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Shipwrecked On the Island of Love
Part One “She said: ‘I do, now baby what about you? On my first morning as a married man, I awoke in the ultra-swank bridal suite at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. I lay there stunned and half asleep between 800-count sheets, wearing nothing but a wedding ring, and stared up at the domed ceiling. It was as if I had gone to sleep my normal self: single, cigar-smoking male, perpetually recovering alcoholic and cocktail waitress-chaser, itinerant traveling musician and songwriter – and woken up a completely different person. An interloper in a bourgeois fairy world. I felt I had braved a complicated secret ritual and having passed, was given the ring and magically transported to, uh…. Marriageland! Through the French-doors leading to the second room (and second bathroom!) of the suite, I could see piles of gifts, the congealing remnants of two three a.m. room-service steak dinners, and the last dying embers in the fieldstone fireplace. This place was bigger than most of the apartments I’d lived in.
*** Everybody has heard of Bora Bora, but no one, it seems, knows where it is. In the year or so since we chose this infamous island paradise as our honeymoon destination, I have talked to hundreds of people about it. The response is always awe and longing, followed by a disconcerting variety of misinformation about the location of the place. Bora Bora and Tahiti and the rest of the Society Islands that make up the best-known part of French Polynesia are about halfway between the west coast of America and the east coast of Australia. They are in the same time zone as the Hawaiian Islands, as far south of the Equator as Hawaii is north of it. Captain Louis de Bouganville took possession of Tahiti for France in 1768, and it’s all been mostly downhill since then. More on that subject later.
Part Two “It was in the summer of 1842 that we arrived at the islands; the French had then held possession of them for several weeks. The islanders looked upon the people who had made this cavalier appropriation of their shores with mingled feelings of fear and detestation. They cordially hated them; but the impulses of their resentment were neutralized by their dread of the floating batteries, which lay with their fatal tubes ostentatiously pointed, not at fortifications and redoubts, but at a handful of bamboo sheds, sheltered in a grove of cocoa-nuts!” It is a seven and a half hour flight from Los Angeles to Tahiti’s Fa’aa airport. In the true island spirit, our flight left three hours late. Our check-in at L.A. International was remarkably lax. We wheeled our bags past a long snaking line of fuming passengers waiting to get on a Lufthansa flight to Stuttgart (“Do you have your paypas?!?!”). There was no line at all at the Air Tahiti Nui counter, and the polite and lovely vahine behind the counter checked us and our baggage right in. We shot the breeze with her for a while and then headed off for a long lunch. After lunch, we settled in for the six hour wait and began game one of the Honeymoon Scrabble Tournament on our nifty travel Scrabble set. “The airport relies on a 300m wide land tongue. They are numerous, inviting and by chance….dessert sand beaches. In 1560 a tremendous tidal wave submerged the island, consequently drowning two halves of its inhabitants.” Tahiti was a breathtaking sight from the air – tall, jagged peaks reaching up to the moonlit sky. Karen and I looked at each other as the plane taxied, “We’re actually in Tahiti.” We said at the same time. This was one of those places you could never quite believe was real until you actually saw it for yourself. We joined the line of weary travelers snaked across the tarmac to the customs line. While waiting to get our passports stamped, we were serenaded by three Tahitians strumming ukuleles and singing. The musical style was a bit reminiscent of what I’ve heard from the Hawaiian slack-key guitarists and singers, but also quite a bit different – much more rhythmic on the guitars, and with a greater emphasis on vocal harmonizing. But that bit of amateur musicology is beside the point: the music was beautiful. Karen put a Tiare behind her ear, rendering her quite lovely, and our vacation was officially begun. Our accommodations for the night were at a place called the Royal Tahitian. After we settled in our squalid, run-down room, we immediately dubbed it the “Hideous Tahitian.” Also, “Le Royal Motel-6” was bandied about for a while. All joking aside, we didn’t much care what the room looked like – we were newlyweds, and we were in love. We transcended the setting with some fabulous sex and fell asleep grinning.
Part Three “The missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make the islanders permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there…How sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell!” We flew into the airport at Rangiroa on a hot, windswept morning. “Airstrip” would be the more appropriate term. It was barely a step away from being an oiled dirt runway/single windsock/check in at the Quonset-hut kind of place. It did in fact have a single windsock. Our baggage was extracted from the idling jet, driven right over to the terminal on a small cart, and handed directly to us. At no time were we made to feel like cattle. It was wonderful. Our resort, the Kia Ora Village, was in a setting of immaculate beauty, markedly different from what we saw of the island on the way in: a pockmarked road, mostly barren scrub land dotted with random clumps of palms bent double and straining against the wind; crumbling, indifferently-built bridges; crumbling, indifferently-built houses. Cinderblock shacks and trash-strewn yards made the place look strikingly like a beach-side Indian reservation. Outside the fairy-tale confines of our resort, it was hard not to be depressed by the poverty of the locals. We were paying dearly for our illusion of paradise, but it didn’t look as if the people that lived there were benefiting much from the tourist cash flow. You can have paradise here, but only if you can afford it.
