Tahiti

Papeete is a mere 200 miles from the tuamotus which is pretty short to get our new batteries and other things that were supposed to be waiting for us.  We anchored for the first night and then went into Marina Taina the next morning.  We had to med-moor, which means dropping your anchor and backing into the dock.  We did that pretty well but soon discovered that the 220 volts was not going to plug into our 110 volt system.  After a day of trying to find an electrician to build us a step-down transformer, we were pretty discouraged at the marina’s lack of empathy for our situation.  After a day and a half of not finding a French electrician that wanted to help, the dockmaster found another spot on another dock where we could share a marina transformer.  Another med-moor practice opportunity and we were finally settled in with the air conditioners humming.  Unfortunately, the marina transformer was tired and only reducing the voltage to about 150 volts.  The air conditioners and most things on my boat worked well with the higher voltage, but our icemaker stopped making ice and the inverter sensed the problem and shut down.

Despite the initial frustration, we started whittling away at projects and got most of them done.  Tahiti and the French decided to take this time to go on strike so my batteries got stuck in limbo until our last week and a few packages are still lost.

The stern of our boat was about 20 feet away from a restaurant and we had live entertainment while sitting on the boat.  One night we had front row seats for a Tahitian dance troupe.   One of the most widely recognised images of the islands is the world famous Tahitian dance. The ʻōteʻa, sometimes written as otea, is a traditional dance from Tahiti, where the dancers, standing in several rows, execute different figures. This dance, easily recognized by its "fast hip-shaking," and "grass skirts" is often confused with the Hawaiian hula, a generally slower more graceful dance which focuses more on the hands and story telling than the hips.  We enjoyed another version of the pig dance and some fine woman dancers trying desperately to shake off their grass skirts. 

One day we rented a car with the crew of Oso Blanco (Another Nordhavn with an 8 year old boy) and got a tour of the island.  In April 1769 Captain James Cook visited the island on secret orders from the Lords of the Admiralty to view the Transit of Venus on 2 June. He set up camp at Matavai Bay and stayed on until 9 August.  We saw the place where he landed and built his observatory.

We also saw a historical site called a 'marae'.  The marae we visited on Tahiti was actually the reconstructed version of the original that once stood on the same spot. There were giant stone statues in a rock-strewn field on the slope of a low hill, and where the hill leveled out there stood the marae. 

The islands each have their own marae design, but all have a very flat, rectangular, stage-like area as the focal point. The marae we saw also had wide pyramid-like steps on one end. Made from stone or coral, these meeting places served many functions. Small family marae were used for family events like births and deaths. Large marae hosted events such as village meetings and religious ceremonies. Sacrifices were also made on the marae, including human sacrifices from enemy villages. The name of the marae we visited was called Arahupahu, which in Tahitian means 'barbeque!

The list of famous authors who traveled to Tahiti and wrote about the island reads like a high-school literature course: Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Pierre Loti, Rupert Brooke, Jack London, W. Somerset Maugham, Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall (the Americans who wrote Mutiny on the Bounty), among others. Exotic images of uninhibited dancers, fragrant flowers, and pagan gods fill the pages. 

The most unlikely PR man of them all was a once-obscure French painter named Paul Gauguin, who transformed the primitive color of Tahiti and the Marquesas into powerful visual images seen around the world. When WW II shook the Pacific from Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal, rather than bloodcurdling banzais and saturation bombings, French Polynesia got a U.S. serviceman named James A. Michener, who added Bora Bora to the legend. Marlon Brando arrived in 1961 on one of the first jets to land on Tahiti and his Bounty film attracted thousands of other travellers and adventurers to also make the trip.

After 16 days at the dock, we were ready to get back cruising.  We timed our visit to take part in a 3-day party of “Puddle Jump” boats.  These are all boats working their way across the Pacific “Puddle”.  Stay tuned Dear reader and we’ll tell you all about it!

Tom