Travel with Indigo

On the morning of Friday, the Ides of March, in the quaint village of Fare on the island of Huahine, all was peaceful and languorous, the essence of bucolic perfection. Birds chirped in the trees, bees buzzed about the flowers, fish schooled in the shallows. And, moving up a step in the animal kingdom, the occupants of Indigo stirred from their cabins, although sluggishly, somewhat in the manner of a man rising from a dentist’s chair after a molar extraction.

The source of their discomfort began innocently enough around the noon hour on the previous day at a glorious beach set along the edge of a dense jungle. The site had been a popular hotel until its buildings were destroyed by a typhoon, a harbinger of what was to ensue this day. There the Indigoians landed with all that was needed for a proper beach party, including folding table, camp chairs, coolers laden with iced Hinanos (the local beer), containers of poisson cru and baguette sandwiches, the ever important bags of pork rinds (a delicacy favored by the owner and captain), a Frisbee, iPod and speakers and, foolishly as matters evolved, a largish container of rum punch.

Every imaginable tree, plant and flower of Polynesia adorns this idyllic beach. But it was the interwoven limbs of the dwarf palm, acacia and tamaro trees that provided the celebrants with shade. An islander wearing a sun-faded hat fashioned from the leaves of the pandanus tree arrived in a rustic plywood outrigger canoe. He cautioned them against sitting under the palm trees. That habit of naïve tourists, he said, is why so many of them are struck on the bean by falling coconuts. He failed to list another equally pernicious source of harm to the bean, dark rum drunk in imprudent quantities. Overcome with indolence, the beach goers sat, ate, snoozed, frisbeed, snorkeled, grooved to beach tunes, and, fatefully, drank rum punch.

Around five o’clock, they adjourned to Indigo to clean up before going ashore for dinner at their favorite bar/restaurant, where, unwisely, they resumed drinking yet more of those rummy things, the per capita count of which was growing to alarming numbers had anybody bothered to notice.

The vessel’s owner decided to have for dinner a stoplight colorful fish common to all reefs of the world, the endearing but dim witted parrot fish, a sort of Bambi of the deep. Served whole, with doe eyes staring up at him so as to continue the metaphor, the fish was nevertheless pronounced delicious. Following this outstanding meal, owner and crew tendered back to Indigo’s aft deck for yet more festivities and, you guessed it, still more rum stuff.

The whole affair never climbed up the fun scale to the celebratory skinny dip nor to the more modest tops off stages, though for a while there an innocent observer might prudently have concluded that both were a sure bet.

Rising next day as from the aforementioned dentist’s chair, toxins swilling about in their crania, the Indigoers recalled through a fog that the previous night had been a fine way to celebrate, though with a tinge of regret, their impending departure from French Polynesia, a place that had served as home base since Christmas.