Lunch was the fabulous Mahi Mahi burgers or the taro and raw fish salad at the hotel restaurant. Then a nap. The first night, we left the resort and went over to Chez Glorinne, one of the many small pensions that dot these islands. It was basically the island version of a B&B, but they also served dinner. We were shown to a picnic table in an open-air part of the house. The décor was funky and basic. Sitting in front of a placemat with Christmas scenes printed on it – the phrase “free gift with purchase” came immediately to mind. Everyone else at the table was staying at the B&B, and it was a real international gathering. A couple from London made up of a French woman and a Scottish guy, a German who was there for the spectacular diving, another French couple, a couple from South Africa. The conversation was quite lively, considering the language barriers. The menu was fixed, but we had heard great things about this place, and were not afraid to try whatever was put before us. Carafes of wine were set out, as well as the ubiquitous baskets of French bread. The appetizer was a tuna carpaccio so good I had to restrain myself from reaching over the table and taking more off someone else’s plate after I’d finished mine. Every course was just as wonderful: the poisson cru (raw fish in lime juice and coconut milk), the grilled Wahoo, the dessert crepes.
After dinner some of us went outside to sit in chairs by the beach and talk until the shuttle came to take Karen and I back to the hotel. It was all very cozy and communal. For a minute we considered staying the night so we could continue our conversation, but better sense prevailed. A beachside bungalow with air-conditioning and a hot tub awaited. Our second day on Rangiroa, we tried what I like to call the “Last Resort Hostage Breakfast Buffet” As in: you’re trapped here and can’t go anywhere else for breakfast, so you’ll pay what we want and take what we give you. Breakfast at our resort was 4,500CFP per person. That’s a total of $90 in American dollars. What do you get for this massive outlay of cash? Your choice of: greasy cold cuts, lukewarm juice, cheese going crusty around the edges, rock hard butter, average-at-best pastries, and the kind of wilted bacon and congealed scrambled eggs one would find at a Greyhound Bus Station café. Only much worse. Yet lunch and dinner at this same restaurant were excellent. You would not have even known you were eating at the same place. After breakfast, we did a little snorkeling in the lagoon. This was by no means the best snorkeling on the island, but it was still breathtaking down there. All sorts of colorful fishes weaved around us. We were privileged visitors in a spectacular alien world, just a few yards from our hotel room. At one point, a rouge Triggerfish, weaving crazily, darted directly at Karen and tried to take a chunk out of her. I found the scene quite amusing. The fish was only about three inches long, but he sure was fearless! “Little bastard bit me!!” Karen howled through her snorkel tube. She was not nearly as amused as I was. The fish that bit Karen is the one the Hawaiians call Humuhumunukunukuapua’a. I only pointed that out because I really wanted to use the word Humuhumunukunukuapua’a in this book. We generally refer to it as the HumaHumaUnnaUnna fish, being perhaps willfully ignorant of the Hawaiian tongue. All those vowels with so few consonants to hang ‘em on are awfully intimidating. Later that day, we rented a “Fun Car” and toured the island via the one road available. The “Fun Car” was basically an emissions-challenged riding lawnmower with three wheels and no blade. The seats reminded me of those ultra-uncomfortable park benches designed to keep homeless people from sitting on them for too long – five minutes into the ride my ass was begging for mercy. The guy who brought it around showed us where the switch was to turn on the lights, only to find out the lights weren’t working. “Come back before dark” was all he said. Trailing a foul black cloud of leaded gas fumes, we were off. It was a pleasant enough ride, but there wasn’t much to see. Poverty and a plague of lazy, mangy dogs abounded. The village of Avatoru, at the end of the road, consisted mostly of uncared-for buildings and uncared-for dogs surrounding a very well maintained church. We would see a lot of this sort of thing in these islands. The church, apparently, was the only other entity around here besides the resorts that was pulling any cash. *** Day three consisted of more laying around, smoking cigars, reading, looking at hermit crabs and other scuttling beasties, and a trip to “The Pass” to watch the dolphins play. The Pass is a narrow channel of water between the long motu that we were on and the next motu over. One of the more popular activities on Rangiroa was “Shooting the Pass”, in which one would don snorkel gear and ride the extremely fast current through the shark-infested channel. It was supposed to be very exciting, if you were into death or at least severe disfigurement. For three days we tried to convince ourselves that we could do this. We met overweight tourists from the Midwest wearing cameras around their necks and black socks with their flip-flops who had shot the pass. “How bad could it be?” we asked ourselves. Finally, while watching the dolphins cavort in the rough, choppy pass, we came to the realization that we were indeed a couple of wussies, and would not be shooting the pass. Ever. We also seized that moment to reflect on the fact that we would never bungee-jump, hang-glide, skydive, climb Everest, or swim the English Channel. We are not ashamed. If we suddenly find ourselves burdened with the urge to cheat death, why should we go to all that extra trouble? Crossing Santa Monica Boulevard on foot during rush hour would be more than adequate.
