Considering that Amanu gets about five or six yachts visiting it every year, that’s quite a high fatality rate.

We managed to get through, though, relieved and somewhat thrilled by our introduction into the lives of the locals. We anchored, after politely declining the offer of tying up to a rusty steel buoy in the harbour which would have scratched the hell out of the boat had the wind blown us onto it, and thanked our saviours for their kindness. However, having spent the last four days in watch shifts of three hours – three on, three off for 24 hours a day, somewhat ruining the sleep pattern – we left the boys to go off and play their Sunday afternoon game of volleyball on the village green, and instead accepted a dinner invitation from Marerenui for that evening, by which time we’d be rested and clean.

Amanuan Hospitality

We showered and hit the sack for a couple of hours’ rest, but I was rudely awoken after an hour by the arrival of another boat, this time heralding another type of native: the Gimme-Something. Most of the locals we’d met so far had been incredibly kind, handing out fruit and advice freely and not expecting anything in return. The Gimme-Something, however, equates ‘yacht’ with ‘rich American’ and pays a visit to see what he can get. The two Gimmes who turned up, with a young son in tow, enjoyed the tour of the boat I gave them in pidgin French, declined the offer of une tasse du café, and after some idle banter revealed their mission.

«Avez-vous du bier?» inquired the scrawny one with the moustache. «Du vin? Du whisky?»

«Non,» I replied, almost truthfully, and had to go through the same routine three times before they finally lost interest and went back to the village. I explained that we’d failed to stock up in New Zealand – a mistake in retrospect, because rum is as valuable as gold in these islands – and that alcohol had been too expensive for us to buy in Rikitea. The reply was that you couldn’t buy alcohol in Amanu for any price, and that you had to go to Hao to get it; all the natives had was tobacco and marijuana, which to me didn’t sound like too bad a deal, but they wanted beer. Or wine. Or whisky. But all I wanted was some sleep, and eventually they left me to grab some while I could.

The evening with Marerenui was quite, quite different; the family were extremely polite, extremely generous, and extremely patient with my stilted communications and the captain’s grammar-free string-of-vocabulary attempt at French. We arrived, kicked off our shoes (as one should do when entering houses throughout Polynesia), and sat down at the kitchen table for a feast. It struck me as odd that there were only two places laid, and as we served ourselves portions of ris, poulet, raw bonito and some superb poisson à soy, drinking jus de coconut straight from the shell, we realised that we were the only ones eating; the family looked on, making conversation and obviously pleased to see such healthy appetites. There were some slightly worrying moments as I realised I knew nothing about Polynesian manners: does one eat with one’s hands, or does one eat everything with the one fork provided? And the coffee, served in a soup bowl: does one slurp it from the bowl like a parched desert nomad, or use the teaspoon to drink it like soup? And should one bring gifts to the house, as we had? And, as I recalled reading, should one make sure not to admire anything too much, because Polynesian custom dictates that the host must give that something to the visitor? Whatever, we scoffed, and we scoffed a second helping, and then we rounded it off with un peu de glace and un cigarette, stretching my knowledge of French superlatives to the utmost limit; how many times can you say «le repas est tres bon, magnifique, superbe» and so on?

Fumbling in French

It soon became apparent that my French was pretty poor and I understood only a little, though luckily Hinano, Marerenui’s wife, spoke much clearer and simplistic French than the men, probably because she was used to talking to her kiddies. Still, the French that I did have was enough for basic communication, and with a few simple inventions I managed to turn the language into my own communications tool.

The first rule I followed was the 50:50 sex rule; learning the sex of nouns in French is probably the hardest vocabulary challenge to a speaker of a generally sexless language like English, so I made up the sex of each noun as I went along, using le for about half, and la for the rest. The second rule was to keep talking, and if I couldn’t remember the word for something, I simply signed it, or just grunted in a Gallic shrug and tried to transmit what I meant psychically. Third, I kept trying to sound enthusiastic about simply being able to communicate, with choice phrases like «Le Bob Marley: il est la langue universale, eh!» as reggae beats throbbed out into the jungle. This approach seemed to work most of the time.

On the other hand, the language barrier was sometimes just that. When I asked the boys what they did with their time, they replied, «Pechant, copra et la femme», rhythmically pulling on imaginary female hips in much the same way as drunk package holidaymakers do in discos in Ibiza and Majorca in time to the latest Euro-pop one-hit-wonders. I initially assumed that this meant they had their way with loads of women but, of course, femme is not only the word for woman, it also means wife, and all the boys were saying was that they fished, made copra and spent a lot of quality time with their wives. I can think of worse ways to while away the days.

