Is this heaven?
29 Oct - 4 Nov, Ian
I posted the last blog entry from Starbucks in
Santiago. In an earlier entry I'd mentioned that Starbucks was offering reliable
WiFi, and Michelle from the Black Sheep Inn mailed me to say that she and Andres
were appalled to learn that the assault on South America was so advanced. As a
visitor, I don't feel the same sense of cultural encroachment: while the decor
and services of the Santiago Starbucks are conscientiously replicated from the
North American template, the vibe is different - while I was posting last time I
was being served unlimited free latte - and I could choose a local cafe instead
if I preferred. And I'm reconciled to the americanisation of major cities, on
the disputable grounds that americanisation, progress and improvement are
approximately the same in the context of commercial non-food services. It's the
extrapolation that's worrying: the prospect of Starbucks opening up in
Chugchilan within a decade. The shock of this vision is akin to the realisation
that your friends and family will one day
die.
It's very different here, though maybe not for too long. The airstrip in Rangiroa is only big enough for small planes and to get here it's necessary to transfer via Papeete in Tahiti. We overnighted at the Sofitel, which has just had a very nice renovation. The state of modernisation here is well illustrated by the presence of ethernet ports in each room that don't yet work. In Rangiroa there is apparently no internet access of any kind and so, as in Ecuador, I'll have to write blogs for later posting. Some must find this isolation very welcome, but not me. As I write these blogs I want them to go on-line straight away - I like the sense of a dialogue that I get from the ensuing mail. Today I'd like to raise a question about beliefs to see what email it generates, in advance of writing on the subject later. I also miss email.
En route we stopped to re-fuel at the most remote inhabited place on the planet: Easter Island. While we kicked our heels in the porch of the little terminal building we chatted to a Scottish couple who were also travelling for a year and who had been on the island for a week. She rated it as their best time; as far as I could tell, this wasn't simply because of the island's beauty or its attractions but because they had, for the only time, rested in one place for more than a few hours before yomping off to their next destination. Uncharacteristically, when we planned our year Paula had suggested spending a week at Easter Island for the enchantment of the place and I'd vetoed it out of suspicion that it would be dull rather than magical.
Our journey from Santiago to Tahiti moved us across seven time zones, extending our day by as many hours; now we hang on to the end of each day long after you're all done with it. Compensating for this, we go to bed earlier each night and rise earlier in the morning than we were doing previously, and this is the norm here.
As well as the location, the geology of Rangiroa shapes the lifestyle. It's an atoll. Even though I knew this before I came, I didn't really get it till we arrived. It's what philosophers call the difference between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance, and what the French discriminate between with the verbs savoir and connaitre. Like all of the Polynesian islands, Rangiroa was formed by volcanic activity. Many of them are pleasingly circular with white beaches formed from coral sand. The atolls are distinguished by having a large lagoon in the centre instead of land so that the land area is only a thin perimeter. In the case of Rangiroa, which is not untypical, the perimeter is breached at several points with channels linking the open sea on the outside with the lagoon on the interior, so it is not possible to walk or drive a complete circuit. The coral belt never reaches more than 300m in width, while at its widest point the lagoon is around 75 km across. Sandwiched between a white beach on the royal blue seaward side and another white beach on the turquoise lagoon side are exotic green coconut trees with clusters of yellow and orange coconuts. In the inhabited areas there are simple houses with concrete bases, stud walls and corrugated tin roofs, and in addition to this there isn't much else: a small airport, a few places to stay and eat, a couple of churches and schools, two or three banks (only one ATM), a chemist. It's unlike anywhere I've ever seen.
Our pension is at the end of the strip of road-joined islets that has the atoll's main village at the other end and the airport in the middle. The deck from the dining terrace stands over the channel that separates the strip from the next segment of land, where the atoll's second village is situated. The channel is 200~300m wide and water runs through it with a visibly violent current. In the absence of the proprietress the pension is run by a lovely lady called Liddy. She only speaks French, and the first other guests we ran into were also French people who were perfectly friendly but couldn't or preferred not to speak English. To be in a French-speaking place seemed so easy after a couple of months in South America, and it seemed as though we would all, through necessity, get plenty of chance to practice. However, when we were taking a walk along the lagoon beach we ran into some more guests - an American couple (Terry and Tonna) and a couple of South Africans who now live in Toronto (Sue and Bert) - and until they left this morning we've passed all of our social time with them.