Part Four Journal entry, 6/6/03: I sit on the gallery of our bungalow, smoking a reflective cigar. My vision framed by a hanging scrim of thatch, I see nothing before me but a delightful low round tree, the endless calm blue lagoon, and a beach that seems forever in motion with a million hermit crabs. Every shell on the beach here is liable to up and walk away. It is the most tranquil of scenes, rendering my regular hustle of a life rather silly in comparison. We awoke to the sound of a howling wind and rain pelting the roof above us. It was eight a.m., but there was no sign of the sun. It was pre-dawn and holding. Today we were supposed to cross the lagoon by boat to the Kia Ora Sauvage. The Sauvage is a small isolated motu with no electricity and bungalows for only five couples at a time. Don’t be misled by the lack of electricity, however. The place featured three gourmet meals a day, hot and cold running water in your four-star bungalow, and hand and foot service. This was no camping trip. Karen looked out the window and determined that there was no way they were going to take a boat out in this weather. I called the front desk, just to be sure. “Oh yes” they said, “We’re going!” “Oh yes” I said to Karen, “They’re going!” “You’re all fucking crazy!” she said. Karen is not the most adventurous soul where her travel safety is concerned. We got up, packed our bags, and headed out into the angry storm – complimentary hotel umbrella in hand – to spend another ninety bucks on breakfast. We were not in the best mood. The breakfast buffet had hit an all time low this morning. Because of the weather, the supply boat had not come in that morning, so they had laid out an unappealing spread of the previous day’s breakfast leftovers. “This sucks!” we said, and then fell to it. We were starving. *** The boat ride over to the Sauvage motu was an hour of bouncing across nausea-inducing swells under a gunmetal gray sky. The rain came and went, pelting us furiously for a few minutes and then stopping. During the entire trip we were regaled with tales from our second mate, Vladimir. According to this garrulous Russian, he was an actor, a model, a sailor, had climbed Mount Everest, had invented several common household items, had homes in Los Angeles, New York, and Tahiti, and was a close personal friend of Mel Gibson. Or was that Leonardo Di Caprio? I can’t remember. In my opinion, the guy was so full of shit he squeaked going into a curve, but he sure could tell an interesting story. Kept my mind off the impending bout of projectile vomiting, anyway. We also met two of the other couples that would be joining us on the island – all newlyweds. We met Caroline and Nicoli, a very nice French couple. I think he was a pro soccer player – never did find out for sure. His wife was beautiful. The other couple were Americans: Jerry and Barbara. Barbara gleefully told us that they had originally planned to go to Paris for their honeymoon, but because of the Iraqi war fracas, they decided to boycott France. So they came to French Polynesia. Smart move; very logical. People like this are the reason the French think we Americans are a bunch of morons. Jerry was an unabashed right-wing nut, which would normally send me screaming for the nearest exit, but despite myself, I couldn’t entirely dislike a guy who said things like: “Remember, it only costs 90% more to go first class!” and “You’re only as old as the women you feel!” Sauvage is French for “wild”, and by our second day here on the motu, we had fully embraced the Robinson Caruso lifestyle. No phones, no TV, no electricity, no contact at all with the outside world. Nothing but beach, sky and ocean for as far as the eye could see. The signal for mealtimes was the sonorous single note of our host blowing into a conch shell. Even now, back in L.A., months away from the islands, that sound would still produce Pavlovian salivation, were I to hear it.
Michael had lived on this island for thirteen years and was a man totally at peace. He likes to tell a story about a guest named Stan, who encountered him one morning at 6 a.m., sitting at his picnic table on the beach, drinking strong French coffee, and watching the sunrise, as he does every day. “What kind of life is this?” asked Stan, “Up at six every day with nothing to do but watch the sun rise?” “Sit with me for a while and you’ll understand” said Michael. Stan has been back to the island seven times since then, and he joins Michael every morning at six, to quietly watch the sun come up over the lagoon. Michael’s life of isolation did not make him provincial or ignorant – far from it. It enabled him to be free of the baggage the rest of us carry and see the big picture very clearly. Even after two days here, I felt a change in myself. On the island, far from “civilization”, stripped of all the things I thought I needed to get through my complicated life, I found myself a far more civilized person than I ever was at home. I eat slowly, savor the food, the air, the sand, the water. I engage in long conversations. I am not defaming the name of someone’s mother because they are in my way on the 405 freeway. Urban life, I sometimes think, has turned me into nothing more than a well dressed, well informed animal. Part of the daily ritual here was the feeding of the sharks. We all would don masks and fins, and wade out into the water with Michael to observe the feeding frenzy. A school of 20 or so black-tipped reef sharks hung out near the beach, awaiting their daily dose of chum. They were completely docile. They didn’t chase the other fish; they certainly had no interest in tourist-meat. These sharks were well taken care of.