We learned plenty from our hosts. Marerenui was a fisherman some of the time, and a copra farmer for the rest. Copra is dried coconut pulp, laid out in the island sun, and is exported from most of the islands in Polynesia; it is used to produce coconut oil, which is in turn used to make such varied items as soap, margarine and nitro-glycerine. It’s a lucrative trade, and has provided the 200 Amanuans with a standard of living that isn’t quite up to Mangarevan standards (where everyone has expensive four-wheel-drives due to the thriving pearl farming there), but which is pretty luxurious by normal desert island standards. Marerenui’s house, perched by the breaking surf at the entrance to the pass, from which a soothing sound of pounding currents lilted all night, was about as well positioned as a house can be. If Amanu had been a tourist resort, Marerenui would have been a property tycoon.

In fact the coconut, the staple product of Polynesia, deserves an aside of its own. The coconut palm, the ubiquitous symbol of tropical paradise, grows just about everywhere; the coconuts themselves, if allowed to mature on the tree and fall off, will germinate, sending out roots from two of its three ‘eyes’, and a leafy stalk from the third. The nuts also float, and coconuts can be seen drifting through the ocean currents, eventually landing on other islands and populating them with coconut palms. The trees themselves are used for building material, making mats and other objets d’art, and for making clothes.

However the nut, which comes inside a fibrous husk (itself used for making rope) is the real source of wealth. After one year growing from a flower into a full coconut, the husk is greeny-brown and the nut drinkable; chop off the husk, smash off the top, and drink down that wonderfully sweet coconut juice, something that tasted good in Mangareva, but which proved really luxurious and as sweet as nectar in Amanu. As the coconut ripens further, the milk gets weaker and the flesh gets thicker, becoming the familiar white pulp that we know and love in the West. Eating flesh from a fresh coconut knocks the sterile western version into a cocked hat, and sliced and sautéed in teriyaki sauce it makes a wonderful nibble for between meals.

So that’s the coconut: it provides food, drink, shelter, body covering, ornamentation, copra and, possibly the most important contribution, it gives you somewhere to hang your hammock as you sip a rum and coconut juice. Ah, the tropics...

So we idled away the night, chatting in fifth-form Français about life on the island, the trials and tribulations of living on a yacht, and all of the other stuff you talk when you don’t know enough vocabulary to get deep in discussion. We discovered how the locals swam in the pass when the current was flowing, using fins and masks to spear the fish as they struggled against the flow. We found out that the nuclear atoll Mururoa was apparently home to «tout le merde de France» and that the local policeman on Amanu, who took over from Marerenui’s late father-in-law, was very strict. Then there was the supply ship, which arrived every two weeks, servicing Hao, Amanu and Mangareva among others, and from which everyone bought direct because it was cheaper than the prices on the atoll (a hand-sized piece of frozen beef cost about US$30 from the local shop). The supply boat had arrived the day before, which explained the frozen chicken and ice cream we’d scoffed.

Then there were the flights to Tahiti, only a few hundred miles away but an eye-watering US$520 for a one-way flight (though the flight is free if it’s a trip to the hospital there); the security blanket that one of the little kids was clutching throughout the night, proving that the world of the comforter transcends mere cultural barriers; and the wonderful cushion covers that Hinano spent her spare time on... it was an evening of interesting discoveries.

Soon enough the three little kids were starting to yawn and we thanked our guests using some Tahitian words they’d taught us during the evening, and got a lift back to Zeke in Marerenui’s boat, the same boat he used to zip across to Hao in one-and-a-quarter hours. The boats in the Tuamotus are interesting. Every one of them has a huge engine – and by huge I mean at least 40 horsepower, a meaty outboard if ever there was one – and every engine is brand spanking new. We assumed there was some special deal going on in the South Pacific with outboards, but nobody in Amanu has a car – there’s one communal vehicle on the whole atoll – so the outboard is the equivalent of the family car. Still, these engines would cost a fair amount in the West, and the houses are pretty luxurious, so there’s money round here somewhere. Whatever the cost, the local skiffs have no trouble surging through the pass at any time of day, chopping through the waves like manic surfers. (Talking of which, Marerenui told us about this mad teacher from Hao who comes over to Amanu every weekend to teach the kids, and who goes surfing on the outside of the reef every weekend too. Looking at the reef, that’s a teacher with lot of nerve... which is surprising, considering he’s an Englishman rather than a surf-mad Aussie or a sun-bronzed Californian.)

And all this in a village with one shop, two churches, 200 inhabitants and no other yachts to be seen. Compared to neighbouring Hao with its 1000 people, hundreds of military personnel, strings of shops and the noisy airstrip, Amanu is a beautiful, unspoilt haven.

