Pick One

Five and a half months - it's been a very very good run in French Polynesia.

Especially considering that we're here on three month visas.

Yesterday, walking home from the an internet session at the post, I saw one of those flower trees that you see everywhere in Polynesia.  Are they tiare?  I think so, but I dunno.  Botany isn't my strength.

I did something that I've never done before.  I picked one and tucked it behind my ear and strolled on down the street, looking fine, I'm sure.

My shorthand description of Polynesia has always been that it is the place where strangers give you flowers.  But I figured, why wait for someone else to do the giving?  When's the next time that I'm going to be in a place where I can wear a flower behind my ear?

So long to all this

Elias and I have had our last snorkel for the season.  We identified three new-to-us species from the pictures that we took - an ID session afterwards is a part of our routine.

What a pleasure, snorkeling with him.  I suppose there's no one who's so comfortable to do something fun with as your eight-year-old son.  May it ever be thus.

Parrot fish are our bane.  How could we not be able to
identify this fish?  It seems like it should be so obvious

For all the talk of the Gambier as being "special", Alisa and Elias went into the village today in search of local fruit, and were floored by the response they got.  A shop owner buried them in gifts of fruit and veg and fresh eggs, just because.

Polynesia never fails to overwhelm.

They'll be treasures at sea - and there were bananas, too

So, yes, as you have no doubt guessed, the weather is looking very good to leave for Chile in a few days, and we're on our final countdown.  I have a painful ear infection and am a bit swamped with finishing science commitments via the very poor internet here, but I'm sure it will all come together, just as it always does.

And, in the midst of our countdown, Alisa took the time to cook a proper Thanksgiving meal for ourselves and our new mates on Windora, who are also heading for Valdivia.  It's not something that I would do on my own, to have people over for a holiday meal a couple days before a three+ week passage.  But we all had a great time - Alisa is good at making it happen.

Alisa can do a holiday justice

And, that's us.  I've got to get some sleep.

The things we've done in these five and a half months - they'll give us memories for a lifetime.

Special

We came to the Gambier expecting nothing transcendent.  For months we had been hearing the same thing from people in the position to know – most notably a couple of public health nurses who work all over French Polynesia – that the people of Mangareva, the main island in the Gambier, are "special".

"Special" sounded pretty good.  Until out informants told us that they meant "special" as in especially difficult.

There are introduced berries on Mangareva.  You can tell
Elias is really an Alaskan kid by how excited he gets
about picking them

Travel, to us, means getting down with the local people to whatever extent our language skills and stamina might allow.  So a place like the Gambier (that's GAM-bee-EHH, all you American and Australian mononglot apes) where the Polynesian magic is supposed to be long since erased – by tourism, by the once-booming culture of black pearls, by too many yachts, by whatever – we naturally look on a place like that as a stepping stone to somewhere else.

One day's haul

And the pie his mom baked

But, it always works out this way.  If we come somewhere expecting little, we find a lot to like.

I want to reach to the hackneyed language that sports enthusiasts use to describe the latest 17-yr old phenom - the Gambier is a incredible physical specimen.  It is a wonderful example of the remote tropical island – a high volcanic island well on its way to becoming an atoll.  High mountains scattered here and there and surrounded by a mostly-submerged reef. 

There are heaps of anchorages to explore, which is a real change after being tied to the quai in Rapa.  There are tracks up the hills.  And the hills are just the right scale – steep and impressive-looking from the deck of your boat, but small enough for an eight-year-old to happily tramp to the top of.

Just the right scale

After all the social interaction in Ra'ivavae and Rapa we're happy to tend our own garden for a bit, and we've made precious little attempt to get down with the locals.  But there is a nice company of like-minded sailors here – our old friends on Hera, a delightful Kiwi couple who are also heading to Valdivia, and with whom we have a ton of friends in common, and a smattering of French boats that are mostly taking a break – for months or for years – from the peripatetic life.

It'll do for us.

Another milestone - the boys' first unaccompanied dinghy
trip together.

One eye on the passage ahead - what's left in those
food lockers, anyway?

And, meanwhile, having another Chile-bound boat for company has brought our excitement at this next grand chapter to a boil.

The weather is looking great for the passage.  The southeast Pacific high looks to be very well set up, which has established a huge area of counter-clockwise winds over this part of the world.  All we have to do is to get a thousand nautical miles – in round numbers – south of here, and then we should have beautiful westerlies to carry us on our way.

The trick, of course, is getting across those thousand miles, many of them with no wind at all…

Goodbye

Back row, l-r: Arnold, Michel Jr., Johnny.  Middle row: Lucie, Alisa,
Jackye, Jane, Michel Sr.  Front row: Elias, Arnold Jr. (Manu!), Eric, Hanavae (sp!)

This is our third trip across the Pacific, and we have been lucky enough to visit many islands in Polynesia.