After we returned from the beach I went for my first run since I'd suffered ligament trouble in Alaska. I returned to find Paula and the girls along with Bert, Sue, Tonna and Terry on the deck watching dolphins arcing along and leaping out of the sea in the channel. We couldn't believe how active they were. For an hour and a half they flew out individually, in pairs and in groups of up to half a dozen. They leapt out forwards and backwards; they back-surfed; they stood out upright; when they leaped they reached heights of over 5 metres. There were large dolphins and there were dolphin young.
During the display a local guy climbed on a nearby post and started yelling at them through a loudhailer. I joined him on this post and asked him what he was up to and he told me that his name was Bruno and he did this every day to encourage them.
The following morning they were out again and this time I got my camera and took some photographs, including the one that's now the image for the Rangiroa category of this blog; here's another:
Bruno was out again too, chivvying them along.
That evening as the tides turned and the sea in the channel became choppy once more there were a few dolphins to be seen surfing along and occasionally flipping out. If we hadn't seen the show the previous evening - which was probably the most spectacular natural animal display that I've ever witnessed - we would have been thrilled, but our expectations were now extremely high. There was less whooping from our deck. We'd have to see whether it was the first or the second night that was exceptional (maybe, like the rest of the atoll, the dolphins were observing the Day of the Dead). I had little doubt: if they did the big show every night, or even frequently, you'd have heard of the place and there would be a grandstand. Rumours circulated that they were excited on that particular night because the young (pups? calves?) had only just been born; others said that it was the full moon (an explanation about which I'm as cynical as Zoe).
Many of the visitors to Rangiroa, including our new friends Bert and Terry, are here for the diving. There are good opportunities to see several different types of shark, and possibly to swim alongside the dolphins. There is also good coral and plenty of beautiful tropical fish, and rays and eels are common too; you can see all of these perfectly well with a snorkel and mask, and even just by looking into the lagoon from the beach or the quay. Paula and Zoe went off a couple of days ago with Sue and Tonna on a snorkelling trip along the channel. They were dropped off at the upstream (sea) end and drifted past us as we watched from the deck at some speed; after repeating this a couple of times they were taken off to a more tranquil location where there are more fish.
While I'm here I'm hoping to join the diving set and have signed up for a course to get my PADI Open Water certificate. I'd done a beginner dive in Australia once before out by the Great Barrier Reef. Then, before I did that dive they'd insisted on giving me some training in a resort pool first and it seemed a serious business. This was a few years ago and I've forgotten everything, and it's not like that here. The only question they asked me before we set off was my shoe size so that they could give me some fins - there were no medical checks at all. A French guy told me to find myself a wet suit and then we were off in a zodiac with a dive master (dive mistress?) called Marina and a French couple who had turned up for a resort dive. We moored the boat at a spot called The Aquarium and after a rapid briefing exclusively in French we tumbled backwards into the sea and were away.
I've been a couple more times since then and have had Marina's full attention, and she has also given me instruction that's mainly in English. Back at the pension Bert has picked up on the fact that I haven't been given the PADI manual that I'm supposed to study and that I'm not getting top quality science from the training course, so he and Terry have filled me in on some of the things I ought to know. These guys are exceptionally considerate (as another example, they're the only non-family/work colleagues I can recall ever asking me more than two questions about my job). I enjoy diving with Marina - she has a very soothing manner - and I feel that with my morsels of dive info from Bert and a post-facto read of the PADI manual I should be able to accumulate the knowledge that the qualification certifies. It's fun. Even at the depths that Terry and Bert dive to they report that the water is 90 degrees F and there's no shortage of marine life. So far (after 3 dives) my only "notable" sighting has been a white-tip shark, but I've equally enjoyed the giant clams and the countless bright fish. It's also fun to do the little exercises, such as kneeling on the sea bed and removing and replacing your mask and your regulator.