Saying Goodbye to Amanu

Our final day on Amanu was a perfect example of the extreme kindness of the Amanuans. Marerenui, finding out that it was our last day, invited us to dinner again, laying on a wonderful spread of poisson cru (raw bonito in vinegar, quite a delicacy), chicken, rice, pasta, coconut milk and entertainment.

We talked all night, with conversation returning to the same topics as covered in all my French chats: snorkelling, weather, excellence of food, kindness of hosts, and so on. We talked about our exploration of the island the day before, where we’d wandered through the copra fields, finding beautiful beaches with incredible coral drop-offs just off the shore; here we swam among sharks, coral cod, amazing parrot fish, and coral that had to be seen to be believed. We talked about fishing, copra making, pearls, the other islands we could visit, and before long the meal was over and the chess began.

Yes, out came the chess set, and Daniel, a friend of Marerenui’s who had come to visit, proceeded to have two extremely close games with Rob, the result ending up at one game each. Then Marerenui and I sat down for a contest, but he must have been having a bad day, because I won both of them, and I’m genuinely no chess player. It was a thrill, though, being the centre of attention as other locals wandered in and out of the house, some staying to watch the game, some just passing through. It also meant we were communing without conversation, a relief after the struggle of thinking in French all the time.

The final act of kindness came as we stood up to leave, some five minutes before the electricity was due to be killed. We had brought a little present – a half-bottle of sake, left over from Napoleon’s visit back in Mangareva – but we were unprepared for the wonderful shell necklaces Marerenui presented us with, garlanding our necks as if we were Olympic medal winners. We also got two beautiful spider conch shells – quite how they removed the inhabitants I don’t know, considering how we’d had to smash the hell out of the shells to eat them in Mangareva – and a couple of red papaya, as sweet and succulent as they come. We were escorted back to our dinghy, the end of another evening where I was struck dumb by the kindness and generosity of the island people.

Not surprisingly, I was loath to set off for the next atoll, Makemo, on June 26th; in retrospect, I had good reason to worry.

Amanu Street Scene

Written: 26 June 1997

Picture the street scene...

There are dogs wandering up and down the streets, searching for food scraps and sex from the various bitches around, whose reaction to the males’ interest is to sit down violently, turn round and try to bite the male’s neck; it’s an effective prophylactic. The same dogs are chasing a black pig down the main street, if ‘street’ is the right word for the single dirt track that carries the one communal car; the pig squeals and cries, unhappy as the dogs yelp and snap around it, like cats cornering a wounded rabbit. The pig escapes back into its pen, where the owner shuts the gate and stops the canine invasion, much to the pig’s relief. If only the pig knew what its owner was planning for it, it might not be so keen to go back home.

The main square in Amanu is not very large, but it’s big enough to house a volleyball court, and this is where some 20 young people have gathered for the daily practice game. Angelo saunters up to ask for a cigarette; I have bought some tobacco as something to be able to offer to the islanders, and besides, it enables me to have the odd toke myself. Between drags, he informs me that there is a training session here every day, in preparation for August’s competition in Hao, which lots of the islands attend (including Mangareva, Amanu, Makemo and other islands on our itinerary). The standard of volleyball is very good: with such a hard, dusty pitch there are none of the crazy dives that you see in beach volleyball in Miami or California, but instead the shots are accurate and bullet-fast, with the atmosphere friendly rather than too competitive.

Around the volleyball, competing with the dogs and pigs, are the children. Polynesian children are as cute as cute can be; seeing the adults, it’s sometimes hard to equate the children with the parents, with Polynesian women tending towards the large and the men tending towards the tattoo. The children seem to have one love in life: the bicycle. In a world where television hasn’t yet tightened its socially stifling grip, the Victorian child with his hoop and stick lives on in the form of the Polynesian child riding his bicycle along the dusty motu streets. There are old bicycles with plastic bottles stuffed in the spokes to make a racket as the protagonist peddles past; bikes with flat tyres, that manage to grip perfectly well nonetheless; bikes with millions of kids balancing on top, making circus troupes look positively uncoordinated. It’s a joy to behold, as well as making sure you keep your eyes peeled when crossing the main drag.

This is Amanu life: work starts at 7am, siesta starts at around 12 noon, and volleyball starts at 3pm. It’s relaxing, healthy, and about as far from life in a London bedsit that you can get. After obtaining information on various islands in the area from the local mother’s meeting on the corner, stretching my French to the limits in the process, I return to the boat, wondering at the simplicity of life on the Pacific islands, and saddened to know that I would probably go out of my mind with boredom if I had to live it. But a little bit of paradise is very, very good for the soul, especially on a remote paradise like Amanu, and it’s a world away from Tahitian tourism. Long may it remain so.

