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< September/October 2003
	Destinations
Tahitian Blues Looking for love in the Tahitian isles Frederick Reimers

From the seat of a kayak, just looking at the color of Tahiti’s sea can occupy you all day. You can’t write about Tahiti and fail to mention the colors. The ocean runs from green to white to a kaleidoscope of blues, most notably the electric blue that seems so impossible in nature. It’s an exercise in perception; your eye travels the bands of color, trying to determine where one stops and the next starts, but always centers on the electric: "How can it be that blue?" And again, even a week later: "How can it be that blue?"

The island’s original name is Tahiti-nui-I-te-vai-uri-rau, "Great Tahiti of the many colored waters." Though it proved too tongue-twisting for most visitors, its meaning didn’t. In my absorption with the blues, I felt my preoccupations fall away as I paddled, and a curious sensation of lightness.

My musings were broken by Olaf, who paddled up beside Frank and I. "Frank, we must get this lad a vahine," Olaf boomed in his imperial Danish accent. "That’s the way to guarantee he writes a favorable article on our expedition. After all," he added, pointing to the empty spot in front of him, "we have an extra seat in the kayaks."

Vahine is the Tahitian word for woman. And just like its colors, you can’t write about Tahiti without mentioning its women—especially the legendary concubines they made for foreigners. It’s not like I was going sea kayaking in Tahiti to find a winsome Polynesian lover, but now that I was here, it seemed like it might just happen. While Tahiti’s history is a litany of scrappy white men bedding tropical goddesses, to me wilderness paddling trips have always been about spending nights curled up solo in the sleeping bag ruminating on past romantic near-misses and plotting future possibilities. Romantic purgatory. But if there was any

place on Earth to break the pattern, it was Tahiti.

The legend of Tahitian promiscuity began in 1767 when the British ship Dolphin dropped anchor looking for water and fresh food to stave off the scurvy and rickets running roughshod through the crew. As the first Europeans to visit Tahiti, the sailors were amazed to see the women paddle out to their ship and send out the clearest of invitations by performing, as put by one crew member, "every lewd action they could think of." It was no tease. The women threw themselves upon the men day after day, apparently to the complete satisfaction of Tahiti’s menfolk. The sailors gave their lovers nails from the ship, which the Tahitians bent into highly-prized fishhooks. Eventually the Brits pried so much metal from the Dolphin that the ship began to fall apart.

Tahiti’s sexual legend grew with each subsequent ship’s call over the next century, astonishing the prudish English explorer Captain Cooke and literary French commander Louis-Antoine de Bougainville. The capers were also at least partly responsible for the infamous mutiny on the Bounty as the crew, who had spent too much time ashore—many of them taking wives—balked at returning to sea with Captain Bligh. Finally, the legend was rounded out by the experiences of the 19th century French master Gauguin, who captured Tahiti’s mood, and the form of his teenaged lover, in his famous paintings.

Even in the 21st century, there seemed to be hope for a pale skinny whip like me. I discovered that Frank Murphy, our swarthy red-bearded co-guide from California, had himself married a Tahitian. He and Olaf Malver, the expedition’s leader, openly discussed my prospects. "Well," mused Frank. "There is a gal I know who might be interested in tagging along as a cook. But she only wears thong bikinis."

The discussion of my vahine was interrupted by the arrival of our fellow expedition members. Dave Landes, Karen Oatey and John and Leigh McAdam paddled up in their doubles. The couples, veterans of paddling trips to Baja, cycling expeditions in Portugal and helicopter skiing in British Columbia, are typical of the clientele of Explorer’s Corner—the Berkely, Calif.-based company that organized our expedition—folks easily capable of completing an expedition like this on their own, but who simply preferred to have someone else work out the details.

We aimed to circumnavigate Rangiroa, an island two days sail northeast of Tahiti. Except that Rangiroa is actually an 50-mile-long atoll, a string of 240 coral islet (or motu) arrayed around a sheltered lagoon (from the air, Rangiroa resembles an emerald necklace, draped casually atop a dresser), so we would actually be paddling along the inner shore of the island. Our plan was to travel clockwise around the atoll, stopping each night on a new palm-studded tropical island. It was an expedition of exquisite design.

