'Mutiny' in Paradise

Papeete, Tahiti, French Polynesia

I finally learned how to pronounce this town: PAH-pa-ee-tay. Or something like that. I made the locals laugh when I told them how I had been pronouncing it. I dusted off my college French to communicate a bit, which helped to read signs but definitely caused a few chuckles with the locals who very kindly switched to English for me.

Welcome flowers as we exit the tender

Between the tropical downpours, we made our way around the island, visiting their sites of note. Our first stop was the James Norman Hall Museum, one of the writers of Mutiny on the Bounty. The museum is a replica of his home and contains memorabilia from the author’s life, work, and movies. The natives are very proud of their history with the HMS Bounty.

Tropical rain followed us all day, but it stopped whenever we were outside

Fletcher Christian led a mutiny against Capital William Blight in April 1789, when the HSM Bounty was to leave Tahiti after a five-month layover. Bligh was a harsh taskmaster, and Christian and other crew members were despondent about leaving the tropical paradise. Having spent some time here, I can certainly understand their melancholy at leaving. Fletcher and his gang of 25 men put Captain Bligh and eighteen of his loyal crewmembers in an open boat and set them adrift in the Pacific. Bligh and his crew managed to navigate more than 3,500 nautical miles in the open boat to safety and England, where he began the quest to bring the mutineers to justice.

Some mutineers returned to Tahiti and were captured and punished for their crimes. The remaining nine mutineers set sail for Pitcairn Island with 22 Polynesians, 14 of whom were women. There formed a small colony. The Pitcairn colony could not be found by the Royal Navy and so remained free until 1808 and only one mutineer remained, John Adams. The rest had been killed off by one another or the Polynesians they lived with.

The lighthouse park on Point Venus has a memorial to the men of the Bounty. Point Venus is so-named as this is where Captain James Cooke charted the transit of Venus across the Sun.

This cutie was hunting fish in the little river off the beach at Point Venus.

Pretty Baby - I made another friend

Stopped at a botanical garden and the sun came out on these lily pads

Beautiful overlook of the coastline

BABY SHARK! doo doo doo doo doo

Everyone watching the baby sharks after lunch. There were a lot of them.

As we drove the single road circling the island, I saw these modest homes (sometimes shanty-like with tin roofs and not much else), with these million-dollar backyards onto these huge expanses of black sand beaches and softly rolling waves. My hopes of acquiring my own slice of paradise for a decent price were dashed when our guide advised that Americans are not allowed to buy property; we can only rent.

We visited one of the only accessible sites of the ancient Polynesian temples, made from lava rock, and open to the air. In the middle of the picture is the sixteen-foot altar.

Polynesians practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism. They believed that we all live in osmosis with nature. We all have mana – a natural energy or power that accumulates in the head. When humans were sacrificed, their skull was broken open and their eyes consumed so that the person could carry the sacrificed person’s mana with them into battle. When Captain Cook first observed the practice on one of his journeys through the area, he as horrified and tried to convince the people to stop the practice. His solution was to bring missionaries to the area, and the practice gradually fell by the wayside as Christianity took hold. Before the missionaries, the natives lived inland, safe from attackers. Most of their temples have been overtaken by the jungle and are now inaccessible. Once the missionaries came, the people moved to the coastline.

Offerings to the totem guards of the temple

French Polynesia is composed of 118 islands, 75 which are inhabited. They have a 30% unemployment rate, which is quite high for developed countries. But most islanders own their own home and land, and grow their own food, fish from the ocean, and take from the trees so they don’t need as much in the way of money than most developed countries.

We had a long day in Papeete, so some friends and I went out to the food trucks (called Roulettes) on the wharf. The area is known for French and Chinese cuisine, so we had some very good Chinese food, with huge portions that we should have shared, but was really delicious.

Not sure what this was, but it was delicious!

Papeete harbor at night

Moorea, French Polynesia

Moorea is purported to be the inspiration for Bali Hai in South Pacific. Beautiful palm trees swaying in the breeze, a thousand shades of blue in the water, and the white sand beaches. This was the setting for the third Mutiny on the Bounty film because Tahiti was too developed and they didn’t have CGI yet to erase all the buildings from the mountainside.

I spent an excellent morning on a photography tour with a local photographer and seven other camera enthusiasts. We rode around the island in the back of a pickup truck, scouting the landscape and talking f-stops and aperture, composition, and perspective. So much fun! I laughed a bit when I met our guide, Lorelei. The tour description warned us to wear appropriate footwear for hiking around with non-slip soles, so I made a point of bringing hiking boots. Lorelei wasn’t even wearing shoes! She was a lovely host and teacher – I learned a lot from her, and from my fellow tourists.

Welcome to Moorea

This altar was a gift from Easter Island

Pineapple Plantation

Some more friends at the pineapple plantation

The perfect paradise is marred with only one thing. The Land Crab. I have not seen one in person, but I will certainly have nightmares about them. They dig these giant burrows in the land to live in. They are larger than the chipmunk and gopher holes at home. I would NOT want to meet one of these in real life; I would probably cry and pee my pants a little bit. One guide told us that they catch them and put them in coconut water for a while (20 days?) and then cook them and they are delicious. I’ll take his word for it.

You can snap an ankle in these things

In the afternoon, I took an orientation-type tour of the island with a friend. We went to the Tiki Village – kind of a cultural center – and saw a show that had demonstrations of how to husk, crack open and scoop out a coconut, and how to tie/wrap traditional clothing, and how to dance in the Tahitian style. They even gave us a little glass of local juice. At the end of the show, they invited people up to dance with them. We have a lot of older people on the trip who were I guess afraid to break a hip or something, so there weren’t many volunteers. I was egging on some guy in the row behind me to go up, and he indicated they were actually gesturing to ME. I tried to talk my way out of it, but the peer pressure was too intense, so I went up. Thank goodness I’ve been taking those hula lessons, so while I was not graceful, shall we say, I don’t think I ended up looking like I was being electrocuted. Everyone told me after that I did a great job, but I think they were just trying to ease my humiliation. I had fun anyway.

Welcome to the Tiki Village!

Me and my dancing partner

A thousand shades of blue

We hustled back to the ship and caught one of the last tenders from shore, and I was safely back on board again. We have another few sea days, then we arrive in Pago Pago, American Samoa. Which is apparently pronounced Pahngo-Pahngo. I can’t.