Makemo

Written: 2 July 1997

The trip from Amanu to Makemo was another ocean passage, and this time surely the unkindest. The wind was good, the sea was calm and the seasickness relatively under control, but on the second day I was knocked down by another problem: food poisoning. I threw up every fifteen minutes for about five hours, starting at 6am, and to add to the pleasure my guts decided to do a convincing impression of a milkshake maker. Both ends thus ruined, I survived on glasses of water and staying above deck, running over to the side to retch on an empty stomach, and shooting down below in that race-against-time otherwise known as Delhi-belly. The trip only took two days, but it seemed to drag on for eternity. I spent most of the second day sleeping, with the captain masterfully sailing the boat himself. Finally we sighted Makemo and its large navigable pass.

We entered the pass and tied up to the pier, because when we left Amanu the electric anchor winch fell to pieces, meaning we’ll have to haul in the anchor by hand until it can be fixed. On the pier, though, there was precious little privacy, and every few minutes we’d hear a muted ‘Hello? Bonjour?’ down the hatch as we tried to snatch a little sleep on the now stationary boat. After a couple of hours’ I gave up trying, and invited the locals on board.

The children, bless ’em, were as cute as cute can be, though Rob kept asking me to kick them off the boat, perhaps because he was as tired as I was worn out. Our visitors were Sebastian, to whom we’d talked to on the radio when trying to work out how to approach the pass and who turned out to be the local radio hack; John, who spoke English and therefore enabled the captain to ask his questions in his native language; Prospère, who lived up to his name by swanning over on his own little catamaran with his boom-box throbbing, a beer in his hand and wide boy written all over his face (he worked in the pearl industry, it transpired, not entirely to my surprise); and Simon, who had visited Los Angeles and Australia and as such was regarded with great awe by those around him. It was quite a party, and it was only when the wind blew up, forcing us to move the boat into the bay and drop anchor there, that the conversation dried up, which is more than could be said for the weather.

That night we went ashore to watch some Tahitian dance practice (the village was preparing for a festival in a few days’ time), and explored the village a little before returning back to the boat. It was here that I spotted a growing problem: I was beginning to get seriously blasé about the whole paradise thing. All my French conversations were exactly the same, all the islands felt the same, all the food was the same, and all the shops sold the same things... it’s a terrible thing to say, I know, but I was in danger of getting bored in paradise. And that’s not a good thing when you’re travelling, so we didn’t hang around too long before heading north to the comparative metropolis of Tahiti.

Escape from the Yacht

Written: 5 July 1997

The final ocean passage was notable for one reason: it was the first leg of the entire journey on which I didn’t throw up (although I still felt pretty awful for the two-and-a-half days it took to sail from Makemo to Tahiti). I’d chundered from Pahia to Whangarei, hurled from Whangarei to Mangareva, spewed from Mangareva to Amanu and vomited from Amanu to Makemo, but I kept it down from Makemo to Tahiti. Despite this seeming progress, sea legs still elude me.

I finally made the decision to leave Zeke when we were about to head off for Tahiti. Being a kind, considerate person, I told Rob just before we left Makemo that I was thinking of leaving, as I didn’t want to screw him around and leave him short of crew without a fair amount of notice. He said it was a real shame and that I’d been an excellent crewmember, but he was glad I’d told him, and if I really wanted to leave, he could probably find crew in Tahiti; besides having seen me suffering on all the passages so far, he understood where I was coming from.

The real reason I wanted to leave Zeke was that I’m never going to be at home on a boat. As we sailed off to Tahiti, I realised that this was perfect sailing: constant, unchanging trade winds aft of the beam, not too much swell and only a little rolling, but I was still totally miserable. I just don’t like ocean sailing; I find it uninspiring, boring and a lot of effort for little return. Talking to other yachties it’s almost universal that sailors find ocean passages a bore and that it’s the landfalls that make yachting worthwhile, but this goes against much of what I’ve enjoyed about exploration; in Australia and New Zealand the journey was at least as important as the destination, if not more so, and on the way to Papeete I realised that I no longer wanted to travel in a way that reversed this emphasis, stressed me out and made me physically ill.

The other overwhelming reason for disembarking at Papeete was that I’d realised (not for the first time) that I like to travel alone. When you’re alone, survival depends on your own actions, and this makes talking French, working out public transport, ordering food and simply managing to exist quite a thrill; however, on a yacht you have a home from home, which removes a lot of the stress and fun of day to day living, and there’s a plan that isn’t really that changeable, and there are always people around on the boat from whom you can’t easily get away (and when Laurent and Rob were arguing through me as their proxy, that’s precisely what I wanted to do). So before I got to Papeete, my mind was made up; it was back to solid ground for me.

