Tahitian interlude

Tahiti is where we’ve caught up with our world again. It’s not so far from New Zealand. We’re almost home, we sometimes say. That’s stretching the truth - we still have about 2500 miles to sail -  but more boats around here are from NZ and Australia than anywhere else we’ve been. Plus, there are daily Air New Zealand flights in and out of Tahiti.

NZ-flagged yacht Rhombus in Papeete port

Window in the cathedral of Papeete

 They’re bringing our world to us.

Touchdown Tahiti - the runway is just beyond the main pass

The Aranui coming into Papeete port on July 31

First up, my mum, who actually arrived by sea.

She had organised off her own bat to take a two-week turn around the Marquesas and the Tuamotus on the supply ship Aranui in July.  Would we be in the region at the time, she wondered? 

We made sure we were. We met her off the Aranui on the last day of July in Papeete and brought her back to Enki by dinghy. She had only a day in Papeete before she flew out to a chamber music festival in Townsville. It’s hard to keep up with my mum.

 

Lots to catch up on after 18 months

My mum charmed our cruising friends

 It was her first sighting of our floating home. She follows our travels, of course, but it’s hard to understand the constraints and the pleasures of our physical space without standing/sitting/moving around in it.  She did a lot of that,  and got the gist of our normality at dockside. I think it rather took her fancy.  Next time in New Zealand, we said.

Lunch was very French that day

 

A woman can't leave Tahiti without pearls

Next up, our old friends Bridget and Mike. They had a scant week to spend with us, but that was enough time to sink ourselves into the beats of Moorea which are considerably slower than those of Papeete.

The skipper relaxes on our way to Moorea

 

New man at the wheel

Opunohu Bay, Moorea (and below)

Moorea landscapes (and below)

At anchor in Opunohu Bay

The weather changed markedly  about the time that Bridget and Mike arrived in Tahiti.  In the Tuamotus, I’d noticed a drop in the temperature of the water.  I needed my  hardly-used wetsuit to go snorkeling for any length of time.  It’s winter in the tropics, we reminded ourselves.  But there’s more than that happening.

We nipped around the corner to Cook's Bay

From the pineapple plantation, sold at the gas station

We’ve been hearing for a couple of months that this is shaping up as an El Nino year, and now that seems definite. Troughs are tracking across the Pacific beneath French Polynesia, and affecting wind direction and air temperature.  We’re seeing a lot more cloud and rain. We’re sleeping under cotton blankets (rather than just a sheet).  I’ve come down with a cold.  How clumsy, catching a cold in paradise.

Marce and Jack joined us on a wintry evening at the Bali Hai hotel in Cook's Bay

 The weather shift that we who have been in the tropics for too long were noticing (and whining about) didn’t matter too much to Bridget and Mike.  They were taking a few days off work and out of Auckland’s damp cold.  Everything was enchanting….the stark beauty of our anchorage in Opunohu Bay, the lushness of Moorea’s deep northern valleys, the abundance of fruit, the  warmth of the water, the easy manner of the Tahitians and the camaraderie of our boating friends.  They had a fine time, we hope – and we enjoyed having them on board immensely.

The round-the-island road, Moorea

Roadside fruit stall

Bridget ready to take on the lagoon - with its rays and sharks

Mike faces off a big ray

 

Bridget thinks twice about the company she's keeping

Couple gone troppo

The road up to the Belvedere lookout on Moorea 

One eye on the sky

Archeological site on the side 

 Big marae dating from the 17th century

View of Cook's Bay from the Belvedere lookout

Shrimp farming at the head of Opunohu Bay (and below)

We’re back in Papeete, awaiting the arrival of sister Barb and the Commodore. The plan is to sail with them as far as Bora Bora – and to catch some fish on the way.

Back in port - with Moorea just over there

 

Our neighbour - M5 (Ron Holland design, ex Mirabella 5)

 

M5 crew at work

 

The Chinese are also in port, keeping an eye on things

Looking back on Fakarava

So this is the city - a haircut, wifi that (almost) works, fruit smoothies, French pastries, water and electricity on the pontoon,  and people like us here too.  We are awash with stimuli and good company.  Papeete is not a big place, but it's so much bigger than anywhere we've been since Panama city.

The photos I promised in the previous post are below. Sadly, I discover, we have no photos of Liza, but Martha, from Silver Fern, says she will email something to me in the fullness of time.

The south Fakarava pass is superlative for snorkelers and divers

The snorkelers - Marce and co

A perfect day for snorkelling past the old village of Tetamanu

The water is so clear, the coral endless (photos by Silver Fern)

Alex took this photo and the one below from above the water in the dinghy anchorage

Inside the church at Tetamanu (south Fakarava), built 1873

Beach barbecue at south Fakarava

Yet another beach barbecue made by Silver Fern in south-east Fakarava (Hirifa Point)

Lisa's beach bar at Hirifa Pt

The anchorage in behind Hirifa Pt

Enki on approach to Tahiti (below), with Moorea on the horizon (above)

Pearl country

PIX TO BE POSTED AFTER OUR ARRIVAL IN TAHITI - WHICH IS IMMINENT

We've left behind the Paumotu girls with the pearl earrings.