Joe and Josephine, a couple of mangy but sweet and happy mutts, lived on the island. Their main pastime was shark chasing. They would stand tensed on the beach watching the fins swirl, and when finally they had a good bead on a shark, they’d lunge out into the water toward it. The sharks would always dart quickly away. They wanted no part of being stand-ins for this rabbit-chasing. That did it for me. I wasn’t about to be afraid of any sharks that ran away from dogs. Counselor Nash was still not so sure. “Don’t worry,” I said. “They’d never bite you.” “Why’s that?” she said. “Professional courtesy.” Our favorite couple on the island had already been there for a day when we arrived. Tom and Jen were die-hard New Yorkers - smart, observant and funny. The four of us bonded immediately. We quickly found out that was shared the same taste in most everything, the same politics, and even some mutual friends. They both worked in the music business. I was both pleased and a little horrified to find myself in a hammock on this fantasy desert island, talking about distribution, managers, agents, the general decline in CD sales, and the New York City club scene. The days here were simple and blissful routine. Breakfast early, followed by a few hours of strolling on the beach, or reading and smoking in the hammock. Shark feeding after lunch, then a snorkeling excursion to one of the outer motus. During these excursions, Michael would go out to the lagoon with a spear and catch dinner for honeymooners and sharks alike. We were all his friends. Perhaps the sharks even more so. In the evening we would take time to watch the sun set, and then meet for dinner, which was a lovely, slow affair with much conversation, laughter, music, and damn fine French-Polynesian cuisine. After dinner, Karen and I would attempt to make love, as honeymooners will do, but the bugs could be a deterrent, even to the most amorous of couples. Our first night here, I lay prone and willing on the bed, naked. I gazed through the exotic film of the mosquito net at my lovely new bride, as she slowly disrobed by the flickering light of the hurricane lanterns, in that unconsciously sexy way that still gets to me after all these years. “Fucking, goddamned, son-of-a-bitching mosquitoes!!” she exclaimed suddenly. She then began to slather herself violently with a thick coating of foul smelling bug repellent, muttering curses at the insects the whole time. As she crawled through the net and threw herself despondently onto the bed, reeking of the contents of most of a can of Off, I suddenly found myself as limp as the lettuce at a truck-stop salad bar. That was the last night I would forget to light the mosquito coils. We were sad when the day came to leave the Sauvage, but, much as I would miss the place, I was ready to return to civilization. I wanted to put on my silk resort duds and swank-out at a five-star restaurant. I wanted to get the perpetual coating of salt washed off my body. I wanted air conditioning and electricity and doors that closed against the swarming nighttime insect-cloud. I wanted to wear socks. Besides, we were on our way to Bora Bora!
Part Five “More than an ocean, the Pacific was like a universe, and a chart of it was like a portrait of the night sky. This enormous ocean was like the whole of heaven, an inversion of earth and air, so that the Pacific seemed like outer space, an immensity of emptiness, dotted with misshapen islands that twinkled like stars, archipelagoes like star clusters, and wasn’t Polynesia a sort of galaxy?”
A vertical, almost square rock formation rises between Bora Bora’s craggy peaks, towering imposingly over an impossibly clear blue lagoon. The foothills are lush with palms, as are the ring of motus that surround the island. The airport is on one of these outer motus, so the first thing you do after landing is catch a boat to the mainland. Very exotic. The Bora Bora airport was a relaxed, open-aired affair like all the other airports around here. Chickens strutted and pecked on the runway, scattering only when a large Air Tahiti jet came their way. Otherwise, these chickens didn’t scare easily.
The Sofitel Motu is so named because it is on a motu. It is a five minute boat-ride across the lagoon to the Sofitel Marara, which was built in the seventies to house the crew working on a Dino De Laurentiis movie called Hurricane. The movie was a colossal flop, but they got a nice hotel out of it. On the swank confines of our motu, we were greeted at the dock by a ukulele strumming porter and the usual lei-bearing lovely. We were joined by the hotel manager and were whisked off to our overwater bungalow, which was just as spectacular as we were led to believe it would be by all the hotel literature. About the time we got in, the wind and rain really started to kick up, so we were pretty much confined to our room for the rest of the day. We spent a slow afternoon in bed while the warm wet gusts of wind blew a filmy white curtain through the doorway out to the deck over the lagoon. There were no mosquitoes to stop us this time. We ate dinner that night in the mostly empty hotel dining room. Our waitress was so deathly slow that you would have thought she was juggling orders from a room full of impatient customers. When she did bother to wander in our direction, it seemed as if it was causing her great physical pain to be civil to us. The menu featured more language-mangling that managed to make everything sound somehow unappetizing. I’m not sure what was worse, the Caesar salad featuring a covering of “breadcrumps” or the Crème Brulee, which was described as follows: Custard pudding burnt to a crisp on top by blowtorch, with pulverized Tahitian vanilla. Mmmm, mmmm – I’ll take two! Fearing a complete loss of appetite, I had Karen translate out loud from the French menu entries. Over-literal menu translations aside, the food was quite good. I had a skate sausage with truffles. The skate is a graceful relative of the ray. Later that week I swam with a friendly and curious group of rays and skates and instantly regretted my dinner choices on this evening. The next morning, the weather cleared, and we took a shuttle bus into Vaitape. The town was a dusty assemblage of buildings near the largest of the island’s harbors. This was also where the mammoth cruise ships docked. The passengers would spend an hour or two here and think they’d seen the island. Then it was back to their hermetically-sealed cruise ship world. The cruise people were easy to spot. They were loud and impatient. They had not set their internal clocks to island time. On the ship, it was just America afloat. Bidness as usual…with more drinking. Near the docks was the Bora Bora high school, and what looked like the entire student body was sitting in a bleacher, singing in Polynesian. It was beautiful. We stood captivated, near tears, until the final note floated away, spirited off by the gentle sea breeze. Such fragile beauty here, even after having been trampled by the relentless, heavy foot of the western world. I hope what’s left of it lasts. As we had coffee and croissants at a sidewalk café, we were accosted by a starving slat-thin cat and her last surviving kitten. They were a heartbreaking pair, working the crowd for scraps of food. Both of our beloved cats at home were strays, born in a dumpster, and I knew that but for the grace of God or the whims of fate, this could be them. So I went across the street to the market and hunted a down a few cans of Sheba cat food, and opened them all up in a row behind a hedge near the café. The cats inhaled the food, purring loudly all the while. It made me feel a little better but not much – I knew it was only a temporary reprieve.