I also like Marina because she was kind enough to describe my figure as "svelte". This may not be exactly true in comparison to the magazine-perfect bodies of the dive masters (including Marina herself) - like a crumby shower that shoots straight from too cold to too hot, since we left Ecuador and resumed broadband alcohol consumption I've gone from too thin to "need to start running again" - but it's fair in comparison to many of the other diving clients, and especially in comparison with the locals. Someone told the story the other day that Polynesia was settled by shipwreck survivors, who passed on their tendency to be corpulent (the thin ones didn't make it). Well, I don't believe that but there are certainly a lot of very big people here; it's like being back in the States.
Apart from diving and appreciation of the beauty of the place there isn't a lot laid on for you to do. A couple of times we've been for a walk along the (probably private) beach by the luxury Kia Ora hotel. Like all of the places to stay on Rangiroa this is a constellation of individual bungalows. A few of the Kia Ora ones are set on stilts in the shallows of the lagoon and provide travel brochure opportunities for photographs of your perfect paradise retreat. Most of the others (there are dozens) are laid out in an estate on lawns behind the beach and strike me as being rather sad. As you walk along the beach looking in at the people who've spent a few hundred extra bucks for a sea-front bungalow the most salient characteristic is that they're isolated in their own cells and not talking to any of their travel neighbours sitting only a few metres away. Maybe this is exactly what they wanted. Personally, I'd much rather be chatting to the other people on our deck, and having a communal dinner in the evening.
There is one guest at Kia Ora whom I've managed to bump into most days. He seems to be a property developer and is what I should probably call a Swedish American, and he's travelling with his Swedish American wife; they left their kids with someone else. In the few days that they've been here (they arrived on the same flight as us) they've been over to the Kia Ora "Sauvage" retreat on the other side of the atoll for the thrill of a night without electricity, and they've cycled up and down the road on rental bikes. When I saw him yesterday he professed that he was fed up with sitting in the sun and he'd left his wife for a few hours to go for a walk. He seemed stir crazy. He said to me, perfectly accurately but with a hint of a derisive sneer, that Rangiroa is the sort of place where you need a good book.
Since we've been here there are a few songs that have been ringing around in my head like advertising jingles. One is Heroes by David Bowie (I, I wish I could swim, Like the dolphins, Like dolphins can swim), although I actually have it sung by him in French (he also did it in German). Another is City of Angels by 10,000 Maniacs (Heaven, Is this heaven, Where we are?) and the third is Heaven by Talking Heads (Heaven, Heaven is a place, A place where nothing, Nothing ever happens). If it is heaven here you certainly pay for it. We had, of course, negotiated the cost of our half-board accommodation before we arrived but the cost of every other little thing (a taxi to the bank, a roll for lunch) is shocking. Yesterday, when we weren't even sure that we had enough cash to pay for a taxi to the ATM, which itself only offered an uncertain probability of dispensing more cash, we reached the "what are our options?" time of the month. We calculated that we could bail out, fly to Auckland early and spend a week or so in New Zealand anywhere we liked and still save money. Well, we did manage to get some cash and we've looked at the numbers calmly and decided that we can come in under budget for the month so the panic is off. And it is beautiful here, and restful. And we do have those books.
It's very different here, though maybe not for too long. The airstrip in Rangiroa is only big enough for small planes and to get here it's necessary to transfer via Papeete in Tahiti. We overnighted at the Sofitel, which has just had a very nice renovation. The state of modernisation here is well illustrated by the presence of ethernet ports in each room that don't yet work. In Rangiroa there is apparently no internet access of any kind and so, as in Ecuador, I'll have to write blogs for later posting. Some must find this isolation very welcome, but not me. As I write these blogs I want them to go on-line straight away - I like the sense of a dialogue that I get from the ensuing mail. Today I'd like to raise a question about beliefs to see what email it generates, in advance of writing on the subject later. I also miss email.
