Yacht Watermelon in Tahiti.

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July, 1992
We are sitting in downtown Papeete, the yacht anchored stern-to the beach. This is incredible - virtually no wind, only disruption is from the wake that the ferry boats make as they come and go. By Bastille Day we understand that this place is going to be knee-deep in boats (we are told that we are going to be the first of three layers of boats moored here in a couple weeks). But it's so great to be in civilization for awhile that we're in no hurry to move.

We've heard so many stories of how expensive Tahiti is that we have to laugh at the reality. Perhaps we've been hardened by our many years in French St. Martin and our many forays to the rest of the islands in the Caribbean. And others here, who've been in the Pacific for awhile, say that there are a number of food items that are cheaper here than anywhere else in the Pacific (such as rice, pasta, beans, etc.). One couple anchored next to us says that Hawaii is more expensive than Tahiti (confirming what a fellow who was from Hawaii said when I spoke with him in Costa Rica).

For now, what we've found is that eating out in restaurants is expensive (though really not much more than in St. Martin, if at all). The sidewalk cafes selling croissants and coffee are just about the same as in St. Martin. Yacht hardware is ridiculously expensive, line is high (but cheaper than buying in the States and having it shipped here), telephone calls are ridiculously high, but they were in St. Martin also (not to mention how idiotically expensive they were in Ecuador - as a matter of fact, I think the price for a phone call from here is about the same as from Ecuador - you figure it).

We were sitting in a café yesterday saying what a pleasant change to come to civilized, clean places (read non-Latin American). We walked through the open-air market here and marveled at how clean everything was. In the market in La Libertad, Ecuador they hire a kid with a whisk to beat the flies off everything, you walk through mud and offal to get anything, and are assaulted with the smell of rotten vegetables and urine. Throughout Latin America we were appalled by the dirt and trash everywhere (except for Quito, Ecuador and Caracas, VZ - two surprisingly clean cities - certainly cleaner than New York). Only in the San Blas Islands, where the Kuna Indians sweep their dirt paths every day, and in a very few of the indian towns in Ecuador, did we see trash free streets. The Spanish mentality seems to be that of hiring someone lower on the social scale to do the cleaning of their homes, and the hell with anything outside of their own personal space. They seem to us to be very short-sighted, caring nothing for public sanitation since it does not (in their minds) directly benefit them personally. So the poor live in the most appalling conditions; everyone copes with poor water and sewage; and the wealthy have their enclaves where they buy purified water and pipe their waste to the boundary of their property where it becomes someone else's problem. And such a shame, because South America is such a beautiful continent.

Such a contrast with the villages we've seen here in French Polynesia. For all our snide remarks about the French, they do make things work. Combined with what seems to be the basic cleanliness of the Polynesians, and everything is just lovely. You just don't see trash - anywhere. We've walked to abandoned houses and fishing pearling camps and seen no trash. No plastic bags, bottles, anything. The French have built elaborate water delivery systems to the villages and houses - collecting water from high up where there is nothing to pollute the supply and piping it to everyone. They've created a welfare system for the Polynesians, purportedly to head off any independence movement (which would mean they would lose their nuclear testing sites). The French are certainly not unselfish in what they are doing, and their nuclear testing is morally indefensible, but they have brought a the islanders a level of care that they never had before. And the islanders I spoke with are quite ambivalent. The older people to some degree regret the changes that are occurring, especially as their children acquire a taste for all these new and modern conveniences (one women told me that the children don't want to eat fish anymore, traditionally their sole source of protein except for their once a year pig - they want to have chicken). But they also want more for their children than they had, so they approach/avoid the trappings of "civilization". And one woman I spoke with who had spent two years in the U.S. would love to go back there. Of course, nobody will starve here.

The islands that we've visited are so very lush that they will always have food [note: this is not so true in the dry islands of the Tuomotus], and the communal nature of their society insures that nobody in need goes without. It's pleasant and refreshing, but rather Spartan for our jaded consumer-oriented tastes, and I'm afraid that we find ourselves itching to get back to civilization after awhile. [Jeanne's cynicism will now hold sway for several sentences]: I would love to see some of our "back to nature" American youth try to survive on some of these islands. To my way of thinking, you'd have to be brain-dead to spend more than a few months "foraging" for food without the intellectual stimulation of books, newspapers, magazines, [even television] from one month to the next, and no new faces from one year to the next. I think that's why the islanders traditionally greeted the yachts so lavishly when they arrived - it was something new, interesting, and stimulating.

Anyway, enough of that philosophizing. We are enjoying ourselves, have a long list of islands to visit (there are so many to choose from) and can't even plan one month in advance, except for the broadest ideas. Since there's so much to see out here, I'm more than happy to make a few more long passages, particularly when the landfalls are so interesting.