While my bride amused herself with her newfound subjects, I checked out the surrounding reef. Pufferfish, triggerfish, parrotfish, crabs, giant clams and all kinds of other brightly colored creatures abounded. Also, vast clouds of mullet…park pigeons of the South Pacific. I couldn’t believe this was all underneath our room! When I was a drinking man, Bloody Mary’s was the kind of place I most liked to drink at. Bloody Mary’s bar and restaurant (named after a character from South Pacific)was opened twenty-or-so years ago by an ex-pat American and has been a Bora Bora institution ever since. “This place has got my name written all over it!” I said, as we walked across the white sand floor to the bar. Bloody Mary’s managed to be funky and swank at the same time without either feeling like a put-on.
While Karen began to work on her second bloody Mary, I toddled off to the Men’s to give the old lizard a shake. The bathroom at Bloody Mary’s, I can say without hesitation, is the coolest bathroom I have ever seen. You walk through a set of bat-wing doors to what looks and feels like an outdoor area. A garden of rocks, tropical flowers, and miniature palms make up the outer wall. Above the urinal trough hangs a carved wooden penis on a chain, which you pull to flush. The “sink” is a tall, not quite random pile of volcanic rocks with a hand-sized cave at about waist level. You give the wooden paddle hanging just above you a pull, and a miniature waterfall cascades down over the rocks into the cave below. Delightful. Dinner was delish. Karen, taking her revenge on the triggerfish that bit her back in Rangiroa, dined on same grilled with drawn butter. I had lobster and teriyaki Wahoo. And salad. Since arriving in these islands, we’d discovered that the French concept of salad was that lettuce and all the other things that come on a salad are mutually exclusive. You get two salad choices around here: croutons, bell peppers, onions, and cucumbers in a nice vinegarette from Province…or plain lettuce. While the salads at Bloody Mary’s were not particularly remarkable, they were a real treat after two weeks of the segregated Jim Crow salad. Halfway through the feast, we were visited by a fluffy white cat named Katie, who instantly became a spoiled surrogate for our much missed felines back home. Karen observed from the girth of the animal that it probably did quite well here, working the crowd for treats. “That may be true” I said, “but you “She looked hungry!” said my wife. After dessert, we headed for the exit. Dutiful tourist that I am, I shelled out for a Bloody Mary’s t-shirt on the way out. I also picked up one of the Cuban cigars they were selling at the gift-shop. One of my new top-ten career-goals is to someday see my name on the Bloody Mary’s wall of fame at the entrance, where the names of all the famous rock musicians, traveling dignitaries, writers and movies stars who have visited the place are listed. Because ya gotta have goals. *** Next morning we rented a kayak and paddled it around to the back of our motu. We were told that some of the best snorkeling in all of Bora Bora was right there on our motu. How convenient! We had a good long visit with the colorful fishes, including a vast school of fish that sat parked together on the ocean bottom perfectly still – lined up like big-rigs at a late-night rest area. Spent and ready for lunch, we headed back to our kayak, which we had tied to some rocks at the motu’s edge. The kayak had sunk. There it lay at the bottom of two feet of water on the rocky, beachless coast. There were no people or buildings on this side of the island, and the coast was nothing but a foreboding tangle of jagged, sharp volcanic rock outcroppings. We were left with no choice but to swim all the way around to the dock on the other side of the island. To me, this seemed a monumentally impossible task – the rugged, outdoorsy type I am not. Exhausted and foul of mood, Karen and I began our underwater odyssey, sniping at each other the whole way. After forty-five minutes of swimming against the ocean current, we finally reached the dock, startling a couple of newly arrived tourists as we climbed up the dock-ladder, scowling and covered with seaweed and sand. We had originally planned to paddle the kayak back to our overwater bungalow, so we had brought no keys, and no shoes. What with the poisonous centipedes crawling about, walking barefoot back to the room was not much of an option. Without keys, our bungalow was only accessible by water. Karen borrowed sandals from the very nice man working at the dock, and went to retrieve our keys and footwear. She was not in a good mood when she returned. Meanwhile, the guy from the dock took off in his outrigger canoe to single-handedly retrieve our sunken vessel. It took him all of twenty minutes. I stood stupidly on the dock, getting sunburned and thinking: being shipwrecked in two feet of water less than an hour from my $700 a-night bungalow is about all the adventure I care to experience on this trip, thank you very much. Back at the room, we showered off the salt and bad vibes and ordered a couple of mammoth steak sandwiches from room service. Tough, fatty meat on a two-foot long French roll slathered with mayo, and a side of fries. It was the best fucking sandwich I ever had. *** Wednesday night, we headed over to the famous Hotel Bora Bora for the weekly buffet and Polynesian dance show. Hotel Bora Bora was built in the early Sixties and was for years the first and only five-star resort in French Polynesia. It is still just about the best thing going in these islands. Our hotel was nicely appointed, like most of the others we had seen on the island, but it all felt rather flat and sterile…somehow lacking in vibe. The minute we walked into the Hotel Bora Bora lobby, we were surrounded, enveloped by vibe. The place was beautiful, of course. But it was more than beauty, it had history, and something about the place made you never want to leave. We walked down to the back of the hotel and stepped onto the broad expanse of the white sand beach, where torch lanterns, tables with snowy white linen tabelcloths, white wooden chairs, and a vast buffet were set up at the edge of the gently lapping waves. The moon lit