Morgan (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} esmereldachubb) wrote,@ 2004-10-21 13:43:00 |
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Live from Papeete...
I'm sitting in an Internet cafe in downtown Papeete, Tahiti, and couldn't resist the urge to check in. Thoughts on the island behind the cut...
Insofar as I was expecting anything, Tahiti is not what I expected. I mean, yes, it's warm and tropical and pretty much everything you'd expect from the South Pacific, but there's an odd dynamic here that's hard to define. I was kind of expecting something like Brazil, where everyone is laid back and things happen in their own time and nobody worries about much. If someone says that something is going to start at 9 o'clock in Brazil, plan on being there at 10. Tahiti is different; there's a kind of hustle here, and a kind of urgent vibe, that's totally at odds with what I've come to expect from a tropical island.
And in other ways it's very typical. Once you get out of the touristy downtown -- and you don't have to go far, because despite the hype Tahiti doesn't have that much of a tourist industry -- you start to run into a colorful mix of houses, small open-air stores, roads without sidewalks, and people who cheerfully coexist with chickens, cats, dogs, and these little tiny gray lizards that may or may not be geckos. Even at a casual glance, it's very communal -- not so much a sense of "this is mine and that's yours" as a sense of everybody sharing whatever happens to be there. I don't know if I'm describing it very well, but it's fascinating to watch.
The highlight of the trip for me was a trip to the atoll of Marutea Sud, to visit the pearl farm of Robert Wan, the biggest producer of black pearls in Tahiti. (Actually French Polynesia, since there aren't actually any pearl farms on the island of Tahiti.) An atoll, if you don't know -- and I actually didn't before I came here, although I nodded intelligently whenever anybody mentioned one -- is the remnant of an ancient volcano that has eroded to the point that what was the crater has become a lagoon, so from the air it looks like a very very thin doughnut. Marutea is about 10 miles long by 6 wide, and the land is anywhere from 100 to 500 yards wide. The widest part is where they built the airstrip, which is the only way you'd want to get there -- it's a four-hour plane ride from Tahiti, situated at the very eastern end of French Polynesia, which means there's almost nothing between Marutea and South America. Very remote, very beautiful.
The entire atoll has become a coral reef, which means that virtually all of the land is composed of bits of coral in various stages of weathering. In places the reef is under water, meaning that you couldn't walk all the way around the atoll (though you could swim in places, the water over the reef isn't that deep). The lagoon is full of fish, notably the lagoon sharks, which in places cruise right up to the waterline on the lagoon side of the beach. There's fish of all descriptions, and birds, and some animals that people flew in from Tahiti (mostly chickens and cats). Fresh water comes from the rain. There aren't a lot of distractions, although they do get television via satellite, and even have mobile phone access (hey, it *is* a business). Supplies come in twice a month on cargo boats that travel throughout the atolls, and if you forget to order anything, you're stuck.
I don't know how to convey the wild beauty of the place; it's a far cry from the well-manicured tropics you see in more touristy places like Hawaii or the Caribbean or even Papeete. Walking down the beach, over miles of rocks that have the remnants of elaborate coral formations, feels like walking on an alien planet. It really gives you a sense of what the ancient Polynesians must have seen when they first began inhabiting the islands. It's like the ocean is where life really happens, where you find the food and where you find the roads from place to place, and the islands are just a pit stop in between.
Well, I need to wrap this up; I'm almost out of time. If I think of anything else, I'll put in in another entry.
I'm sitting in an Internet cafe in downtown Papeete, Tahiti, and couldn't resist the urge to check in. Thoughts on the island behind the cut...
Insofar as I was expecting anything, Tahiti is not what I expected. I mean, yes, it's warm and tropical and pretty much everything you'd expect from the South Pacific, but there's an odd dynamic here that's hard to define. I was kind of expecting something like Brazil, where everyone is laid back and things happen in their own time and nobody worries about much. If someone says that something is going to start at 9 o'clock in Brazil, plan on being there at 10. Tahiti is different; there's a kind of hustle here, and a kind of urgent vibe, that's totally at odds with what I've come to expect from a tropical island.
And in other ways it's very typical. Once you get out of the touristy downtown -- and you don't have to go far, because despite the hype Tahiti doesn't have that much of a tourist industry -- you start to run into a colorful mix of houses, small open-air stores, roads without sidewalks, and people who cheerfully coexist with chickens, cats, dogs, and these little tiny gray lizards that may or may not be geckos. Even at a casual glance, it's very communal -- not so much a sense of "this is mine and that's yours" as a sense of everybody sharing whatever happens to be there. I don't know if I'm describing it very well, but it's fascinating to watch.
The highlight of the trip for me was a trip to the atoll of Marutea Sud, to visit the pearl farm of Robert Wan, the biggest producer of black pearls in Tahiti. (Actually French Polynesia, since there aren't actually any pearl farms on the island of Tahiti.) An atoll, if you don't know -- and I actually didn't before I came here, although I nodded intelligently whenever anybody mentioned one -- is the remnant of an ancient volcano that has eroded to the point that what was the crater has become a lagoon, so from the air it looks like a very very thin doughnut. Marutea is about 10 miles long by 6 wide, and the land is anywhere from 100 to 500 yards wide. The widest part is where they built the airstrip, which is the only way you'd want to get there -- it's a four-hour plane ride from Tahiti, situated at the very eastern end of French Polynesia, which means there's almost nothing between Marutea and South America. Very remote, very beautiful.
The entire atoll has become a coral reef, which means that virtually all of the land is composed of bits of coral in various stages of weathering. In places the reef is under water, meaning that you couldn't walk all the way around the atoll (though you could swim in places, the water over the reef isn't that deep). The lagoon is full of fish, notably the lagoon sharks, which in places cruise right up to the waterline on the lagoon side of the beach. There's fish of all descriptions, and birds, and some animals that people flew in from Tahiti (mostly chickens and cats). Fresh water comes from the rain. There aren't a lot of distractions, although they do get television via satellite, and even have mobile phone access (hey, it *is* a business). Supplies come in twice a month on cargo boats that travel throughout the atolls, and if you forget to order anything, you're stuck.
I don't know how to convey the wild beauty of the place; it's a far cry from the well-manicured tropics you see in more touristy places like Hawaii or the Caribbean or even Papeete. Walking down the beach, over miles of rocks that have the remnants of elaborate coral formations, feels like walking on an alien planet. It really gives you a sense of what the ancient Polynesians must have seen when they first began inhabiting the islands. It's like the ocean is where life really happens, where you find the food and where you find the roads from place to place, and the islands are just a pit stop in between.
Well, I need to wrap this up; I'm almost out of time. If I think of anything else, I'll put in in another entry.
