A New Standard

One of the standard sailing guides to Polynesia refers to Rapa as "the strangest island in the Pacific".

That of course offers a strong allure. But whenever I've read that page I've also heard a rebuttal forming in the back of my mind.

Everyone knows that Tasmania is the strangest island in the Pacific.

But while Rapa is unlikely to gain that title any time soon, it has replaced Tassie as a different sort of superlative.

In the very first week we ever spent in Hobart, we found ourselves socially engaged - either going to someone's house for dinner, or having people to the boat - five of the seven nights. This in spite of the fact that we arrived knowing no one there. That record has forever since stood as our defining standard for a friendly place.

Well, Tassie - move over, you're second best once again. This is our eighth day in Rapa. And we've had social engagements on seven of those days.

It would have been a perfect eight for eight, except for the one night that the person we had invited for dinner saw us driving around in someone else's truck shortly before the appointed hour, and concluded that our plans must have changed.

And that's a twist on top of everything that's been going on - there's this steady back beat of spontaneous events that occur at all hours, courtesy of a very social place where not many adults have a strict 9 to 5 schedule for filling their days.

Finally - truth in advertising - all this frenetic activity has not been solely due to the vivacious nature of the place and our honed skills at getting down with the people. We have very much been riding the coattails of the National Geographic group that is here. They have done a fantastic job of interacting with the people of Rapa, and the community has responded by throwing down some incredible Polynesian hospitality. Like, completely incredible. Like, you could sail the Pacific for years and see nothing like it incredible. And for some reason, everyone has decided that the family on the voilier parked next to the Nat Geo boat should naturally also be treated as honored guests at all of these events.

The Hanse Explorer will be heading off to Tahiti tomorrow, leaving us to our own social devices.

Eric will be at school tomorrow, having matriculated from being a slightly stir-crazy boat kid to being one more problem with which the teacher of the three- and four-year-olds can fill her day.

Alisa, I think, will be learning to make popoi at someone's house.

I think we're ready to fly solo.

Psyche-Rapa-Delic

Rapa has no airport, gets fewer than ten yacht visits a year (from what I'm told) and is visited by the supply ship every two months.

This is an off-the-track place. And it offers the promise of a dazzling, off-the-track experience of Polynesia.

Two days at sea from Ra'ivavae put us in the proper frame of mind for seeing Rapa for the first time. Convoluted spires of lava lost in the impossible vastness of the Pacific. A four and a half meter swell.

We pulled into the caldera that forms the harbor within this island - and found an expedition cruise ship at the dock. It was stuffed with people from a "Pristine Seas" project - marine biologists and Pew Charitable Trust people and a National Geographic film crew. They had a Chief Scientist and an Expedition Leader and they were going fishing with the locals and engaging them about community-based fisheries management and Marine Protected Areas and in the evening they were inviting the community to a reception on board - free beer and good food - and showing the locals a film of themselves fishing, shot by said National Geographic film crew.

Before that, our friends on Hera were at the dock for a week or two.

And shortly before THAT, the French Polynesian government ship, the Tahiti Nui, was here with their own film crew AND a helicopter, and they were taking locals out to the very very remote Iles Morotiri (fifty miles away, indifferently charted) to catch lobsters as long as your arm.

Our friend Patrice, who was here a year ago, rhapsodized to us about how everyone in Rapa stopped to shake his hand.

Ain't no one stopped to shake our hand in the first two days we've been here. The arrival of Galactic has not been the biggest event of the year.

But hey - don't matter one bit to us. "We're just happy to be here," is the enduring Galactic motto.

And - presto, it turns out that the Chief Mate of the expedition cruise ship is from Tasmania ("the strangest island in the Pacific"), and is mutual friends to a great mate to Galactic. So she kindly asked her captain for permission for us to raft up to them at the dock, and before we knew it we were scrubbed up and climbing the pilot ladder en famille, bound for the reception for the locals.

Not at all what we expected to be doing in Rapa. But even more fun for all that.

But then today (our second day), it seems to have begun. The completely out of the box Polynesian social experience.

At the reception we ran into the Togolese nurse who Alisa briefly met at Ra'ivavae, and who is now working here. So of course we invited him over to the boat the next night for a feed. ("Togolese" - isn't that the greatest adjective?)

Alisa "I haven't seen a supermarket in five months" Abookire was trying to get dinner ready while the boys were more or less going crazy down below. I wisely chose that moment to be on deck, doin' stuff. A Rapa man stopped by the boat to chat with me - an optimistic verb choice, that, chat, since he and I share about twenty words of mutual vocabulary. Soon he asked to come aboard for a visit. Absolutely, I said. Soon enough after that, we managed to convince his wife to come aboard. Very soon after that, they invited us to come to their house for Sunday dinner.