The sky was an armada of clouds. They tracked across the sea in a search for land to crowd and siege with rain. But the host of high flying nimbus hardly noticed our strand of palms and swept on. We were paddling along the north shore of Rangiroa a few days later with the blue expanse of the lagoon to our right and a curtain of green palms on our left. The far shore of the chain was still invisible over the horizon. Through the breaks between motu, the swell of the open ocean broke against the reef in a flash of white foam. "We’re as much at sea as we can be and still be on land," Frank said from the stern of the kayak. Frank’s French-accented, thong-wearing beauty hadn’t materialized, so I had to content myself with his South Seas lessons. "We’re pretty exposed out here."

The inhabitants of Rangiroa have had it good—plenty of fish, breadfruit and coconuts to eat, and a clothing-prohibitive, 80-degree, climate year-round. It’s easy street, that is, unless a typhoon rolls through. With the highest point of land on Rangiroa being a forest-reclaimed dune about 12 feet above sea level, the atoll has been routinely steamrolled by swells that can reach 30 feet. Frank said that the traditional solution to such a storm is to climb the highest palm tree, tie oneself to the top and ride it out on a tree bent nearly to the wave tops. Fortunately for us in our tiny red craft, the only weather we ran afoul of was an eight-hour drizzle our first day.

Frank also explained how the atoll was formed. Rangiroa was once a volcanic island, a la Hawaii. As the island aged, a coral reef encircled its steep green flanks. Eventually the mountains eroded completely away, leaving only the sand-bottomed lagoon and the living, thriving reef. Meanwhile, storms deposited sand on the reef, coconuts washed ashore and birds dropped seeds on the oblong ring. Plants grew, soil formed and birds nested.

We lapsed into the common silence of paddling. The frigatebirds, their swollen throats resembling puffy English aristocrats, wheeled and glided lazily overhead. The only sounds were the splash of paddle strokes and the lapping of the hull against the small chopped waves. My thoughts turned inward. Paddling is the rhythm of introspection—our cadence the exact rate at which thoughts naturally arise in an unharried mind. The past surfaced: lists of favorite destinations, lists of past lovers; then plans: the career path, friendships to develop, relationships to mend, all couched in the suspense of the world’s evolution in your absence. It seemed appropriate in Tahiti. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? is the title of Gauguin’s most famous painting from his Tahitian period, an epic canvas of half-naked women in attitudes both light and dark. Even a sun-drenched paradise like Tahiti must come to terms with reality.

Our reality was that it was blazing hot. To protect my pale skin I wore my full nerd suit—a white long-sleeve shirt, white long pants and a big sun hat. I felt wan and anemic, like an Englishman on safari sweating away in his khaki and pith helmet while the natives saunter by bare headed and free. I trailed my hand in the cool water, harvesting the relief. "Shouldn’t we take a break?" I wondered aloud, and before anyone could answer I rolled overboard to float alongside the kayak, my nerd suit billowing around me.

"You know," said Frank, floating on the other side of the boat. "There is another potential vahine."

"Are you trying to fix me up with your stepdaughter?" I asked.

"No, that is taboo," he laughed, referencing the Tahitian-originated word for forbidden. "But there is a young gal who lives with her parents at the end of the atoll. They make shell jewelry. We’ll be there in a few days. We could drop you off."

I imagined myself living on the private island; lying in a hammock with my willowy Tahitian sprite; writing classic novels in longhand by morning, paddling my outrigger canoe and spearfishing in the afternoon—by now buff and bronzed from a life on the sea. The children have green eyes and skin the color of café au lait.

"We’ll see," I said.

The coral head rose from the sea floor like an enormous brain. I snorkeled awkwardly above it, trying to come to grips with the strange, unsettling sensation of things happening underneath me—it seemed to awaken some instinctual prey vigilance, like the watchfulness of deer in a field. Tropical fish skipped over the coral like yellow leaves blown along the sidewalk. Others sailed in a prism-shaped school, flashed and turned in unison to avoid some perceived threat. Then something caught my eye. Thirty feet down on the bottom was a human-shaped shadow in the murk, or was it? I looked twice, unsure, and suddenly there was a flicker and Ugo’s spear punctured a fish. He rose into the light, dive mask-first, the thrashing fish trailing on his line. He tossed it into the plastic bin that Dave was trailing behind him, a place to keep the gasping, bleeding fish so as not to attract the sharks.

