Luxury Link 8

‘Oh Tane, god of beauty, Lord of the fleets, of the deep ocean Take care

   of your people Carry us in the hand of your mana, right to our

   destination Give us a wind astern, a wind from the east Let us sail as

   fast as a child’s canoe with a coconut leaf for a sail Let us sail as

   smoothly as on a sea of oil, or a bed Let the crests of the waves be low.’

Robyn and I needed to find something that could link us to a more authentic Mo'orea, before it had got all muk’d up. We rented a white Peugeot. It turned out to be just the sort of time machine we needed.

We drove by an old white church with red caps on its two steeples, like candles, past a hand-painted mural of a pineapple, to a giant warrior statue with a paua paddle in one hand, and an outstretched palm in the other. Everybody wants something. We scraped the underside of the Peugeot on the rocks and roots of the old forest, on our way to swim naked in its waterfall. Another hot bush walk brought us to stony streams, big ripe orange coconuts on the ground to quench our thirst, and shiny burnt sienna bracket fungi and round white mushrooms and curved buttressed trunks and roots leading to the ancient rock walls of the marae.

  

  

  ‘Marae were the sanctity and glory of the land... the pride of the

   people... A place of dread and of great silence ...When the people

   approached... they gave it a wide berth, they lowered their clothes from

   their shoulders down to their waists, and carried low their burdens in

   their hands until they got out of sight of it... They were places of

   stupendous silence; places of pain... dark and shadowy among the

   great trees... the basis of the ordinances... the basis of royalty; It

   wakened the gods; it fixed the red feather girdle of the high chiefs.’

The Tahitians that worshipped here had individual names for over two hundred stars, seventy different species of coconut tree, and a marvelously complex oral history of their flowers, trees, rocks, fish, birds, insects, winds, and physical geography. The highly intricate Lapita pottery they had brought with them on their great twin-hulled sailing vessels had become increasingly plainer, until it was abandoned for baking their food in ahima'a earth ovens. They had no knowledge of the wheel, using rollers to move their gigantic canoes ashore instead, some on logs, some on human bodies. Because of how steep Mo'orea was, the wheel would have been of no use to them. They had migrated here around the time of the birth of Christ, but they had brought a different deity. The dark land above... The light land below... Surrounded by birds... At the flash of sunrise.

  

He was there Taaroa. was his name

All about him was emptiness

Nowhere the land. Nowhere the sky

Nowhere the sea. Nowhere man

Taaroa called out. No echo to answer

Then in this solitude he became the world

This knot of roots it is Taaroa

The rocks are him again.

Taaroa. The song of the sea

Taaroa. He names himself

Taaroa. Transparence

Taaroa. Eternity

Taaroa. The Powerful Creator of the Universe which is but the shell of Taaroa. Who bestows on it life in beautiful harmony.

The old warriors of Tutaha’s army were as serious as the Bali Hai boys were not.

    ‘Be like the blasting north wind Weed out the water mint (refugees)

     Look for the red taro (able-bodied survivors) Leave no one alive

     Disembowel the hen (the enemy clan) Do not leave a red root behind

     Be deaf to their entreaties Be like the roaring ocean Put the sky (the

     chief) beneath your feet Let us have the anger Of Ta’aroa, whose curse

     is death!’

We emerged to the smile of a swath of afternoon sun on the far forested peaks of the island. And moved forward again in time. The ancient Tahitian war canoes had carried their fresh water supply in hollow bamboo tubes, and set sail after offerings of ‘a fine mat, ura feathers, arioi cloth, a pig, half a breadfruit, and a bunch of braided coconut leaves.’ Let your shadow be one of aroha.

The two passing modern catamaran ferries carried their fresh water in little plastic bottles labeled Evian and Perrier, and set sail after offerings of an uneventful passage. They are coming on a canoe without an outrigger.

We drove by the fimbriae and flagellae of overwater bungalows, elongating further out into the lagoon with each of Muk’s birthdays. The abandoned Club Med lay in ruins above our road, luxury linked to oblivion.

Our final shelter from vulgarity was French. And how. The staff at Les Tipaniers was uniformly surly, the Parisian women waded topless on the shallow beach and on the long powder blue pier, and the kite-surfing legionnaires, cutting arcs through the atmosphere, considered the small children making sand castles under their aerobatic Activités nautiques collateral damage. All the yachts at anchor were first born limb amputation exorbitantly expensive. Fluffy orange clouds hovered en flambé above. Even the roosters and mosquitoes and heat that kept us awake all night did it with classical Gallic insouciance. And the signpost near the road that would take us back to Pape'ete promised to take us even further. Ile de Paques 4257 km.

But that wouldn’t happen until later.