TAHITI

Te Ao Hou, September 1960, Page 36

TAHITI I remember that Saturday; everyone was talking about our first port of call—Tahiti. We were due there on the Sunday morning. The air was warm and the sun caressed our skins. And as we lay there I felt that if the same sun breathed on Tahiti, then what a wonderful island it must be. You could hear snippets of gossip from excited men: “Boy! You just wait till you see Tahiti. You'll forget all about your wife. You just wait till you see Tahitian women. They're beautiful!” We met a Frenchmen who had been living in Whangarei and who was returning to Tahiti with his Tahitian-Chinese wife. He said to us, “you stay in Tahiti for a year, you stay there forever.” Such was the fever of excitement about Tahiti—its women, its climate, its love of life—that we too could not wait until the morrow dawned. Many of the men planned to go ashore by them-selves. They did not wish to be encumbered with jady friends from the boat. We slent in! People are already astir. We must have arrived, the boat is motionless. The cabin feels too warm. We struggle into our clothes. We hurry up to the deck. We breathe very deeply. Palm trees reached out and up from the shore in graceful welcome. Slow mists of steam wafted up lazily into the limitless blue of the Tahitian sky. And the sun was everywhere. It drenched itself into the green of the ground below and the blue of the mountains above and it sparkled in the waiting lagoons. And we saw the sun again in the glow of the Tahitian smiles on the wharf below and in the warmth of the honey-coloured skins. No garish signs of civilization greeted us. Before us was an island of incredible beauty. A few buildings badly needing a coat of paint interspersed themselves amongst coconut palms. Till about two miles inland the land inclined gently and then it rose to mountainous ridges of bearable height where the soft mists from the sundrenched earth hovered. ethereal cool I could smell the coconut oil—so I thought—it reminded me a little of sulphurous Rotorua. Indeed, the soft mists made the resemblance even stronger. We ate a hurried breakfast. The Italian waiter