Approaching Tahiti was wonderful. I could smell the city of Papeete (pronounced ‘Pah-pay-eh-tay’) from afar – my first real city smell since Auckland – and the lights glowed as we sailed into the harbour at 2am on Saturday 5th July. We dropped anchor and hit the sack, the elation of impending change quite tiring me out.

We spent the next day trying to squeeze the boat into the overcrowded quay at Papeete, which we eventually managed after discovering that we’d dragged anchor while visiting the information centre in town (a scary experience, when you find the boat’s moved considerable distance down the harbour, only being saved by other yachties leaping on board and dropping more chain). I had visions of us being stuck in the middle of the harbour for days, having to keep an anchor watch, but by Saturday afternoon we were tied up at the quay on the end of a line consisting of all kinds of yachts, from mansions to mouse holes. Our neighbours were fun, and I sighed with relief as I realised that I would never have to do another ocean passage. I was a man set free.

Tahiti

Written: 22 July 1997

Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia, is the biggest settlement on Tahiti and the only place in the territory that can be called a city (with a population of around 150,000). It is also a mixed bag. I found the very idea of a population explosion delightful after such a long spell in the enforced hermitage of Zeke, and as we approached the city lights, the smell of thousands of bodies and their excretions drifted across the tide.

I instantly recognised it, a combination of exhaust, sewage and sweat. I suddenly realised that I’ve spent most of my life living in this smell, so much so that I’ve also spent most of my life not noticing it. Mangareva reminded me that healthy earth and trees smell; Papeete reminded me that humans smell too. I revelled in it.

But Papeete, despite my initial euphoria, wasn’t that flash. It’s an intriguing combination of French culture, Polynesian flair and tropical weather, but it’s a pretty smelly and dirty place. As a place to visit it’s interesting, but only that, and the landscape around the city – Tahiti with its high mountains and Moorea, the neighbouring island, with its jagged peaks – is rather more enticing and exotic than the town itself.

The quay was an interesting place to observe the oddities of Papeete, like the huge Club Med ships that frequent the Society Islands, full of holidaymakers who, when asked, are convinced that the huge sails on those boats actually push the things along (they’re actually engine driven, with four huge gibs stuck on to make them look good when sailing).

Perhaps the most amusing and downright French spectacle was the pedestrian crossing just opposite the boat. In typical Parisian fashion, the cars have absolutely no intention of stopping for mere pedestrians, which produces a collection of bemused and critical Americans and English standing on the crossing and mumbling about how rude these French drivers are.

One fool Englishman walked out into the road, looking the wrong way (as they drive on the right here, of course) and promptly got the shit scared out of him as a car slammed on the anchors and skidded to a halt inches from his knees. The Englishman launched into an angry tirade against the driver, shouting, ‘Are you drunk?’ in very loud English, which had the same effect on the driver as Belgian sitcoms would on the rest of us; he knew what the Pommy guy was going on about, but how relevant was it to him?

As the Tahitian casually drove off, thinking to himself that the world would be a better place if the tourists calmed down, the English guy raved on at his poor travelling companions, re-enacting Agincourt in all but physical violence. There’s no doubt, though, that Papeete is a pedestrian’s nightmare, with blind corners coinciding with a disappearing pavement, drivers who think the whole world is Le Mans, scooters that treat the sidewalk as an extension of the road, and parking rules that were obviously made to be broken.

Tahitian Dancing

Still, we did see some local culture, mainly in the form of real Tahitian dancing. As part of the Bastille Day fête (Bastille Day being on 14th July, the excuse for a long celebration in Tahiti called the Heiva) there was a three-week long dancing contest, and for most of the nights we were in Papeete, you could watch the various teams strut their stuff in a makeshift stadium erected by the harbour. It was rather fun; the way those girls wiggle their hips is enough to make otherwise healthy men get palpitations, and even though the dancing we’d seen in Makemo had been more raw and powerful, the Tahitian programme of dance, choral ditties and instrumentals was certainly entertaining. Especially when the grass skirts and amazingly ornamental flower hats[1] started to fall apart with the vigorous shaking they were getting...

There is one thing that bothers me about Tahitian music, though. They have the most powerful drummers that you’re likely to see, but over the drumming they play – wait for it – the ukulele. Now quite what the ukulele is doing here, I don’t know; perhaps the Tahitians invented the bloody thing, but my appreciation of Polynesian rhythms is somewhat scarred by the fact that bits of it remind me of George Formby. That’s not good, even if the drum sounds are second to none.

My visit to the Musée des Îles et de Tahiti confirmed what I dreaded: the stringed instruments used by the islanders were brought in by the Europeans, though quite why a nation of powerful music makers should embrace such a tinny instrument and include it in their every composition is beyond me. The native instruments on display were far more interesting; the pahu drum, a hollowed out tree trunk popular in eastern Polynesia; the to’ere, a split drum popular in western Polynesia; triton conch shells that make the most amazingly loud howl you’ve ever heard; bamboo nose flutes that you wouldn’t want to play after someone else already has; reed pipes; and, from the Marquesas, a type of xylophone. That’s more like it: instruments with attitude.