Ugo seemed half shark himself. A half Polynesian, half French native of Tahiti and resident of Rangiroa, Ugo Angely was our local guide, chef and primary provider. We generally paddled all morning and then, during the hottest part of the day, snorkeled and gathered dinner. One day we dug clams off the reef, which he cubed and marinated with lime, onions and garlic and served on the half shell. Another day, to add a little heft to the marinara sauce, he gathered snails no one else would have trusted him or herself to pick. But mostly we spearfished, taking turns stalking the wary grouper, sea bass and unicornfish, which Ugo grilled, fried or made into ceviche. If it weren’t for Ugo’s hunting prowess, we’d have eaten a lot of burritos. He was just as comfortable below the water as above it, and with his long diving fins, glided over the reef as easily as the sharks that were constantly on patrol.

The sharks we saw were primarily black-tipped reef sharks, harmless (so we were told) shallow-water sharks, anywhere from one to five feet long. They cruised the coral like gangsters in finned Cadillacs, long, slow and lethal. But the blacktips are scavengers only, virtually incapable of hunting healthy fish. Cleaning our dinner catch in the evenings, we’d throw the refuse into the shallows off shore, and 10 minutes later, drawn by the smell of blood, the dorsal fins would arrive. Apparently, the only attacks on humans have occurred when spearfishermen kept their bleeding prey strung to their belts.

So it was with moderate confidence that the group submitted to Ugo’s shark show. "Eeet is verry safe," he said in his thick French accent, his eyes open wide. "Eeets true! Dees sharks won’t eet peeple. Only feesh. Eeets true!" He had us put on dive masks and slide into the water, clutching one side of the anchor line like tourists looking into the polar bear pen at the zoo. "You must stay on zat side. Stay verry close." Ugo wanted us shoulder to shoulder so the sharks wouldn’t swim between us (we’d later find out why). Then he threw the chum—the bucket of fish guts he’d saved for two days. The dozens of sharks circling nearby—probably pre-baited—streamed in, and the water four feet from our faces was a knot of boiling sharks. Their dim, beady eyes showed no interest in us, instead vacuuming chunks of fish offal from the water. But each time one flashed out of the roiling mass toward us, pursuing a stray morsel, I felt a rushing in my ears.

Once the chum was gone and the sharks had drifted off we climbed aboard Ugo’s powerboat. We laughed about how Dave and John had suddenly felt themselves thrust forward over the rope by a hand on their shoulders, pushed ahead by their bug-eyed wives. And it was only then that Ugo told us about the last time he’d done the shark show. He’d ferried a group of Japanese tourists out to the spot for the day, and once they’d climbed from the water he noticed one man clutching his ear. In typical Japanese modesty, the man insisted, through expressions and gestures, that it was fine. But when Ugo examined the ear he saw a bright red rivulet of blood streaming from a black tip’s bite.

We’d paddled, snorkeled, fished and drank rum from coconuts. My Tahitian experience was now complete, except for one thing: the vahine. Paddling toward the island Frank had spoken of, I wondered how the courtship might be affected. Clearly, long gone in Tahiti were the days of instantaneous, all-comers, free love on the beach—two centuries of missionary work had seen to that. I imagined instead a casual conference under the palms—from over her father’s shoulder the young beauty fixing me with a coquettish smile (as on the Tahitian tourism brochures) and then glancing shyly downward. It wasn’t clear to me how we’d get from there to our Blue Lagoon idyll, but I was ready for the adventure. As a last-second thought, I’d removed my nerd suit, preferring to appear less cloistered.

"There it is," said Frank, pointing to a pair of huts on stilts in the lagoon. On shore, behind them we could see a few palm-mat-walled houses. As soon as we stepped out of the boats, my visions of paradise began eroding. We waded through soup-hot, ankle-deep water toward shore. A black dog rushed out into the flats and barked at us the whole way in. Smoke poured from palm fires in 50-gallon drums on the beach. "To keep away mosquitoes," said Ugo. "Very bad here." It was definitely the worst spot on Rangiroa, not an idyllic paradise.

"Aah, there she is," said Olaf, clapping me on the back.

"Which one?" I said. The three people who appeared from the huts were virtually indistinguishable in age or gender, each a doughy 250 pounds or so.

"Why, the young one, of course," said Frank, grinning. "Don’t be shy."

But I was, studiously hanging in the back of the group as Ugo and Frank spoke with our hosts in French. Fortunately, I couldn’t understand a word, so just smiled glassily throughout, even when my name was mentioned and everyone took a minute to stare at me while I smiled back. My visions of jumping ship on the expedition and my rat-race lifestyle, enacting my own mutiny of sorts, drifted away with the palm smoke. I congratulated myself on my choice of learning Spanish in school instead of French, and wandered off to check out yet another shade of blue in the water.