We are finally in French Polynesia! Mangareva is the largest of the Gambler Islands, but it's not so large - one can walk completely around the island in about six hours. The picture in our "Landfalls of Paradise" show Mangareva as quite desolate, but now it is now a lush island, with papaya, grapefruit, bananas, breadfruit, and mangos growing wild. This is where the black pearls are cultured, so the people are quite affluent. However, like all French islands, things are quite casual. The last supply ship got caught in a tropical storm coming here, so they lost all the propane and gasoline that they were carrying on deck. The flour in the hold got wet, and so did a great many of the other provisions that were coming here, so supplies of just about everything except canned butter and milk and cheese are in short supply. (Not that there's much of anything even under the best of circumstances, we understand). Just because some essentials were lost doesn't mean that they're going to send another supply ship out early - oh, no, one must keep to the schedule - so they don't expect another ship (and therefore flour, propane, etc.) until June. Bread is therefore being rationed - they bake bread every other day - and we can only get two loaves at a time, so each of us goes in separately to get our two loaves. 

We can't just casually catch fish, because there is so much ciguatera here, so we have to go out beyond the fringing reef to catch tuna, and the lobsters have been fished out to supply Tahiti, so we are pretty much living on boat stores. Good thing that we like pizza (we can get good New Zealand cheese here) and spaghetti and rice and grapefruit. But the people are nice, the island is quite pretty, and it's a good stopping and resting place before we continue on into the heart of French Polynesia. 

We won't stay here too long but we have some things to fix before we leave (always something to fix) and do some diving to find some great shells.
 

TOP

Copyright © exists on ALL material on this website.