the scene beautifully. Waitstaff bustled about with a competence and attention to detail not seen elsewhere in these islands. The customers were dressed nicely, as were we. This clientele was mercifully free of the creeping schlubiness that was born in casual California, and over the last three decades has spread like kudzu and smothered the world in a pile of polyester stretchy-pants, wrinkled t-shirts, torn jeans, saggy track-suits and backwards baseball caps. Somehow we’ve been reduced to a civilization where the dress code at most restaurants is that you have to wear socks. The thing about a well dressed crowd that I have observed over and over again is that people naturally show each other more respect when they are dressed up. Politeness, deference and a score of other atrophied social skills suddenly reappear when everyone is not dressed like they just got back from a long day of hauling fertilizer and picking rocks. We helped ourselves to the buffet spoils and went back to our table. The food was wonderful and the show was great too – a more polished version of the dance & drum gig we had seen in Rangiroa. But what I remember most was the way we wandered the hotel grounds late at night, long after the show and dinner were over. We could not tear ourselves away. It was a most romantic evening. *** The next morning we were met at the dock by a darkly tanned Polynesian Adonis in a white loincloth. He was piloting a large wooden outrigger boat with an outboard motor. We had rented the services of this guide and boat for a “motu picnic.” We would be taken to a deserted motu away from the main island, and dine on a gourmet lunch for two. It cost plenty, but we couldn’t resist.
I lingered awhile longer in the water, ignoring my lady’s protestations, and finally clambered back onto the boat. Our guide came aboard shortly after, and far more gracefully. As I watched him, We pulled up at the deserted desert-island motu around noon, and while our host prepared the feast, we explored the island. There wasn’t much to see, just a lot of coconut palms, hermit crabs, volcanic rock, and sand. Dead campfire sites and remnants of other picnics. In a small cove, we saw a small yellow eel sliding along in the shallow water among the beach. Karen and I watched the eel in reverent silence for a long while, amazed to be in a place where you could see such things. Our table, complete with white linen tablecloth, was set up in the clear shallow water a few feet off the beach, under an umbrella. Our host was grilling lobster, steak, and prawns on a charcoal grill just We sat under the hot tropical sun feasting on course after course of wonderful food, and chatted comfortably with our host. We bagged on L.A. – he said he loved it, went there every year. We extolled the beauty of Bora Bora – he pointed out that much of the time, it was an exceedingly dull place to live. Perspective, I suppose, is everything. On our last day in paradise, we rented another “fun-car” (or “Le Merde Car” as Karen liked to call it) and after a large lunch at Hotel Bora Bora, set out to drive the entire twenty-mile length of the road that circled the island. Minutes into the trip, Karen developed massive stomach cramps. We found the drugstore in town, and I was instructed by my wife through clenched teeth to “BE THE BOY.” “BE THE BOY” is a catchall phrase in our relationship that means all pretenses toward equality, modern women’s liberation, and en-lightened male sensitivity are to be temporarily dropped. I am to go caveman, and take charge of the situation. A call to “BE THE BOY” usually means I am to manfully deal with things like taking out the garbage, changing a lightbulb, calling a cab, fixing a flat, unfreezing the computer, building a fire, assembling furniture, programming the VCR, or driving to the emergency room, while my delicate, dewy flower of womanhood watches appreciatively from atop her pedestal. Today, I was to take care of the stomach-ache problem, and fast. I walked into the pharmacy looking for an over-the-counter stomach remedy, and quickly discovered that there is no over-the-counter here, everything was behind the counter. I asked if they had anything for a stomach-ache. Blank stares – no English spoken here. I tried miming debilitating stomach pain. “Oh”, said the clerk, “you have sunburn on tummy, no?” She handed me a tube of sunblock. Shit! I thought, why did I have to go and take GERMAN in high school?! I went back out to the car and told Karen, who was now doubled over in pain, that I was getting nowhere and that she would need to go in there and speak some French. “Be the goddamned BOY!” was the only response. I went back in, and after much embarrassing gesturing and miming, I finally got my point across. “Mal à l’estomac!” she exclaimed, and handed me a box of Maalox tablets, which cost ten bucks. The Maalox quickly did the trick, and Karen became her normal self again – which is to say that she was once again in charge and no more alpha-male hunting, gathering, and providing would be required of me. As we drove the road that circled the outer perimeter of Bora Bora, we were again struck by the jarring contrast between the poverty of the locals and the lushness and tidiness of the resorts. There is a lot of money being made in these islands, but precious little of it is staying here. The hotel we were staying at was owned by Accor, the massive American hotel conglomerate that also owns Motel 6 and Red Roof Inn (after all the time I’ve logged in those places on the road, I figure Accor should have comped me at least one night at the Sofitel Motu). The hotel we stayed at in Rangiroa was owned by Coca Cola Bottling in Japan. You get the picture. But who the hell was I to complain? I was just another tenderfoot American tourist tooling around blithely in my rented car and expensive resort-wear, enthusiastically fulfilling my role as part of the problem. Bora Bora was truly beautiful, and I hope to go back again one day, but in coming here, there is a sad loss of the illusions attached to a place like this. This was all slammed home to me as we drove by the town dump on the far side of the island. Once you’ve seen the Bora Bora dump, your dream of paradise can never be quite the same.