En route we stopped to re-fuel at the most remote inhabited place on the planet: Easter Island. While we kicked our heels in the porch of the little terminal building we chatted to a Scottish couple who were also travelling for a year and who had been on the island for a week. She rated it as their best time; as far as I could tell, this wasn't simply because of the island's beauty or its attractions but because they had, for the only time, rested in one place for more than a few hours before yomping off to their next destination. Uncharacteristically, when we planned our year Paula had suggested spending a week at Easter Island for the enchantment of the place and I'd vetoed it out of suspicion that it would be dull rather than magical.
Our journey from Santiago to Tahiti moved us across seven time zones, extending our day by as many hours; now we hang on to the end of each day long after you're all done with it. Compensating for this, we go to bed earlier each night and rise earlier in the morning than we were doing previously, and this is the norm here.
As well as the location, the geology of Rangiroa shapes the lifestyle. It's an atoll. Even though I knew this before I came, I didn't really get it till we arrived. It's what philosophers call the difference between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance, and what the French discriminate between with the verbs savoir and connaitre. Like all of the Polynesian islands, Rangiroa was formed by volcanic activity. Many of them are pleasingly circular with white beaches formed from coral sand. The atolls are distinguished by having a large lagoon in the centre instead of land so that the land area is only a thin perimeter. In the case of Rangiroa, which is not untypical, the perimeter is breached at several points with channels linking the open sea on the outside with the lagoon on the interior, so it is not possible to walk or drive a complete circuit. The coral belt never reaches more than 300m in width, while at its widest point the lagoon is around 75 km across. Sandwiched between a white beach on the royal blue seaward side and another white beach on the turquoise lagoon side are exotic green coconut trees with clusters of yellow and orange coconuts. In the inhabited areas there are simple houses with concrete bases, stud walls and corrugated tin roofs, and in addition to this there isn't much else: a small airport, a few places to stay and eat, a couple of churches and schools, two or three banks (only one ATM), a chemist. It's unlike anywhere I've ever seen.
Our pension is at the end of the strip of road-joined islets that has the atoll's main village at the other end and the airport in the middle. The deck from the dining terrace stands over the channel that separates the strip from the next segment of land, where the atoll's second village is situated. The channel is 200~300m wide and water runs through it with a visibly violent current. In the absence of the proprietress the pension is run by a lovely lady called Liddy. She only speaks French, and the first other guests we ran into were also French people who were perfectly friendly but couldn't or preferred not to speak English. To be in a French-speaking place seemed so easy after a couple of months in South America, and it seemed as though we would all, through necessity, get plenty of chance to practice. However, when we were taking a walk along the lagoon beach we ran into some more guests - an American couple (Terry and Tonna) and a couple of South Africans who now live in Toronto (Sue and Bert) - and until they left this morning we've passed all of our social time with them.
After we returned from the beach I went for my first run since I'd suffered ligament trouble in Alaska. I returned to find Paula and the girls along with Bert, Sue, Tonna and Terry on the deck watching dolphins arcing along and leaping out of the sea in the channel. We couldn't believe how active they were. For an hour and a half they flew out individually, in pairs and in groups of up to half a dozen. They leapt out forwards and backwards; they back-surfed; they stood out upright; when they leaped they reached heights of over 5 metres. There were large dolphins and there were dolphin young.
During the display a local guy climbed on a nearby post and started yelling at them through a loudhailer. I joined him on this post and asked him what he was up to and he told me that his name was Bruno and he did this every day to encourage them.
The following morning they were out again and this time I got my camera and took some photographs, including the one that's now the image for the Rangiroa category of this blog; here's another:
Bruno was out again too, chivvying them along.
That evening as the tides turned and the sea in the channel became choppy once more there were a few dolphins to be seen surfing along and occasionally flipping out. If we hadn't seen the show the previous evening - which was probably the most spectacular natural animal display that I've ever witnessed - we would have been thrilled, but our expectations were now extremely high. There was less whooping from our deck. We'd have to see whether it was the first or the second night that was exceptional (maybe, like the rest of the atoll, the dolphins were observing the Day of the Dead). I had little doubt: if they did the big show every night, or even frequently, you'd have heard of the place and there would be a grandstand. Rumours circulated that they were excited on that particular night because the young (pups? calves?) had only just been born; others said that it was the full moon (an explanation about which I'm as cynical as Zoe).