Rapa made us feel like we were seeing Polynesia for the first time.  Or like we were finally seeing the real thing.

I have a lot more to say about Rapa.  But a blog is a document that lives in the present, and now that we are happily in the Gambier, events will soon overtake Rapa memories in this space.

The va'a paddle.  Is regret a particularly Polynesian emotion?

Before that happens, though, I've got a few more good Rapa posts in me – starting at the end, with our goodbye.

A cross-cultural disconnect in the middle of it all.  Alisa to Jackye (having
scrubbed out our takeaway food containers from the day before so they
could be re-used, just as American yachties do: "Here, can you use these?"
Jackye: "Why are you giving these to me?"

Elias getting in one last session on the fish book with Johnny.

The boys in their hats, getting down
with some Rapan nectarines

We have left hundreds of places behind over the last seven years, and it's enough of a circus to organize crew and boat to go to sea without some landlubbers staring down from the dock, waiting to wave goodbye.  Or worse yet, trying to help.  So our normal routine is to say our brief farewells ashore the day before we leave, and then to slink away whenever we finally get ready.

That is not an option in Rapa.  That is clearly a place where good manners demand that friends be offered the chance to say bon voyage as you depart.  And so, I now realize, it's probably good manners to do the same everywhere in Polynesia.

So we spread the word that we were leaving at 0600 the next day.

Here, and below: previous scenes.  Arnold Jr. (Manu!), Eric
and Lucie after an impromptu fishing session on the quai

And Arnold showing me some chops on the kamaka

Johnny Faraire was the first to show up – and he handed me the va'a paddle I had been using on the island as a farewell gift.  Which floored me, although he had given me warning a couple days earlier that he would do that.

I had some tuna hooks for him.  But just now, as I am writing this, I wish I had thought, in that electric moment of leaving, to go back to the stern rail where our trolling rod was lashed in place for going to sea, and handed that to him. 

That would have been the Polynesian thing to do.

But, alas, we live in the moment, and have to live with the decisions we make on the fly.

Jackye, Jane and Alisa on our last full day in Rapa, in the community hall
where we had previously attended crowded, happy scenes of celebration.
Just us this last time, and we were there because...

Jane and Michel were shouting us lunch.  Us and the kids and Jane, Michel,
Jackye and Johnny sat down at this private table, laid with food that women
were making for takeaway sale in the village.  Poisson cru, taro, a delicious dish
of raw tuna and fermented coconut that I never learned the name for,
chow mein, fried chicken, bread.  Etc., etc.!

Elias, getting down with the local Fanta

Jackye and Jane brought down Rurutu-style hats for the boys, and necklaces for all of us.  Everyone had a cup of coffee on Galactic.

I had been concerned that we had not managed to tell Arnold and Lucie that we were leaving.  Johnny managed to come up with their phone number and, faster than you might believe possible, Arnold and Lucie and Arnold Junior (Manu!) were at the boat, still looking very sleepy.

Arnold gave me a necklace and leaned in for a whiskery buss.  Which gave me the key for how to comport myself with Johnny and Michel Senior. 

It was the peak Gallic moment of my life.

After kisses and nanas all around, it was time for us to shove off.  We got the main up, then made a pass by the dock for a final wave, and saw that two of Elias' mates from many afternoon plays on the quai had come out with their mom to wave.

And then we sailed away from Rapa, most likely forever.

Final waves

And, so...it all means what, exactly?

Well, I can only think that Rapa resonated so strongly with us because the people there showed us the living embodiment of an approach to life that so many Westerners aspire to.

Things that Westerners pay lip service to - like living in the moment, and being generous, and not being shackled to a life that serves material possession - are everywhere in evidence in Rapa.

As always with my travel interactions, I'm keen not to see these people as abstract utopian beings.  They're complex people, with their faults and their talents, just like us.  Shortly before we arrived in Rapa, there was the most horrible tragedy you could imagine, involving sudden death and some of the more hopeless themes of human existence.  Rapa is very much a place of the real world.

But people on Rapa treated us - strangers who could not speak with most of them - with an incredible grace.  And that welcome made it hard for us, the always-a-little-confused visitors, not to see Rapa as this incredible remote bit of the world where people have learned to lead life in a way that's just a little bit more beautiful than what people have struck on in other places.

I suppose that's what's kept us coming back to Polynesia over and over again.

For some reason Alisa and I found this picture so funny.  Me, sailing away
from Rapa, wondering what the hell just happened

Va'a

Here, and below - who's paddling in the #5 spot?  Could it be?

Va'a ono

Va'a are the outrigger canoes that you see everywhere in French Polynesia.

Va'a hoe

I don't like the phrase "bucket list" - it implies such an acquisitive attitude towards experience, to go along with everything else that is acquisitive about our culture.

