We Lose the Plot, or, Uturoa Lets Us Down

Being robbed in Moorea didn't really bother me that much.  Of course it was a bummer when it happened, and then it was a bit of a hassle to return to Tahiti for a new outboard.  But I mostly just saw it as the inevitable sort of thing that happens now and then when you're travelling.

What really got me down was accepting our bond back in New Zealand dollars when the bank at Uturoa was out of other foreign currencies.

I was picking up the thousands of dollars that we posted when we first entered French Polynesia three months ago.  And I got so steamed that the bank was out of both U.S. and Australian currency, and could only offer me Kiwi dollars, that I forgot that the same thing happened three years ago.  That time I merely took my Pacific Francs from the bank that held our bond and walked across the street to another bank to change them into Australian dollars.  But this time we'll end up exchanging our bond money three times - from US dollars to Pacific Francs when we posted the bond, from Pacific Francs to New Zealand dollars when we got the bond back, and then, once we reach Oz, finally from Kiwi to Australian dollars.  And of course each step of the way you lose hundreds of dollars in poor exchange rates...

So much of extended travel revolves around being frugal, and being savvy about staying away from the various spending traps that present themselves, that I felt really lame to have made this goof, and it took me a couple days to shake it off.

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And that, it turns out, was a bit of a harbinger for how Uturoa, the "big city" of Raiatea, would treat us.  The Shell station that used to offer water at the dock has locked its spigot, and wouldn't open it when we asked.  My polite "Parlez-vous anglais?" was met with sneers by the clerks at the hardware store.

After two or three negative experiences like this you start to feel like the whole town is against you.

There is an ebb and flow to really long travel - you hit the rough patches that make it feel like you're paying for the fantastic bits.  And, not surprisingly given that this great chapter in French Polynesia is drawing to a close, we've hit a strong ebb here in the leeward Societies, and spirits on board have been low in recent days.

Huahine, our first stop in the leeward Societies, was nice enough.  But I noticed that we weren't taking many pictures, which I think was a sign that we weren't really engaging with the place.  A French acquaintances told us how much he and his wife liked the island, and that they were planning on staying for a few months.  But our attention was already on the passage that was awaiting us after we took care of final errands in Raiatea, and we didn't really give Huahine a chance.

And Alisa, bless her, hadn't taken the robbery so well, and she was spending much of each night on deck, shining the spotlight towards suspicious sounds on shore, while I snored away in bed.

Then we got to Raiatea, and found that Uturoa wasn't as convenient a spot for taking care of final errands as we had remembered, and we hit a stretch of days where it was all we could do to take care of the boys and keep the boat going, so that we ended each day exhausted without having completed any of our pre-departure tasks, and then we really started to lose the plot on this whole exercise.  Why, we each wondered to ourselves, are we sailing across the Pacific with these two little boys?

Part of the trouble is the fragile, ad hoc nature of the communities that we inhabit.  During our three months in French Polynesia we got to know a lot of boats, and met some wonderful people.  But when we got to Raiatea, we were suddenly alone.  There weren't many travelling boats around so late in the season, and we didn't recognize anyone we knew.  The dock in Uturoa was deserted, and I couldn't help looking at it and remembering how vibrant it had been three years ago, with our friends on Macy and Hannah tied up next to us, and that great guy from New Jersey who was sailing an ancient 35-footer from Mexico to New Zealand as part of his plan of travelling around the world without getting on an airplane.  Now it was just us, and our envelope containing four thousand New Zealand dollars, and the sneering clerks at the magasins, and our two needy boys.

Thieving Locals

So, long story short, we were robbed in Moorea.

At one in the morning at least two people paddled up to Galactic in outrigger canoes.  They took Eric's swim diaper, rashy and board shorts from the lifeline where they were drying.  They took our fishing rod and they cut the American flag off of our stern rail.

And they took our outboard right off the inflatable, which had been hanging out of the water on the spinnaker halyard.

And after that, brazen scoundrels that they were, they paddled over to Pacific Bliss, anchored behind us, and took a camera and the family's shoes and snorkelling gear from the cockpit.  Then they tried to jimmy the lock on Pacific Bliss's outboard and woke Colin in the process.  Nonplussed to find two men with t-shirts wrapped around their heads in the process of robbing him, Colin screamed loud enough to wake us up.

