Travel with Indigo

1.     FP, a colony of France, is one of the most expensive places in the world, prices of the most ordinary items breathtaking. Electricity is so costly that homes and shops are ill-lit and rarely air conditioned. Most homes have only cold water showers and the barest necessities of electric appliances. Cigarettes are $8 a pack and gasoline the same per gallon. Booze carries a 200 percent import duty thus making an active night on the town a budget buster.  An ordinary beer in a typical bar, the universal currency comparison, is $10. Diesel fuel for ships in transit, like Indigo, is just $3.75 per gallon, but for locals it’s $7.50. Cell phones are so costly that phone booths are omnipresent. All of this kleptomania is due entirely to duties and taxes imposed by the French.

2.    The Polynesian language, while euphonic, is utterly unrelated to Latin, the root of most Western tongues, and so must be learned solely by rote. It is perfectly phonetic, there are no silent letters, and it has lots of vowels. The airport on Tahiti, for example, is the Faaa International, pronounced fah-ah-ah and meaning either community or plantation depending on the context. Hello is ia orana, thank you is mururu, I love you is ua here vau ia oe. The English language gets from Polynesian the word taboo (tabu), meaning prohibited and often seen on no trespassing signs. It also gets tattoo (tatu), meaning to puncture. The place is the original home of body art as it’s now called.

3.     Local fishermen employ a technique that to my knowledge is not used anywhere else in the world, though it looks like great fun.  In high speed open boats 20 to 25 feet long and variously powered, the captain, usually the sole occupant, stands in a tight cubbyhole far in the bow, just a few feet aft of the bow stem. He steers using a vertical rod moved in the direction he wishes to travel. A conventional throttle is at his left hand. When the seas are rough, fish, most particularly the mahi-mahi, rise to the surface in search of food and are thus visible. Spotting a school of them, the fisherman applies power to overtake the fast fleeing fish and directs his craft alongside using the steering rod clasped between his knees or in his left hand. He then grabs in his right hand a stout spear tipped with a trident and, with the boat crashing through the rough waves at high speed, hurls it at his prey. If it’s a strike, he hauls in the catch using a lanyard attached to the spear. Too cool!

4.    By a wide measure, the strangest aspect of Polynesian, and especially Tahitian, culture is its sexual mores. Their practices are thousands of years old, somewhat chastened by the advance of Western culture, yet still widespread. They are also by Western standards reprehensible and vile. Incest is far more common and indeed accepted here than anywhere else on earth. Fathers with daughters, brothers with sisters, fathers with sons, you name it and it’s here.  It also is not at all uncommon for a man 30 to 40 years old or more to take as his “girlfriend”– for which read concubine–a pubescent girl as young as 12, though more commonly 13 or 14., and this with the permission of the girl’s father. The legal age is 18. There are also the mahus. These are young men, who for reasons I could not learn and quite apart from whether or not they are in fact gay, are from an early age shunted off to a female role and as a result grow up to be sexually ambiguous or outwardly effeminate. Most of course are, or through this experience become, gay though not all. A few, while effeminate, nevertheless are generally heterosexual, marry and raise families. Every village has one or more mahus, who by reason of this condition occupy a position of considerable, if perverse, status. Some become transvestites and, if they can afford it, travel to New Zealand to have an operation in which the entire male genitalia are removed and a vagina constructed in its stead. The Adams apple is even whittled down to be less visible. All of this occurs in most every culture in the world, but here it is far more common. And truly weird.

Now we’re bound for Raratonga in the Cook Islands and the prospect of new adventures.