The lyric above is from Southern Cross, which references the constellation visible only in the southern hemisphere. Last night, we saw it for the first time.
Day Eleven
Bryan and I meditate – Transcendental Meditation, which one can allegedly practice anywhere, regardless of location or outside distraction. I’ve meditated under lots of different circumstances, in cars, on trains, airplanes. Yesterday I meditated on a boat motoring across the Pacific toward Bora Bora over 2.5-meter swells. These aren’t great swells, not like what they are expecting today, but you definitely feel them.
Mr. S, with his impeccable research and planning skills, arranged for us to take a private tour of Raiatea, the island considered the birthplace of Polynesian culture. Indeed, our concierge Hiro told us, Raiatea (roughly pronounced RAY-a TAY-a, though correctly it comprises five syllables) is called the Sacred Island, and it houses a vast UNESCO site called Taputapuātea.
On this excursion we would also visit the neighboring island of Taha’a, which is the Vanilla Island. This area is where the best and most pure vanilla in the world is grown.
We got there by boat, the O’hanalei, piloted by Teiva, with Ben, his first mate, and Teranji, our hostess. When we got on board we were given big, beautiful leis made from tiaré Tahiti, a type of gardenia that is exclusive to this part of the world.
Teranji is from Tahiti but lives now on Raiatea (which is the second largest of these islands). She told us that for years she’d only gone back to Tahiti when strictly necessary, to do errands, doctors’ appointments, paperwork, and so on, but that finally she had reason to stay for two weeks and she fell back in love with it. She drove to the mountains, looked down on the island and cried, realizing the beauty she’d taken for granted for so long. She equated Mo’orea with Saint Tropez, said that many wealthy Tahitians have second homes there, and everyone we spoke with yesterday spoke of that island with reverence. Bora Bora, she said, has its own laws. Indeed, a famous restaurant, Bloody Mary’s, which has been around almost 45 years, is under new ownership and will close this Sunday while the land around it is developed and turned into a hotel and villas. This would not happen in many other parts of these Leeward Islands. In fact, Teranji told us the story of the day she was there two years ago and saw some men sitting at the bar with an iPad showing mock-ups of different buildings – she learned that these were the new owners and developers making the plans that they will start implementing next week.
We spent most of the 90-minute ride up top where Teiva runs his boat with a combination of steering and automatic navigation. Teiva grew up in Raiatea; his father came here from Paris in 1969, met his mother, who is from here, and stayed. Teiva married a woman of Swiss descent whose family arrived when she was six months old. The refrain we keep hearing from people whose parents or grandparents (or who, themselves) came here from elsewhere is that once they arrived, they never looked back. Now Teiva owns and runs this boat which is named for his two daughters, O’hana and Analei.
This was a beautiful ride unlike any I’ve taken – I’ve not spent a lot of time on the water, and on this trip I’ve realized that I really love being on boats of all kinds – ferry, canoe, smallish whale-watching boat, and this one, which I guess is technically a yacht. We rode over swells much smaller than the ones on which I would later meditate, and in the distance we could see the basic outlines of the two islands we’d be visiting. I kept thinking about the snake that swallowed the elephant and then resembled a hat in The Little Prince.
As we drew closer, the texture and color and nuance of these islands came into view. Teiva told us that everyone he brings on this trip is astonished by how green these islands are and it’s true – they are incredibly lush, vibrant islands that have a lot of water within in rivers and streams, as well as significant rainfall.
Taha’a and Raiatea are five miles apart and share a lagoon. Raiatea is the metropolis, where the hospitals and colleges are, where people from Taha’a go to file their paperwork and run their errands. We arrived to Taha’a where we were greeted by Maeva, who would take us on a tour of her family’s pearl farm. Maeva’s (her name means Welcome in Tahitian) parents are from France and came to French Polynesia on a sailing excursion forty years ago—you know the rest. Now the family owns and operates a small pearl farm out of their home and property, the Champon Pearl Farm. The whole family is involved; Maeva’s brother is a diver and grafter, which are the people responsible for readying the oyster to produce the pearls.