He and I gave sleepy chase, but the rascals got away.

So a trip back to Papeete to buy a new outboard was in the cards.  We returned to the crowded anchorage at Maeva beach.

I started the hot and dusty work of venturing into town to check out prices at the various outboard shops, and researching the mysterious procedure for claiming back the tax on the purchase, our right as a yacht in transit, and then entering the bureaucratic maze to actually get the tax back.

We really weren't all that keen to be back in Tahiti.  But, as always, there were compensations to make up for the shortcomings of the place.  For one thing, we were anchored right next to Silver Lining, the only other Noble 451 ever built.  She's the staysail schooner on the right, and that's Galactic on the left.

We had a great time meeting her convivial crew and comparing notes on the boat.  Frank and Margo have gotten a lot of Pacific miles out of Silver Lining over the last 18 months, including two visits to the Austral Islands, and it was great to see that our sister ship had been such an able travelling boat for them.

And we had the company of our good mates on Pacific Bliss, who came to Tahiti to take care of various chores before they head back east to the Tuamotus and Marquesas.

Who wouldn't enjoy the company of this lot?

Elias loved playing with their kids.  He had his first-ever sleep over on their boat, and in return played host for a sleepover for the first time himself.

We ended up visiting with these guys for weeks - in Tahanea, Moorea and Tahiti.  When we finally said goodbye to them, Elias cried and cried and cried.  Sigh - this is a new dynamic for our travelling life, watching our growing boy coming to grips with the transience of friendship.  He got over it quickly, but the poor little guy doesn't have the ability to hold himself back the way we adults do.  Towards the end of our visit, Cosmo and Zinnia were his best mates in the whole world, which makes for quite a difficult farewell.

So now Alisa has cried when saying goodbye to Yolene in Nuku Hiva, and Elias has cried when saying goodbye to Pacific Bliss in Tahiti.  I guess my turn is next.

The overnight passage to Huahine, in the leeward Society Islands, gave us the traveller's great gift of a change of scene.

This is the view of Huahine that greeted us at sunrise.

And that's where we are now.

The 100-Franc View

Well, there's French Polynesia.

And then there's Tahiti.

Tahiti felt a little grimier to us this time around, a bit more concrete jungle than we remembered.  Everywhere you looked was the scowling embodiment of urban dislocation in a formerly rural people.

But we just concentrated on getting our business done, on running our errands that are only possible in a city and then moving on.

We celebrated a birthday in Tahiti.

And had lunch at the market.

And we provisioned the barky.

And every day ended with the sun setting behind Moorea.

We realized that we weren't really giving Tahiti a chance.  We were just hanging out at the Maeva Beach anchorage with the full yachtie scrum, and running our errands in Papeete.  But who has time to explore the delightful corners of Tahiti that so rarely get visited by yachts?  We've still got an ocean to cross!

After we had all of our business done for keeping Galactic going, we started looking for a spot where I could complete some more science work.  We needed wi-fi, a beach, and a bucolic setting, roughly in that order.

Based on the recommendation of some French yachties who have been here for a while, we went to Opunohu Bay in Moorea.

Not bad, we figured!  It even featured the view from the 100-franc coin.  Compare the mountain in the two pics...

Now, Moorea is firmly not a Galactic kind of place.  Too many resorts, not a lot of delight and innocence for the casual traveller, that kind of thing.  But for a spell of work, and for keeping the boys happy, it would do just fine.

It helped that our good mates on Pacific Bliss arrived to keep us company.

We could appreciate Moorea a bit more through the eyes of Elias and the kids on Pac. Bliss.  For instance, we have always mentally rolled our eyes when yachties tell us about the great spot in Moorea where the resort staff feeds the rays and sharks so you can pet them.  But the kids loved it - that's Elias in the foreground below, and a passel of black-tipped reef sharks in the background.

So we settled in for a good productive stay, enlivened by the company of friends.  Once my work was accomplished, we'd push off for the leeward Societies, as we continued to march west, west, forever west.

But then, one night, everything changed!