Wandering Round Tahiti

Another result of my visit to the Musée was my rediscovery of the joys of walking. Apart from a few stints in Mangareva and the odd beach walk in the Tuamotus, I hadn’t been on any serious walks since Tongariro and I really missed it. So I took le truck to the museum – le truck being the local bus, a wacky combination of bus and truck, and cheap to boot – but decided to walk back, it being a beautiful day. The 15km, three-hour jaunt wasn’t exactly picturesque – it followed the dirty coast road back to Papeete – but it felt good, and woke up those walking muscles that just don’t get any exercise on the sea.

The rediscovery of walking opened up Papeete like never before. I hadn’t had the time or the inclination to do much exploring in the first week, as I’d promised Rob I’d help him with the varnishing, a job that took a lot longer than anticipated, but when that was done, I declared myself a non-working guest on the boat and started to explore.

In a vain attempt to find some aspect of Tahiti that wasn’t entirely spoiled by exposure to western tourism, I spent one day visiting a craft fair, which turned out to be an intriguing combination of craft shops (selling, mostly, tourist-friendly junk, but pleasant junk nonetheless) and a little arena in which all sorts of competitions and displays took place. I spent the best part of a day watching a basket-weaving contest, in which a group of large Tahitian women[2] sat around nattering and moving their hands in well-practised combinations to produce intricate baskets and hats. There was also a race to create these strange traditional shapes out of big, flat, round leaves; a fashion show, in which three lovelies from the Tuamotus showed us various ways of tying a pareo (the Tahitian equivalent of the sarong or saree); dancing, which interestingly featured some of the dancers I’d seen practising in Amanu; and a kids’ dancing competition which managed to show up the fundamental differences between male dancing and female dancing.

Male dancing and female dancing are quite different to each other, although they often dance at the same time. The males tend to leap around in a more violent manner, with their mainstay being to crouch down and knock their knees together very quickly; the females waggle their hips from side to side incredibly fast, while keeping their shoulders absolutely still. It’s quite a sight when there are about 100 dancers on the stage, the girls all wobbling hips in time, and the boys all knocking knees together, with serious drums smashing in the background, and the tinny lilt of a ukulele sounding like a lost little girl at a footy match. And as for the costumes... well, the coconut bra might not be the most comfortable accoutrement in the world, but it does wonders for a man’s libido when he’s been cooped up in a 36 ft yacht for so long.

Le Retro

The ice creams at Le Retro, the café over the road from the yacht quay, were hard to beat. Not only were there some 30 flavours to choose from, but it became quite a social spot for the yachties: ‘Fancy an ice cream?’ became a byword for ‘Stop trying to fix that and take a break.’ Many a tale of derring-do was relayed over une glace du chocolat at Le Retro, I can tell you.

Indeed, the social life on the quay was buoyant, to say the least. On one side of us were very friendly Canadians Dave and Dorothy in Kabloona III, and on the other was the ketch Tir Na Nog, with its crew of Merl (known to his mates as Claw), his wife Mary (who had the most delightful Irish accent) and their daughter, eight-year-old Crystal, who was a vivacious American-accented tornado. Then there were all the other boats around, some of whom we had met in the Gambiers, and some of whom we met through others. Hearing stories from other yachties of awful passages, sea sickness, wonderful anchorages and the ups and downs that form the fabric of cruising made me feel that at least I wasn’t alone in feeling ill at ease on the sea.

We never got to see Illusion, who’d set off for Tahiti soon after us, but Jan van Gent did pull into the quay on the day before I flew out, having spent a couple of weeks over in Moorea, Tahiti’s sister island. It was genuinely great to see Richard and Gail again; such good friendships are forged out there on the ocean.

Real Food!

Food and drink, so long a subject of fantasies and restrictions, was initially a wonderful experience, and gradually it became normality again. Drinking beer; eating baguettes and the most amazing French contribution to international cuisine, the pain au chocolat; ice cream; real coffee; real milk... these things transformed my life more than I would have anticipated.

I rediscovered alcohol after four months of abstinence, spending one night guzzling over nine pints of Hinano beer in a slightly worryingly self-destructive solo beer session, the product of internal stress over having to wait for my escape to Brisbane and a general disappointment at Papeete; the next day’s hangover served me right, and proved that getting drunk on a boat is no fun at all.