said to my husband rather drilly, “Lock your wife up in the cabin for the day.” There were scooters for hire on shore and we managed to hire the last one for the day. Once we were on the scooter we forgot that we were going to drive 108 kilometres in our trip round the island, is a permanent fixture. Outside the is the one which encircles it. Even if you paint Tahiti on the finest of Japanese silks, you cannot reproduce the beauty of its unfolding scenes. You have to be there to feel that beauty come out of the earth, into the trees, and into the mountains, and down again from the sun. And the smells! If it is true to say that countries have smells peculiar to themselves, then Tahiti is filled with the sweetest. They are a mixture of coconut oil, frangipani, and other tropical scents. On either side of us as we drove down the road were rows of coconut palms and here and there thatched houses browned to a deep brown; and outside those houses brown people and brown children sat and laughed. They passed us on the road—children and people—some walking, some riding on bicycles, or squeezed into old decrepit ranch wagons that creaked and groaned with the weight of the load. There were several of these wagons crammed to capacity—Henry Ford would surely turn in his grave at the sight of such a load. The crowds sang and played guitars and the singing, the laughing, the strumming soothed away the click of the wheels of civilisation. I remembered a few lines from Yeats's “Lake Isle of Innisfree” and they needed little adjusting to fit in with the flow of this island people, who seem to know the art of gracious living and who live in the sun: “And I shall have some peace there For peace comes dropping slow… dropping To where the Tahitian sings….” We saw little boys and girls in their Sundaybest—girls in the brightest hues of nylon and cotton, with hair black and falling to the waist, boys barefooted and lithe, and we felt that it was good to be alive amongst people that sang from the soul. The men from the ship did not exaggerate the beauty of the women. They have warm beauty, a slenderness and barefooted grace that defies the convention of their European counterpart. Every where you see these brown slender women, with flowing rich black hair that caresses a waist and with hands that speak an elegance untutored. A few kilometres out of Papeete we stopped on a clearing overlooking the harbour and there we sat and breathed in the warmth, the stillness of the green of the trees, of the brown of the houses and of the blue of the mountains, the sky and the sea. Then along came a crowd of chattering tourists and gone was the silence. So we departed. During the New Year festivities, drinking bars spring up along the mainland like mushrooms. The French government gives the owners licences to open for ten days. So for ten days there is continuous drinking and dancing. My husband decided that we should visit a few of these gay places where we anticipated a riotous afternoon of good drinking and colourful dancing. We visited the famous Quin's bar which is very close to the wharf and is the mecca of all adventurous tourists. This place, unlike those dotted around the island, is a permanent fixture. Outside the bar tourists sat and sipped Tahitian beer to cool themselves from the heat of the day. We walked into a very hot and stuffy room crowded with people who, streaming with perspiration, danced vigorously to the monotonous beat of a two step tune strummed by a group of carefree Tahitians. While I stood and stared, my husband hurried off excitedly to get us some drinks. Before he returned an elderly, rather dignified lady approached me with garlands of threaded flowers. She placed one of these round my head, said a few words and pointed to the flowers. I beamed at her in delight. She placed another garland around my neck and I was enchanted. “They're just like Maoris,” I thought, “She's giving me these to make me feel welcome.” I smiled profusely. She pointed again to the flowers and she said a few words. But I understood her not. I grabbed my husband's arm on his return and introduced him to the lady. “Look!” I said excitedly, “She's given me these.” And then the lady presented my husband with identical garlands and again she spoke and pointed. “This lady says that each of these garlands costs twenty francs!” my husband informed me. But twenty francs each! I never felt so foolish. It wasn't that I didn't want to pay…. It was just that I thought….My husband grinned most eloquently and paid the eighty francs—for my naiveté. I swore that I was never again going to be caught by wily hawkers of the tourist trade. We saw the men from the boat dancing with the Tahitian women in complete abandon. It was good to sit and watch. The women charmed their willing partners into wriggling their hips and waving their arms and they danced such as I never saw them dance on the boat. The love-making and the caressing all seemed part of the dance. A few of these exuberant young men and women later decided that we should really make a night of it by visiting another of these drinking bars; so we left this place close on midnight. The taxi which we hired was one of those ranchwagons we'd seen earlier during the day—open at the sides and well used. Two drivers stood and waited for us to climb in. One was huge and looked like a body guard. I remember we were quite a cosmopolitan group—Dutch, German, Australian, a Samoan girl and her English husband, my husband who is Swiss and I, a Maori; and we were all overflowing with high spirits. About half way to our destination the wagon stopped. The drivers got out. There was a great deal of talking and much waving of arms and then we understood. We

have to pay our fares here and now! Perhaps they thought we'd be too drunk by the time we'd arrive at the bar and that we wouldn't pay our fares. Anyway it was all rather bewildering. The two drivers stood, one on either side of the windowless wagon, and with great haste collected the money. The chirpy younger members of the party were so bemused with liquor that they handed out their money with reckless generosity. I was flabbergastered! I think I was a little befuddled too; for we had passed the bottle round. I got out of the wagon and I stormed up to the drivers, as though I was doing a Maori haka: “I think this is disgusting! We haven't reached the bar yet. Why collect the money now?” Whether they understood me or not, I don't know. I only remember that I grabbed all the money that they were holding and even succeeded in producing some they had already pocketed. My husband, a more experienced traveller than I am, came at this stage to sooth my indignant feathers. “Now, now,” he said, “Don't be too hasty. Keep calm.” Together we counted the dirty notes and administered justice. The balance we distributed to the passengers amidst much laughter and merriment. Once arrived at our destination, we enjoyed more dancing, beer and vigorous music, till we were a group of very tired people who wisely departed at a time when it looked as looked as though we too would get involved in a boxing match between seamen and taxi drivers. The incident over the taxi fares was never forgotten by my fellow passengers. Particularly the men came up repeatedly and complimented me: “Remember Tahiti? Gee, you were great. You fixed those taxi drivers. We wouldn't have known what to do without you.” There was much sighing from the men as we left Tahiti. “No, the women on board are not as beautiful! Can't tell you why. No, they're not the same.” My husband and I both sighed because in Tahiti we had found beauty—the sun, the women, a people with a great charm. We had no need of our faded garlands. We had a memory.