But for the longest time I have been keen to try paddling a va'a.  They're so sleek and fast and such a part of the culture here.

So, mark up one more to Rapa.  Our friend Johnny - Tihoni Faraire, to use his Rapa name - was quite the paddler as a young man, and today is the coach for the local paddlers in Rapa.  People train for this, and compete at a variety of levels, you see.

The other day, when the blokes had gathered at his house to paddle the va'a ono, the six-person canoes, he let me take out his va'a hoe - the one-person version.

Ruben, the raconteur and nurse who has been a great friend to Galactic, was there to train with the other blokes.  ("The paddling, it is so very hard," he says.  "The other men in the boat with me are so VERY FAT.  It makes it so hard.")  Rueben helped me to get into the va'a hoe and gave me the most basic instruction.  He let go of the boat - and I immediately flipped it.  Turns out
they're stable as can be to port, and completely unforgiving to starboard.

Once I had that figured out, it was a breeze to paddle around the protected Baie Haurie while the big boats disappeared around the headland, six men paddling in unison in each.

I showed up again yesterday at the appointed hour (3:30, gotta love the non-9 to 5 lifestyle) and Johhny looked at me and said, "Va'a ono!"

Now, it was not my ambition to paddle in one of the big boats.  You've got to paddle in unison, you've got to keep up with the pace, and these guys have been paddling since they were boys.

Plus, I don't speak French, Tahitian or Rapa, remember?

But my only goal with all this travel is to be game for whatever comes along.  So I hopped in, a little nervous, and started a-paddlin'.

Ruben holding court during the
long BS session that follows
the paddling

The best paddlers are in the bow - that's the guy who sets the cadence and calls the frequent switches from side to side - and in the stern, where responsibilities for steering reside.

I watched the paddles ahead of me, and tried to catch on to the timing of the switches as quickly as I could.  And then, presto - there I was, in a va'a ono, paddling out of the bay of one of the most remote islands in Polynesia, over the reefs and close to the waves breaking on the rocky headlands.

We paddled for an hour.  With one break early on and one break right at the end.  My concern at first was just keeping up, but later I also started to concentrate on not splashing the men in front of me, not dropping the paddle on a switch as my hands got tired (!) and not throwing up.  I might not have paced myself so well at the outset.

But what a treat to be out there with those big Polynesian men (fat or not, they're fit for paddling - and I wasn't the oldest by more than a decade) paddling off a high volcanic island with the bowman calling the switches and Johnny behind me calling out instructions now and then in the delightfully guttural sounds of Rapa.

In terms of getting down with the people of Polynesia, masculine-style, it's a much better experience than smoking dope with the pig hunters of the Marquesas, let me tell you.

I think I'll show again this afternoon.

And - further Rapa twist - we had Johnny and Jackye over to the boat last night for a light dinner.  And I coulda sworn Johnny said he was going to give me the paddle that I used.

My rule of thumb in Polynesia is to refuse no gift.  But honestly, generosity like that can easily overwhelm.

Four Days of Rapa

Rapa from seaward.  A very very romantic landfall, and the four meter seas helped with the ambience

Rapa…

I'm afraid that words and pictures are going to be stretched a bit to capture this one.

This is a place that I've dreamed of visiting for years, and now that we're here the experience is, as always, very different from anything that I imagined beforehand, and, because it is true in the particular details that we couldn't have pictured before, better than we could have expected.

The pace of events has made seeking out internet time a second-best priority.  But for now, sitting on the porch of some new local friends' house (he is just now coming in from a paddle in his pirogue…so we will pause this entry while I have a heartfelt discourse for a few minutes, mostly in pantomime) I get the chance to share these pictures from our first four days in Rapa.

The crew, ready for shore after two days at sea

The village of Ahurei

I'm glad Dad doesn't make me
do varnish like this

As I noted in a couple earlier posts, we were very lucky to find our arrival coinciding with the visit of the Hanse Explorer and the National Geographic crew that had chartered the boat.  

The anchorage of Baie D'Ha'urie is infamous for being an insecure place to anchor, and Martin, the captain of the Hanse Explorer, very kindly allowed us to raft up at the dock.

Not to be dramatic about it, but if you haven't been to sea in your own boat you can't imagine how utterly alone we were on the 300-mile sail from Ra'ivavae.  Just us and our boat and the big big Pacific.  And then suddenly we find ourselves coming alongside this small ship, and climbing the pilot ladder to get aboard, and interacting with a bunch of friendly strangers - what a transition.

The Nat Geo folks invited us to a little party on board that night, which seemed to set the precedent for involving us in anything that was going on for the rest of their stay.  Very kind.

And how we got up there...

And, I said "friendly strangers" just now, but that wasn't strictly true, as the Chief Mate of the Hanse, Madeleine Habib, is from Hobart and is friends with one of our great friends back there.  So it was a pleasure to make the connection with her. 