The Reality of Yachting

Papeete quay also showed me once and for all the ugly side of cruising – in fact, whoever adopted the word ‘cruising’ for the task of getting a yacht round the world obviously hadn’t done it themselves (one yachtie I met described ‘cruising’ as ‘fixing your boat in exotic locations’, and it was a deadly accurate observation). It’s the constant battle to keep your yacht shipshape, a considerable challenge when the sea is constantly doing its best to eat away at your pride and joy. Dave and Dorothy had their engine die on them, and by the time I left Tahiti the problem had graduated from a possible electrical fault in the inverter to a burnt-out alternator. Rob had to fix his broken anchor winch, a thankless task that required a whole day’s hacking around to botch a solution. Claw and Mary had to survive without their wind generator after it broke down, requiring a courier to take it to Hawaii to be mended. All along the quay yachts were having to stay longer than originally hoped due to ripped sails, dents in the hull, damaged equipment and, in one case, a badly broken leg. At least two yachts I saw had decided enough was enough, and were trying to sell their floating homes, with little success.

So next time you look at those beautiful pictures of yachts sitting in blue coral lagoons, think of the effort involved. A sailing holiday? That sounds like an oxymoron to me. I heard of an outfit that charged US$4000 for two weeks’ sailing experience, where you went out on a yacht and learned about sailing by actually doing it – all of it. The quaysiders’ view was that anyone who paid US$4000 for two weeks of having to wash up, cook, reef the main in high winds and pump out the bilges must be completely insane. I didn’t tell them that I considered anyone who would pay US$100,000 for a yacht in the first place completely insane too.

Leaving Zeke and Polynesia

Due to my unexpected departure, Rob had to find more crew, so Zeke became an interview zone for prospective sailors who had replied to the advert tacked on the bow (an advert noticed by plenty of people as we were tied to the yacht quay). Some were idiots, some were potentially good, and some were good choices, but every interview made me feel a little sad to be leaving as Rob reeled off the plans for the trip, and the places he was going on to visit: Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Vanuatu and the rest of the Polynesian pantheon. But it didn’t take much to realise that leaving the boat was still the best thing I’d done on the whole trip; sometimes you just have to accept that you don’t have sea legs and are never going to get them.

One thing I’ll never forget was the feeling of euphoria when I shook Rob’s hand and finally stepped off Zeke for the last time. No more swell! No more seasickness! No more sailing to contend with! I said goodbye to my newfound friends on the quay and hopped onto the airport bus; I was back on my own two feet again, with nobody to answer to or worry about, and I felt unshackled. As Tom Wolfe once wrote, you’re either on the bus or off the bus, and I was well and truly back on the bus.

[1] San Francisco might have flowers in its hair, but Tahiti has them in its hair, round its neck, on its clothes... everywhere. Never have I seen a people so happily obsessed with flowers, to the point of it being strange to see someone without a flower somewhere on their body. It makes a welcome change from drab pinstripe suits.

[2] This is a confusing issue. Many older women in Polynesia are huge, and wear these awful Mother Hubbard dresses that the missionaries brought in to cover up the previously naked natives. I had been told that Polynesian men like their women on the large side, and that being fat is regarded as a good thing, rather than the social stigma it is in the stick-thin fashion consciousness of the western world; this struck me as a particularly healthy attitude, as there’s nothing remotely attractive about anorexic models. There’s only one odd thing: Miss Tahiti is a gorgeous, slim girl, whom I was lucky enough to watch dancing at the craft show, and the girls who shake their hips at the dance contests are hardly what one would call overweight. Somewhere between young girl and old woman there occurs a metabolic change of immense proportions, literally, and it’s weird.

Bushwalking in Tahiti

Written: 19 July 1997

On a whim, I decided to spend the afternoon of July 19th trying to get to the houses above Tahiti, from where I imagined the view would be something special; the problem was, the only map we had of Tahiti was over ten years old, and it stopped short of what was obviously a relatively new housing development. This didn’t deter me, and after striking out from Papeete towards the interior, I discovered a road that I assumed would take me into the mountains. Of course, it did nothing of the sort, and instead it led up a valley, following the River Tipaerui up the Vallée Tipaerui, heading towards the mountains of the interior rather than the hills of the coast.

The road passed a huge industrial estate and eventually came to a little housing development, a terrace of scraggly little flats where a number of islanders lived in relatively poor surroundings, obviously a long way from prying tourists’ eyes. I wandered along the road, which soon came across a little building full of locals taking the opportunity of a sunny Saturday afternoon to play boules and get slaughtered on Hinano beer, the local brew. As I walked past, noticing that the road had by now petered away into a rough dirt track with a chain across to deter vehicles, a couple of the louder men yelled «Attention!» at me, gesturing up the road. When I asked them why I should be careful, they replied that a big serpent lived up that road, and that I should make sure it didn’t eat me. It would have been quite effective, except for the fact that the alcohol meant they couldn’t keep a straight face between them for more than five seconds, so I told them I’d watch out for the monster, and headed up the track.