I won’t go into extensive detail about the pearl cultivating process, but we learned some fascinating things. The Tahitian pearls are also called “black pearls,” though in fact their colors can vary greatly from black to these rich, jewel-tones greens and blues, to silvery pinks. The color varieties are the work of the black-lipped oysters native to this area. It takes 1.5 years from the time they start working with a single oyster until that oyster produces a pearl, and they can work with the same oyster up to five times, over a span of ten years. The life span of these oysters is thirty years. That merits an exclamation point. Thirty years!
After Maeva gave us a tour and we watched the grafter work (she works on up to 500 oysters a day, which is a lot but is very little compared to what the larger, more commercial oyster farms produce), we went into the house where they sell their jewelry. The pearls range in color, as I said, as well as shape and size, and the jewelry they create is beautiful.
Maeva drove us back to the boat and we traveled across the lagoon to Raiatea. This time we sat downstairs in the kitchen/dining area where Teranji had prepared us a snack – open-faced tea sandwiches of smoked trout and smoked tuna. As we pulled into the marina she went outside to help Ben, and Bryan and I collected our things. We went to open the door … and couldn’t. We gestured to the others but they were talking and laughing and didn’t notice us. We tried a few more times, turning the locks, pushing the door, pulling the door, sliding the door, nothing. By this point the gentleman who would be our tour guide for the afternoon had arrived and now they were all talking and laughing, the crew with their backs to us, our tour guide not yet having noticed us, and Bryan and I were in hysterics, trapped in the galley of this yacht. We had visions of their forgetting we were there and heading off to lunch and I wondered where the rest of the bread and smoked fish were. Finally our tour guide, Joe, spotted us and pointed. Teranji apologized for locking us in, and we were on our way.
Joe’s real name is Heinue, which means big crown, and he was wearing one made of ferns.
He explained that he wears one every day and that it symbolizes joy and being one with nature, and while he drove us around he pulled over several times to gather more ferns with which he made crowns for Bryan and me to wear.
On the seat next to him was a ukulele, which he played for us and insisted that we try, though neither of us play ukulele.
He is a treasure, has lived on the island his entire life and has vast knowledge of its history and deep appreciation for his ancestry. He spoke to us in fluent franglais, much of which I translated for Bryan, though the is getting very good at understanding French. I will tell you some of what we learned, some which we’d already had basic ideas about, other points on which we’d been misinformed. Know that, while he talked to us, he drove us around the island toward our lunch destination, pointing out the things that we passed—a taro plantation, trees of none (NO-nay) fruit, grapefruit, lemon, avocadoes, pineapple, bamboo, ginger, and these structures where they cultivate vanilla beans.
His tour was a combination of history lesson, agricultural insight, and personal anecdotes, with his stopping frequently at the side of the road to demonstrate how his ancestors used different plants and leaves, particularly the coconut palm, to make baskets, fans, plates, clothing, rope – he’d jump out with his scissors or his knife and hack away at a plant, deftly weaving the leaves and producing objects for us to take home.
He, like so many of the people we are meeting here, takes tremendous pride in his home and his ancestry. He would tell us later that Polynesians and the French that colonized their islands in the late 19th century have “a good relationship,” but that Polynesians do not consider themselves French – they speak the language, but they also speak their own and they have their very old tradition and history and culture, which is quite different, of course, from the French. “We just want to keep our own identities,” he said, then, “Look at me. Do I look French? I’m not.” This wasn’t said with anger or bitterness, it was said with fact. It was said after he’d shown us the sacred space, after we’d taken our shoes off and walked on his ancestral land, after he’d imparted so much wisdom to us that it will take a long time for all this knowledge to settle into our bones.
A few posts ago I mentioned that our tour guide in Mo’orea said that the original Polynesians came from South America. This seemed apocryphal then from a logistic point of view as well as one based on physical features. Joe told us that this is a theory started by a Norwegian historian in the mid-twentieth century, and that he believes it to be false. For one thing, he said, theirs is not a sailing culture, and so the odds of their reaching these lands in the era that they were first settled are slim.