You'd see them in Rotoava, kicking along the road in groups of two or three. One might be carrying a baby. They'd usually be laughing. They'd be wearing shorts and a top, some kind of easy footwear or bare feet, and in their earlobes, lustrous pearl studs. Green or grey, purple or black. Tahitian pearls (or black pearls as they're sometimes called) come in lots of colours. All the girls wore them, just as they all wore their long thick hair twisted into a heavy knot at the back of the neck. Very often they'd have stuck a fresh flower behind the ear, just like the postcards, and yet nothing about them looked contrived.

In my super fine hair, a flower behind the ear doesn't stand a chance, but they could keep a whole flower arrangement in place on their heads. For special occasions, they did - they'd have their hair brushed out, a crown of fresh flowers on top, and around their person, more pearls. Short strands of perfect small pearls for young girls, long strands of outrageously large pearls for the mamas. One of the ladies in the craft tent at Heiva had made up for sale necklaces of tiny bright-orange shells interspersed with black pearls. So Tuamotus.

You get to thinking differently about pearls after you've been floating about in the Fakarava lagoon for a bit, keeping a lookout for the pearl farm buoys and talking to women who know their product. "You don't pay less than 5000 francs for a good pearl," Liza tells us one evening. "Anything less than that is a rubbish pearl." We've met Liza on our first day anchored at the south-eastern tip of Fakarava, and she's reeled us in. We offer no resistance. She's an ample-bosomed, gregarious woman with a throaty laugh, a bon vivant of sorts with keen sense of hospitality and commerce. For a couple of evenings,we sit around the table in her open-sided beach hut with other cruisers, and she feeds us poisson cru, seared tuna, grilled fish (mahi mahi, grouper), chips, rice and big bottles of Hinano beer. We can hardly move afterwards.

After the plates are cleared (a baby pig rustling around under the table nibbling toes was hinting at others waiting for their fair share of the evening's fare), Liza comes out of the kitchen. She's in hostess mode, wearing a loose silky off-the-shoulder above-the-knee dress, her grey-streaked hair down and a dried flower crown completing the outfit. In her ears, the same pearls I noticed earlier in the day when she'd hooked a small bunch of green coconuts down from a very tall palm behind the house, and with a machete, sharpened for the morning's copra work, cut them open for us to drink from. She works hard, does Liza.

She lights up one of Alex's cigarettes and talks. This is why she cooks for us, so she can talk. This could be a lonely spot. Nothing in the way Liza speaks suggests that she is lonely. She has her man Jean (a Morgan Freeman lookalike who spent 17 years in the French Foreign Legion), and further along the beach, a couple of his sisters and their families. She grew up on Toau, a very much smaller and less accessible atoll north of Fakarava and she loves to tell stories about those simpler times. But the only visible light looking out from their house behind the beach bar is a navigational beacon. It's probably near the south pass, which is littered with reefs. The village to the north is 55 km away by boat. When she needs to go shopping, they take their boat up the same channel we came down. It's not always smooth water in the lagoon. Far from it. We foreigners, we transients, are her entertainment, we are the reason she pushed Jean to help her build a restaurant on the beach a couple of years ago. "He could live here alone," she says, "but I like people."

What she has to say about pearls is probably common enough knowledge, but a lot of cruisers passing through the Tuamotus arrive hoping to pick up cheap black pearls. They've heard stories from those who've come through before them. Handfuls of pearls for only XXXXX. And it's true, there are cheap pearls to be bought. But the people in the Tuamotus aren't naive. They're not selling you anything they can't sell somewhere else for a better price. If you've been sold cheap pearls, it's because that's all they've got left to sell you. The pretty ones have already been sent to Tahiti.

The price of black pearls has fallen. That's because too many are being produced too quickly, according to Liza. It used to take two years to grow a pearl, and now it's more like one year before the pearls are brought to market. More pearls, cheaper pearls...and less durable pearls. A pearl which has been left for two years inside the mother-of-pearl shell in the water, growing its beautiful lustre, lasts a lot longer than one left for half that time. "I've had these for 10 years," she says, fingering her own pearls, "and they haven't changed colour."

But we all have a budget, don't we? So we cruisers sail away from the Tuamotus with our 1000 FPF pearls, and likely feel happy with what we've bought. Probably the colour and the lustre of our cheap pearls will fade, but what we're really after is memories, isn't it? Tokens of our passing by there. Everything fades.

In southeast Fakarava, we met a French couple who have one of the most famous names in sailing - Taberlay. Marie was wearing an interesting arrangement of pearls around her neck, which I admired in the dark as we sat around a fire built by the redoubtable beach barbecue team on Silver Fern. In daylight she showed me how her necklace was put together - three pearls, two at the neck and one at the back, serving as a clasp, cleverly held by and strung on very fine Spectra (a synthetic rope stronger than steel). The pearls were originally a gift from a friend, and strung on a natural fibre which had rotted. Marie's husband Patrick, who is a true man of the sea, had re-constructed her necklace using a fibre he had on the boat. It will never rot, and Marie can wear them everyday, just like the girls of Paumotu.

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