Mona Tapas

There's this new institution in Hobart - Mona, the Museum of Old and New Art. 

Totally remarkable place, in a very Tasmanian way.  To begin with, it is, as far as I can figure, completely self-financed by a professional gambler from the daggy end of Hobart, and the permanent collection is, again, as far as I can figure, entirely his personal collection.

Just went by this week (a Tasmanian driver's license gets you in for free), and got a wonderful surprise, a jaw-dropping surprise.

The current special exhibit features the tapas collection from the Tasmania Museum of Natural History and Art.  This is a very old institution in Hobart, and it turns out that it possesses an incredible collection of tapas from various corners of the South Pacific.  The collection has apparently never before been put on display all at once like this because of the shortage of space in the older museum.

Tapa is cloth made from bark, typically from the mulberry tree, that has served a variety of utilitarian and ritual uses in various Polynesian and Melanesian cultures.  Some of the pieces in this collection are contemporary, but a number were collected in the 19th century.  And they're stunning - they're huge, and beautiful.

I reckon that's one of the joys of travel, the connection that you develop with random art forms.  I'm still enchanted by the sound of the oud, 16 years after I travelled in Yemen.  And, if you've sailed around in the South Pacific, you can't help but spend an hour in a roomful of tapas every time you run across one...
 

Futuna tapa - known for its intricate design, and particularly close to our hearts.

The exhibit runs through April 2013.

Futuna Is

Well, if you'll indulge me, I'll backtrack a bit to Futuna, which was the starting point of our 18-day sail to Bundaberg.

Futuna is...

...the kind of place where you go to check in with Customs, and come away with the lei that the Customs official had been wearing.  This has to sum up everything that I love about Polynesia - it's the place where strangers give you flowers.

Futuna was Alisa's very favorite stop on the whole crossing.  It's a little French dependency northeast of Fiji that gets only about 25 yachts a year, and almost no non-yacht tourists.  People were incredibly friendly and helpful and eager to interact with us.

By the time we reached Futuna we were starting to get a little dazed from all the travel we've crammed into the last six months, and our photography suffered from the travel fatigue.

 But I did get a pic of Elias in the back of a pickup on a hitchhiking foray around the island.  We're going so fast, he said.

Futuna is at 14° South, and I found the heat to be a bit insufferable - check out my sweat-soaked t-shirt.


Lucklily, we could swim off the boat every day.

Elias discovered the joys of jumping off the jupe.

And, as always, we had lots of chores to attend to.

I hauled water.

And we made a new cage to keep the escape artist safely in his bunk at night.

We pulled the jib down on deck for a bit of sewing.

And Alisa did some laundry.

With all that to take care of, it's not surprising that I never got around to drinking kava with the men.

Hopefully we'll go back some day when we have a little more time...

The end.

Passage to Alofi

Last night, after the kids were asleep, we finally had Galactic ready to go. Half of the main anchor chain had been pulled by hand, the stern anchor had been pulled and put away, the sail cover was off, the awning was down, Smooches the inflatable was deflated and lashed into place, Little Dipper the hard dinghy was secured forward of the mast, water had been hauled from shore, the coconuts and bananas and diaper buckets and water jugs and solar shower were lashed on deck, the jib had been patched, rust spots on the hull given a little attention, the prop cleaned of barnacles, the zincs scrubbed off, ditto the rudder and waterline, the batteries checked, the rudder had been connected to the grounding system, the cracked bulkhead where the windvane lines attach had been strengthened, and a new lee cloth / sleeping cage had been installed for Eric.

Once the kids were asleep, and all this was ready, we agreed that we had no energy whatsoever left for sailing, and settled instead for a glass of white wine in the cockpit and an early night. I checked the weather before turning in and was interested to see a big zone of disturbance appearing in the 72 hour forecast, right in our path.

In the morning I checked the weather again. The front that has been propagating across the South Pacific was about 24 hours away from us. It would bring good sailing winds, but the updated forecast now showed disturbances behind the front both 48 and 72 hours out. So, in spite of the excitement that has been building over the idea of actually setting off on our last leg to Australia, we decided to just make the six-mile passage to Alofi, the other Island in the Iles de Horne group, where we could drop the pick in a more secure anchorage and give the weather a day or two to develop.

So that's what we did.

Alisa and I had each taken a quarter of a sturgeron, that wonder seasickness drug much favored by the in-the-know yachtie, before we checked the weather and decided to delay the start of our long trip. And that ended up providing me with a very informative unplanned experiment. The sturgeron made me feel awful. My eyeballs ached, my heart fluttered, and after we had moved to the new anchorage I spent most of the day napping. If we had been at sea I would have thought I was seasick, but in fact it was the seasickness medication that was causing it all. So no more of that stuff for me.

Aside from napping, we passed the day by swimming off the jupe with Elias, who executes a mean cannonball from the top of the swim ladder, and by filling the kiddie pool in the cockpit for Eric. (Futuna and Alofi have been desperately hot - I all too literally leave little pools of sweat everywhere that I go down below.) And we've watched the clouds building in the west as the front approaches. And now I'm going to check the weather again to see when we might get going.

If we're here another day the dinghy will have to go into the water - there is a sandy beach by the anchorage and a little village just inshore of the reef where nobody lives anymore, but that is visited daily by people from Futuna who keep gardens here. It all looks wonderful.

Futuna Delights

Futuna is the kind of place where:

You go spearfishing with the gendarme two days before you complete entry formalities...with the same gendarme.

Drivers on the single road around the coast screech to a halt the moment you stick out your thumb. If you even look at a driver quizzically, they are likely to stop a hundred meters down the road and turn around to find out if you need anything. If you aren't at all sure where you are going, they offer to drive until you recognize your destination.

Everyone wears elaborate flower necklaces. The first day that you see everyone wearing flowers, you ask someone if a special event of some sort is going on. They answer "no", explain that the flowers are an everyday thing, and then take the flowers from around their neck and put them on you.

Futuna, in other words, is unique in all the world.

At first, given the reputation of this place for being innocent of the yachtie crowds, we were a bit surprised to find ourselves sharing little Sigave Harbor with three other yachts. But even that was a pleasant experience, as with "only" four yachts here people didn't segregate into national groups the way they tend to in the more popular ports.

As always, we've spent a big chunk of our five days here taking care of the boat and shepherding the boys through the minute-to-minute of their routine, so our time for Getting Down With the People has been limited. But the experiences we have had have been uniformly great. This is a place where Polynesian generosity has not been overwhelmed by a deluge of visitors from the outside world.

And now, Futuna is being added to the list of wonderful places where we haven't had enough time. We have our outward clearance from Customs, and it lists Bundaberg, Australia as our next port.