Epilogue We spent the morning of the day we were to fly home sitting on the deck of our overwater bungalow, quietly contemplating the lagoon and the vast Pacific beyond. Paradise had been wonderful, but we were ready to go. Real life, or at least life as two ambitious type-A overachievers like Karen and myself interpreted it, beckoned. We’d had our fill of being busy doing nothing – to steal a phrase from Brian Wilson – and were ready to re-enter our cacophonous world. There is a word the Polynesians use, fiu, which is meant to convey the feeling of empty boredom one gets from a lifetime of having nowhere to go, nothing much to do, and little stimuli from day to day but the crash of the waves, the blue of the sky, and the heat of the sun. Island fever. We were about to get it. Our taxi had no markings on it confirming that it was a cab, and no meter. But there it was at the cabstand, and the driver (with her young child in tow) had our bags stowed in the trunk before you could say “gypsy cab.” Karen, in her painful high-school French, negotiated a ride to town and a return trip pickup after dinner, and a price for the whole run. We didn’t want to miss our plane, and hailing a cab in the off-the-beaten-path neighbor-hood we were going to would be tricky. It was a little frightful leaving our fate so completely in the hands of this harried cab driver, but we had little choice if we were going to attempt this little excursion. We would have to trust God and Saint Christopher with this one. The restaurant was a bistro that looked as if it could have been dropped whole and breathing from any small city in Europe. Once inside, you would have never known that you were on a palm-covered tropical island in the shadow of a dead volcano. The owner-cook was Belgian, the waiter was French, and not a word of English was spoken. We ordered items off the menu, hoping they were what we thought they were. The waiter also offered helpful corrections to Karen’s mangled French. I had traveled to Brussels to play a blues festival just a few months before this trip, and the food here reminded me very much of what I had eaten there. French cooking the way the Belgians do it. It was fabulous. After dinner and strong coffee, we waited nervously for the cab driver to show. She arrived right on time, and ten minutes later we were back at the airport. At eight-thirty a.m. Pacific Standard Time, we landed in Los Angeles. By the time we arrived at our apartment in this loud, jarring, overcrowded, smog choked metropolis that, before collapsing under the weight of its own myth, was once known as a kind of paradise itself, the islands had already begun to feel like a distant dream. © 2004 by Bob Malone
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Previous to this morning and the night before, the only thing I knew about a joint like the Hotel Bel-Air is that usually, when they saw me coming, I would be sent around back to the loading-dock. But here in Marriageland, I could walk right in the front door. They even called me sir. 
Upon stepping off the plane, we were enveloped by the smell of flowers. The Gardenia, known here as the Tiare, is a constant presence in these islands. I found the smell of Tiare Tahiti and burning jet-fuel to be quite an exotic combination. 
There is only one road on Rangiroa, I don’t even think it has a name. It’s simply known as “the road.” During the entire drive from airport to resort, water was always in sight on both sides of the road. At first, I though we were being driven along some sort of narrow strip of land jutting from the main island. Where’s the rest of the island? I thought. After checking my map and getting hip, I realized that the whole island was like this. This low coral atoll, like the dozens of others that make up the Tuamotu chain, is simply a narrow strip of coral, a couple of feet above sea level, surrounding a calm blue lagoon. Rangiroa has the second largest lagoon in the world – more of an inland sea than anything else.
In the breezy, flower strewn, high ceilinged, open-air lobby, we were greeted by a Polynesian beauty bearing cool washcloths and cool glasses of fresh-squeezed mango juice. This got me right in the mood after the purgatory of two flights and a night at the Hideous Tahitian. After filling out the forms and authorizing the rape and pillage of our credit card, we repaired to the lovely overwater bar to wait for our bungalow to be readied. We both ordered frothy, fruity chick drinks. I quit drinking two years ago, so my drink, sans alcohol, bore the added burden being a children’s drink as well as a chick-drink. Oh well – better sober than dead, I suppose.
I frittered away long happy hours on the deck staring at the sea, smoking cigars and reading Herman Melville’s Typee. Reading 19th century prose is always significantly easier when you are on island time. It was written in a slower time and a simpler world, and when you are in such a setting, you can adjust to the pace of the narrative and really put yourself there. In any case, Typee was a pretty exciting read. Much of it is based on Melville’s encounters with the native (and supposedly cannibalistic) tribes of the Marquesas Islands in the northernmost reaches of French Polynesia – not all that far from where I sat now. He takes plenty of well-deserved shots at the French and the God-botherers who were already doing a number on the place back then in the 1840s. 
