Tuesday 18 February 2014

Luxury Link 5



We passed a right-angled breadfruit tree, with a shark’s tail nailed to its trunk. Its fruit were gigantic, like green basketball scrotums afflicted with filariasis. Beyond the turtle petroglyphs were a vanilla plantation, walls of coral and concrete and conch, and a boy and girl on bicycles, who stopped just long enough under a mango tree, to charm Robyn out of a pen. Our one path circumambulation continued past an outrigger canoe stenciled with shark and dolphin fish, through beautiful lush valleys and mountains, and into an ancient stone marae, under a pillbox–like mountain redoubt, with three lonely coconut palms on its top. Closer to Vaiea were front yard cement block square graves, painted white, on which pots of plastic flowers slowly faded in the sun. There was a strangely inappropriate mural of two fat Polynesians dancing tango, and a hand-painted Hinano beer label poster, that brought us back to Alain’s smile and sunglasses, and the fast wake of his outboard home. The dogs got up to welcome us back, Yoyo prepared another excellent fish dinner, and even Alain accompanied us on his solar powered keyboard, after the homemade coconut ice cream.
Yoyo and Monique waved to us from the shore next morning, as Alain cut the boat on an arc towards the airstrip. The dogs went back to sleep, as the motu disappeared into our slipstream. We waited in the hot sun for the weekly flight back to Pape'ete, beside a chalk mural of pink tiares and fish and a four-masted windjammer. I thought of how I would have like to meet Gerald, and link to the luxury he had created on his motu. But one person’s luxury is another person’s loathing. Gerald’s innovations had generated more than one kind of power. During his birthday party, the electrical room was set on fire, and a counterweight turnbuckle bolt on one of his expensive wind turbines was unscrewed, causing the entire structure to buckle. Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
The strangest part was why the dogs hadn’t barked.



 “Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the
  opposite of vulgarity.”

                                                                                    Coco Chanel

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