Luxury Link 10

The explorers had found Rousseau’s Noble savages living in the Southern Sea, afloat on a Golden Age of freedom, free fruit, and free love. They had landed to find no one working very hard at anything. Which was what Robyn and I also discovered, when we tried to find an inexpensive way into town. Pape'ete wasn’t quite the enchanting little In the Strange South Seas hamlet that Beatrice Grimshaw had found in 1908.

    ‘The loveliest, sweetest, and wickedest town of all the wide South Seas,
     lies before us - just a sparkle of red roofs looking out from under a
     coverlet of thick foliage, a long brown wharf and a many-colored crowd.
     Across the water steals a faint strange perfume, - heavy, sweet,  
     penetrating, suggestive. . . cocoanut oil scented with the white tiare
     flower.”
                                   
But it also wasn’t Theroux’s ‘ugly plundered-looking town with scruffy, ill-assorted and flimsy buildings.’ Pape'ete was a cultured black pearl, not the 26 mm baroque-shaped AAA 8.7 gram Tahitian Silver in Robert Wan’s museum collection in on Boulevard Pomare, but more like the fat mongrel bitch with the big nipples that continually rolled on her stomach to have her belly scratched, in the cafeteria that Robyn and I grabbed an overpriced croque-monsieur in, on our way to the market. We visited the Galerie Winkler, still open, thirty years after I had originally thrilled to its discovery, on the last leg of my Final Cartwheel. I still couldn’t afford anything inside, and the original owners had taken their Happy Hours back to California.
From the balcony, the market was still a tableau riot of pareus and pandanus and plastic grass skirts, shell strand necklaces and rito hats, scarlet ginger flowers and yellow and orange bird of paradise, and stalls of opalescent fish and primary-colored produce. Downstairs, in the toilet, was a red-lipped urinal in the shape of an open female mouth, with a sign. Pour répondre à tous vos envies. To answer all your desires.
Back outside of the steps, we met Santa, and his heavenly helper, scantily clad in red and white, both sweltering in the midday heat. Robyn wore a garland gift of white tiare gardenias, and I waved a baguette baton to stop traffic, as we charged through the sidewalk vendors and fois gras and wine shops, luxury-linked to the fresh shipments of pink and blue Chinese plastic bicycles next door.
On our final day in paradise, we did the unthinkable, and took a bus tour around Tahiti Nui. It is said that King Pomare built the Old Broom Road that encircles it out of alcohol, inside so many of his more inebriated subjects that were sentenced to its construction. Its convolutions took us at French autoroutes speeds, to caves and cataracts and a café for fish, and on to the Gauguin Museum. He had lived in Tahiti until he decided his proclivities and perversions were more suitably situated in the Marquesas. Most of his paintings had emigrated as well, but what had survived still conveyed the mysterious shadowy spirit of the tropical Tahitian rainforest, and the primitive essence of its natives. ‘D’ou Venons Nous Que Sommes Nous Où Allons Nous.’ Where Do We Come From What Are We Where Are We Going.