(Imagine, the next time you come across someone in your home country who does not speak your language, that you react by immediately inviting them and their family to dinner at your home. You can't imagine it, can you?)

Tongi! We replied. Thank you, we would love to.

Alisa handed out pieces of the flat bread that she was making for dinner. Our guests, Lucie and Arnold, nibbled away, and then started making spreading motions over the palm of one hand, saying "confiture" and "framboise".

Ah, yeah, jam, I replied after checking the dictionary. Good stuff, that.

Arnold and Lucie responded by chucking myself, Eric, Elias and four-year-old Arnold Junior into the family truck and driving us to their home. In the truck Lucie continued the steady stream of junk food for the boys that Arnold had begun when he first walked up to the boat. We got to their house and Lucie packed a little care package for us - a couple liters of frozen berries, a jar of jam, a bucket of potatoes and carrots. Arnold went into the garden to pick a different sort of berry for us. They seemed disappointed that we didn't have a freezer on the boat - lord knows what they would have given us if we had.

My instinct is that refusing a gift in Polynesia can be a very rude thing to do. I very cheerfully accepted the lot.

And then we all drove back to the boat. I wondered if they would drop us off or come aboard. That would be the latter.

Arnold Junior went forward with our boys and they all cheerfully went completely apeshit together.

Alisa kept cooking. And Arnold and Lucie and I sat around and had a pleasant visit.

Except, and I cannot stress enough what a surreal element this gave to the whole interaction, we could not speak to each other except in the most rudimentary way.

And, it's all so fun and uncomplicated and different from anything that we are used to. This attitude - there are people here, we don't know them, can't speak to them, but hey, they're people, they probably eat, let's take them home and give them a big feed - it's so Polynesian. And it can be so disorienting. We think we're having a full day of travel that will be capped by a dinner we've planned for a guest, and through the odd gyrations of the day we're keeping family life more or less on schedule. And then suddenly it's all overturned by a very fun, slightly incomprehensible social experience featuring strangers sitting in our living room.

That's the psyche-Rapa-delic part. And it's what has kept us coming back to Polynesia again and again.

We're looking forward to Sunday very much.

And Gone

The season moves ever on, and the winds are forecast to be favorable starting tomorrow.  So, assuming that the good weather-organized boat Venn diagram comes together, we'll make our departure from Ra'ivavae to Rapa.

We've been lucky enough to visit a lot of islands in Polynesia over the last six years.  Ra'ivavae has been our favorite of the lot so far.

Harold Tamaititahio - our great help in Ra'ivavae

A big part of our delight in the island has to be the absence of a yachtie scrum.  Only one other boat stopped in during the month+ that we've been here.

We love meeting fellow sailors, and I love the way that the common experience of people who go to sea in their own boats is a dependable bridge over national differences.

But, when there are lots of boats around, as there are in most of the South Pacific anchorages, sailors tend to assort by nationality, which I find tends to defeat the whole idea of travel.  Worse still, when you share no common language with the locals, and little in the way of common outlook, a fleet of anchored boats gives you a pool of people who are easy to interact with, and that in turn makes it harder to get down with the locals, as it were.

So this mix, of one other boat with whom we could compare notes and trade stories (the delightful crew of the Dutch yacht Hera), was just right.

Marcelle and Eric

But of course, the real joy of Ra'ivavae was the people of this small island, and the warmth with which they welcomed us.  Ra'ivavae is a place where strangers shake your hand, it's a place where (almost) everyone has a wave and a smile at the ready.  Alisa's efforts of distributing lunettes served as our introduction in this place where we don't speak the language, and once we had gotten to know some people, it was the lunettes that we kept coming back to as our consolation when we considered the overwhelming generosity with which we were treated.

"Thank God for the lunettes," we would say to each other as people pressed gifts on us.  When you consider the work that goes into producing food here, and the easy grace with which it is given to strangers, reciprocation with an old t-shirt doesn't feel up to the mark.  So the lunettes have finally given us a way to feel that we're reciprocating adequately to Polynesian gift-giving.

(The many people who do the work to collect the old reading glasses and get them to us, while Alisa and Elias get all the fun of handing them out - that's another story.)

Alisa and an abandoned marae - a pre-contact chief's house/place for religious
devotion/center of local political power.  (I think.)  There are marae ruins
everywhere in Ra'ivavae.  While the language of the island survived, nearly all
knowledge of pre-contact culture is lost.  The island is small (less than 5 nautical
miles long) and the apocalypse of post-contact epidemics was total. 

So, Ra'ivavae gave us all that we ever hope to find in the sailing life.

But, then, someone from Moorea whom we met here smiled when we said we were going to Rapa and replied, "Rapa?  You'll cry when you leave Rapa."

New places ever await.