At last, some real bushwalking! The track crossed the river a number of times, slowly becoming thinner and thinner and winding up an increasingly gorge-like valley, and I began to wonder where on earth it went. Right into the interior of Tahiti? Up Mt Aorai, the highest peak in Tahiti? Or did it go nowhere, just petering out?

After a fairly easy but humid walk, I reached the end at the bottom of a beautiful waterfall that had managed to carve an almost tubular niche in the valley wall, forming a deep pool at the bottom and a sheltered spot that would have been perfect for a picnic. The only drawback was the immense population of no-no flies (the rather colourful Tahitian name for sandflies) that smelt me coming and flew over to make friends, so after naming the falls Sandfly Falls for want of a better name – it didn’t even appear in the maps of the area – I ducked back down the track and headed downhill towards Papeete.

Passing the locals again, they asked me if I’d come across their serpent; one of them even did a fearsome impression of the monster said to inhabit the pool at the base of the waterfall, holding his arms up in the air, throwing back his head and roaring as his eyes rolled in his head. The performance was made all the more impressive by the fact that he had no front teeth, making his mouth look not unlike the fanged jaws of a monstrous snake.

I told them I’d managed to escape the clutches of their monster – at least, I think that’s what I said in my rusty French – and they laughed as I ambled back down to Papeete, with me wondering if the monster had perhaps left the waterfall and was now lurking in the bottles of beer they were necking like water. Aboriginal, Maori, Polynesian... the Europeans might have invaded and screwed up these cultures, but it’s alcohol that’s continuing the effect. No wonder they hide it from the tourists up dead-end valleys with serpents guarding the waterfalls.

Further Reading

This story is continued in another of my books, The Back of Beyond: Travels in Australia (also available for free from www.moxon.net/ebooks). If you enjoyed this book, you might like to know that there’s a whole series of free books like this available from the same source, covering 25 countries and six continents:

- The Back of Beyond: Travels in Australia

- Into the Deep Blue Sea: Travels in Belize

- A Town Full of Nothing to Do: Travels in Burkina Faso

- In Search of the Lost City: Travels in Colombia

- Tainted by Tourism: Travels in Costa Rica

- A Funny Sort of Socialism: Travels in Cuba

- Snow on the Sun Loungers: Travels in Cyprus

- Love at First Sight: Travels in El Salvador

- Paradise Has Teeth: Travels in French Polynesia

- A Million Mosquitoes Can’t Be Wrong: Travels in the Gambia

- The Road to Jesus: Travels in Ghana

- Stuck on the Gringo Trail: Travels in Guatemala

- Many Ways to Change Your Mind: Travels in India

- Hello Paul, What’s Your Name? Travels in Indonesia

- The Muddy Confluence: Travels in Malaysia

- The Lapping of the Dunes: Travels in Mali

- A World-Class Dive: Travels in Mexico

- Snaking Patterns of Sand: Travels in Morocco

- Roof of the World: Travels in Nepal

- God’s Own Country: Travels in New Zealand

- Poverty and Paradise: Travels in Nicaragua

- Alone on Two-Palm Island: Travels in Panama

- The Head and the Heart: Travels in Senegal

- Serious Fun: Travels in Singapore

- Melted Meccano: Travels in Thailand

If you know someone who might like any of my books, please pass them on; I make no money from this, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading my books and recommending them to their friends. If you’ve enjoyed reading my writing (or even if you haven’t) I’d be delighted if you could sign my Guestbook at www.moxon.net/guestbook – after all, it’s the feedback that makes it all worthwhile. Happy travels!

THE END

Table of Contents

Preface

Anatomy of a Yacht

Sailing to French Polynesia

The Strange World of Sailing

Gambier Islands

Gambier Islands (Mangareva)

The Sociability of Yachties

Cooking on Board

Rikitea Harbour

Gambier Islands (Southeast)

Gambier Islands (East)

Man vs Cyclone Kelly

Amanu

Amanu Street Scene

Makemo

Escape from the Yacht

Tahiti

Bushwalking in Tahiti

Further Reading

Table of Contents

Preface

Anatomy of a Yacht

Sailing to French Polynesia

The Strange World of Sailing

Gambier Islands

Gambier Islands (Mangareva)

The Sociability of Yachties

Cooking on Board

Rikitea Harbour

Gambier Islands (Southeast)

Gambier Islands (East)

Man vs Cyclone Kelly

Amanu

Amanu Street Scene

Makemo

Escape from the Yacht

Tahiti

Bushwalking in Tahiti

Further Reading