We’ve learned of the Polynesian triangle, at the center of which lie these islands. The three points of the triangle are: Hawaii, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Rapa Nui (Easter Island).
This is where Maori culture was born, and this is where migration began toward these islands. As further evidence that Polynesian culture shares its DNA with these places, Joe pointed out the similarities in the relationship between man and nature, how the knowledge of his Polynesian ancestors came to be. His ancestors learned, he said, by sitting still, not chasing time, but observing the ocean, the horizon, the stars. Polynesian wisdom is a combination of astronomy, cosmology, meteorology. They learned by studying the power and direction of the wind, the trees, animal behavior.
The national sport here is paddling. Surfing was invented in Tahiti by a woman. Joe likes watching football (the global kind, not the American) and rugby, and he plays bass in a band. Marlon Brando’s Tahitian wife, Tarita, was his first cousin.
For lunch Joe drove us to Opoa Beach Hotel, where we had one of the best meals we’ve had on this trip: a salad of pineapple, tomato, and warm herbed goat cheese, then pistachio-crusted Mahi with coconut rice so decadent it was like risotto, and hibiscus-lychee iced tea.
Bryan and I are running out of adjectives. One the boat ride over I said that I was “stoked” to go snorkeling in the lagoon. He described the fish we had for lunch as “bonkers”. Also, he owns three pairs of Pago socks and wore one yesterday, so that our pup could be with us in spirit.
Joe picked us up after lunch to drive us to the sacred space. En route we passed a spot where they dry the shells of older coconuts (the brown ones), which they then export to Tahiti to make the oil that is used around the world.
We passed flowers that included hibiscus, bougainvillea, and the tiaré Tahiti, whose scent is in most of the lotions and hair products we find at the resorts. It’s a beautiful delicate floral.
We arrived at Taputapuātea, a protected seaside expanse described on Wikipedia as such: Marae Taputapuatea is a large marae complex at Opoa in Taputapuatea, on the south eastern coast of Raiatea. The site features a number of marae and other stone structures and was once considered the central temple and religious center of Eastern Polynesia.
This was built sometime around 1000 AD, then expanded upon, Joe estimates, around 1300.
He showed us the different marae, which are like the sacred platform we saw in the jungle of Mo’orea, but much larger. We saw the structure that was once the school, where the aforementioned astrology, cosmology, meteorology, and so on were taught.
We saw those used for ritual; here was where Polynesians would gather before sailing to pray to the gods for a safe and successful voyage, to pray for good navigation. These places were considered so profoundly sacred that every tree and plant that grows within these grounds and every animal that walked or flew past were considered sacred as well.
The stones that make up these structures are coral, from the sea, and basalt, from the mountains, emblematic of the melding of the different elements that Polynesians honor.
We saw the marae that contains the tall white rock on which the king would sit during ceremonies and political meetings.
We walked around the grounds, which were filled with holes created by the little crabs that populate the area. Joe pulled leaves from the trees and placed them near the holes, and we watched crabs emerge tentatively, grab the leaves, and scuttle back below ground. Before we left, he gave us a final, illustrated history/geography lesson about Polynesian migration, drawing upside down in the dirt with a stick.
He showed us his elaborate and beautiful tattoos that tell the story of his people’s past, and explained the origin of the word.
On our way back to the boat, he played us some of his music, Tahitian rap. At 4PM, we said goodbye, boarded the O’hanalei, and headed back across the ocean toward Bora Bora.
We arrived in time for sunset,
And then had dinner with the moon.
It would be impossible to adequately describe all that we learned and experienced yesterday, and so I will leave this as is and relish the memories.
At dinner, our server, Virginia, pointed out the Southern Cross.
She took a liking to Bryan and me, and told me to come find her today as she has a necklace for me. After a little while she explained it is a necklace she doesn’t like but she wants me to have. How do you say “regifting” in Tahitian?
firstsweetpang 