The Habib-Abookire Union of Seagoing Arab Sheilas

(can I say "Sheila" in this context?) wearing the head

garb, post-reception our first night

What's next - oh yes, the fundraiser for the local youth group that was being held by the community - dinner and dancing, for 3000 CFP a head, or about $35 USD.  A bit out of our price range, to be honest, but as it was for a good cause and everyone was apparently going, we would have been happy to throw down…except that, hearing we couldn't buy much of anything in Rapa, and not sure at one point if we wouldn't clear out of French Polynesia from Ra'ivavae, we had purposely used up all of our local currency.

But wait - not a problem.  Nat Geo was shouting for the entire ship's crew to attend, and Paul Rose, the Expedition Leader (I maintain that you can't have an "expedition" to a place that a four-year-old can happily sail to, but that's a quibble) very graciously extended the invitation to us as well.  

Why?  I can only guess that the Polynesian worldview is catching.

A table, somewhere under all the food

Poema, the trilingual Pew Charitable Trust Marine Protected Area

community engagement powerhouse, and friend to Galactic.  She's the one

who told us in Ra'ivavae that we would cry when we left Rapa

Lord knows what I'm saying to the poor kid

Eric, taking on all comers.  He holds his own in these situations, but at

the expense of sometimes being a little rougher than we would like

Ah, yes - and this is where I mention our pleasant interactions with Rueben, the Togolese public health nurse who is posted here.  He and Julie, the nurse on Ra'ivavae, have just naturally assumed that our family fell under their purview during our visits…a "you're here, you're human, if you're sick I'll help you, here, give this antibiotic to your kid, would you?" sort of attitude.  Very French, I suppose, and also the type of interaction that can provide a bit of unexpected comfort to traveling parents.

Rueben in conversation: "Polynesians eat too much.  Everyone here gets

sick because they ARE TOO FAT.  In Africa people die because they

don't eat enough.  Here people die because they eat too much."

And this was a good one…  Alisa tried to invite Jackye and Johnnie, a local couple who have been incredibly nice to us, over for coffee and cake.  This morphed into five adults and a child coming over for dinner - they always eat together, explained Jackye.  (Everyone has a Rapan name and a French/Western name.  The Western names are the ones we remember, go figure.)

We were thrilled to have everyone at the boat…except that we are low on "hospitality" food - we're doing lots of rice and beans and pasta for our family meals - and we can't buy anything here for a special dinner with friends.  AND we're out of beer and wine, AND we don't have access to the local foods that are the mainstay of the Rapa diet, AND Polynesians eat a lot, and when you feed someone you naturally want to give them a very good meal.  So there was a little pre-dinner angst from Alisa.  But we made do with deviled eggs and pasta with our last two jars of New Zealand beef and a cabbage salad and the many things that Jackye and Johnnie brought.  No need for concern - we all had a great time.

These guys are used to the ways of yachts, and they showed up dressed

warmly, expecting to stay in the cockpit for the entire meal

Our guests brought LOTS of vana - sea urchin roe.  A delicacy    

And of course we moved the party downstairs, where things are more

comfortable.  That's Martin on the right, the captain of the Hanse

 Explorer, making an appearance

Jackye and Alisa dressed for church the next day    

Elias before church - I love how this picture captures his wariness in 

a new village setting.  He and his brother are the leading attraction for

every kid in sight, and coming to a common understanding of what

fun play entails can take a little working out

The inside of the church 

And our little ambassador.  Parents were happy to let their kids try to get

Eric's attention throughout the service

Then of course there are the pare, the "hyper-fortified" ridge-top village sites that Rapa is famous for.  

More on them in a future post, I imagine.

Morongo Uta, one of the largest pare sites, and conveniently the

easiest to get to

And the view of Baie D'Ha'urie that you get along the way...    

Finally, I'll just note that we continue to have a great time with Lucie and Arnold and their boys.  Through the years we've heard yachties talk about being "adopted" by local familes in Polynesia.  This is the first time that that word seems appropriate for describing our interaction with islanders - these two just assume that we should be involved in whatever their family is doing on a particular day, even though our inability to speak French makes us pretty dull companions.

Eric and Elias and Armold Jr. and Lucie at Sunday dinner.  We really must

learn their last name.  Lucie is from Tahuata, in the Marquesas.  

Spouses from off the island seem to be in demand…the population

of Rapa got down to about 100 people during the post-contact

apocalypse,which is quite a genetic bottleneck

Arnold in their taro fields

Elias and Arnold Jr.

Of course the whole point of writing a "sailing blog" is to try to capture some larger perspective on the fly - to get, and share, some glimpse of What It All Means.

But I think Rapa will defeat any attempt to share real-time perspective…we're just going to have to live in this place as fully as we can in the short time that we'll be here.

Late-night party animal

More soon.

Galactic at the dock