After dessert, I asked the woman serving us (Glorinne herself, I believe) where I could find the bathroom. Actually, what I said was: “Toilette?” A large mouthful of French for me. I was sent down a set of wooden stairs of questionable sturdiness into a dark pit of a cellar lit by a single 40-watt bulb. After wandering in the dark for a while – hearing nothing but the ghostly barking of a stray dog and the drip drip drip of a leaky pipe, and truly beginning to believe I would die in there, my bones found years later by another lost soul who just wanted to take a piss and instead ended up dying with his legs crossed and his teeth clenched – I found the bathroom. It was just past a pile of abandoned children’s toys, surfboards, and other cellar effluvia, hidden behind an unmarked piece of plywood on hinges. It would be needless and inaccurate hyperbole to call it a “door.” It was a piece of plywood on hinges.
That night, we partook of the excellent buffet at the hotel and watched the Polynesian Dance review. The show was significantly less slick than the big luau shows we’d seen in Hawaii, and all the better for it. The singers and dancers just gathered on the beachside deck in front of the restaurant, and let it rip. Gentle singing and guitar strumming as light as the breeze blowing in off the lagoon slowly gave way to furious tribal drumming that set the stage for the dancers to enter. No lights, no amplification, no third-rate Don Ho impersonator, no western influences whatsoever. Something about its untouched nature made it very powerful to me. The last authentic remnants of an all but vanished world. The Hula, after all, before it became mere entertainment for lei bedecked tourists, was part of the Polynesian religious ritual. A ritual that was often aimed at angry gods. Gods that required sacrifice. Human sacrifice. All that hip swaying takes on a whole new meaning when you watch it with that in mind. 
Our host, Michael, was a brown and leathery forty five year old Polynesian man, fluent in four languages. I admired him immensely. His wife did the cooking; he did pretty much everything else. At night they sang Polynesian songs and strummed ukulele and guitar. They met when they were both working in a Polynesian dance review. She was one of the singers, he was a dancer. We tried to get him to bust a couple of moves, but he was reluctant to do so. She was a wonderful singer and ukulele player. Far better than average in a place where it seemed like everybody we met – from porters to drivers to waiters to clerks – could pick up a uke and sing and play like a pro. 
At first, the thought of getting in the water with these beasts was terrifying, no matter how many times Michael scoffed at our tenderfoot mainlander fears, and told us we’d “seen too many movies!!” It was the dogs who made me understand. 
Bora Bora has been called the most beautiful island in the world. Of course, it was called that by James Michener, who had a thirty pound book about the place to sell, so a bit of hyperbole is not surprising. Yet much as I would like to resist such hype, I would have to agree with ol’ James…for now. There are a lot of islands I have not yet seen, so I’ll have to get back to you on this in my dotage.
Our hotel, the Sofitel Motu had sent a boat to meet us. As we cruised across the lagoon, I found it hard to believe we were really here. Even though the weather was gray and rainy, the island and all surrounding it was a spectacular sight.
The rest of the day was spent snorkeling in the lagoon around our overwater bungalow. There was a glass porthole in the floor under the coffee table in our room, and you could check out which fish were congregating around your bungalow. Seconds later you were swimming with them. Karen had developed a great affinity for the schools of needlefish that were in abundance in our lagoon. Piece by piece, she fed whole loaves of French bread to these odd, skinny, silver, needle-beaked fish. They all soon found out where the motherload was located and swarmed our bungalow day and night. Karen, often given to hyperbole, declared herself “Princess of the Needlefish!” 
In a wooden, ice-filled trough to the left of the entrance, the vast catch of the day was laid out in all of its glistening, still-twitching glory. Parrotfish, grouper, flounder, Pacific lobster (no claws), giant prawns. Craig, our host, took our orders on the spot, and shouted them to the cook manning the grill right behind him. Then we were escorted to our table. Once seated, you were encouraged to kick off your shoes and run your feet through the fine white sand that covered the floor of the joint. The building, all thatch and bamboo, gave me the feeling of somehow being inside and outside at the same time. It flowed seamlessly with the world beyond its doors. 
are probably the only tourist who has ever hauled the cat up onto her lap and hand fed it half of a $35 fish dinner, after carefully removing all the bones.”
On the way out to our little lunch paradise, we stopped in at a ray feeding. We joined some other folks standing in chest-deep water while large gray stingrays swirled around like hungry housecats. They would gently rub themselves along your body to get to know you, and then snatch some fish from your hand. It was quite enlightening, I had no idea these were such gentle creatures. We then went out into deeper waters and snorkeled above a group of divers. A giant school of black fish surrounded us. Way off in the murky distance lurked what our guide assured us was an eighteen or twenty foot lemon shark – requin citron to the locals – one of the most vicious predators in the sea. From this distance I found it hard to get all lathered up about the shark – I could barely see the thing. Our guide was slightly bored – he saw sharks every day. Karen was terrified. She ejected herself from the water and back up into the boat in seconds flat, demanding I do the same. 
effortlessly balanced on the outrigger beam, white breechcloth gleaming against the azure sky, bronzed biceps heaving, dark curly locks flowing in the ocean breeze – I felt that pang of male inadequacy that I’m sure hundreds of other doughy, fishbelly-white newlywed grooms before me have felt in his presence. I wondered about the carnal thoughts he has no-doubt provoked in scores of freshly minted brides, and wondered what thoughts were concealed behind my own bride’s poker face. I didn’t dwell on this for too long though – I was getting hungry.
a few feet away. The smell was making me salivate. Champagne and sparkling water chilled in a bucket next to the table while clouds of mullet swarmed around our feet as we sat at the table and waited for lunch to be served.