Many of the visitors to Rangiroa, including our new friends Bert and Terry, are here for the diving. There are good opportunities to see several different types of shark, and possibly to swim alongside the dolphins. There is also good coral and plenty of beautiful tropical fish, and rays and eels are common too; you can see all of these perfectly well with a snorkel and mask, and even just by looking into the lagoon from the beach or the quay. Paula and Zoe went off a couple of days ago with Sue and Tonna on a snorkelling trip along the channel. They were dropped off at the upstream (sea) end and drifted past us as we watched from the deck at some speed; after repeating this a couple of times they were taken off to a more tranquil location where there are more fish.
While I'm here I'm hoping to join the diving set and have signed up for a course to get my PADI Open Water certificate. I'd done a beginner dive in Australia once before out by the Great Barrier Reef. Then, before I did that dive they'd insisted on giving me some training in a resort pool first and it seemed a serious business. This was a few years ago and I've forgotten everything, and it's not like that here. The only question they asked me before we set off was my shoe size so that they could give me some fins - there were no medical checks at all. A French guy told me to find myself a wet suit and then we were off in a zodiac with a dive master (dive mistress?) called Marina and a French couple who had turned up for a resort dive. We moored the boat at a spot called The Aquarium and after a rapid briefing exclusively in French we tumbled backwards into the sea and were away.
I've been a couple more times since then and have had Marina's full attention, and she has also given me instruction that's mainly in English. Back at the pension Bert has picked up on the fact that I haven't been given the PADI manual that I'm supposed to study and that I'm not getting top quality science from the training course, so he and Terry have filled me in on some of the things I ought to know. These guys are exceptionally considerate (as another example, they're the only non-family/work colleagues I can recall ever asking me more than two questions about my job). I enjoy diving with Marina - she has a very soothing manner - and I feel that with my morsels of dive info from Bert and a post-facto read of the PADI manual I should be able to accumulate the knowledge that the qualification certifies. It's fun. Even at the depths that Terry and Bert dive to they report that the water is 90 degrees F and there's no shortage of marine life. So far (after 3 dives) my only "notable" sighting has been a white-tip shark, but I've equally enjoyed the giant clams and the countless bright fish. It's also fun to do the little exercises, such as kneeling on the sea bed and removing and replacing your mask and your regulator.
I also like Marina because she was kind enough to describe my figure as "svelte". This may not be exactly true in comparison to the magazine-perfect bodies of the dive masters (including Marina herself) - like a crumby shower that shoots straight from too cold to too hot, since we left Ecuador and resumed broadband alcohol consumption I've gone from too thin to "need to start running again" - but it's fair in comparison to many of the other diving clients, and especially in comparison with the locals. Someone told the story the other day that Polynesia was settled by shipwreck survivors, who passed on their tendency to be corpulent (the thin ones didn't make it). Well, I don't believe that but there are certainly a lot of very big people here; it's like being back in the States.
Apart from diving and appreciation of the beauty of the place there isn't a lot laid on for you to do. A couple of times we've been for a walk along the (probably private) beach by the luxury Kia Ora hotel. Like all of the places to stay on Rangiroa this is a constellation of individual bungalows. A few of the Kia Ora ones are set on stilts in the shallows of the lagoon and provide travel brochure opportunities for photographs of your perfect paradise retreat. Most of the others (there are dozens) are laid out in an estate on lawns behind the beach and strike me as being rather sad. As you walk along the beach looking in at the people who've spent a few hundred extra bucks for a sea-front bungalow the most salient characteristic is that they're isolated in their own cells and not talking to any of their travel neighbours sitting only a few metres away. Maybe this is exactly what they wanted. Personally, I'd much rather be chatting to the other people on our deck, and having a communal dinner in the evening.
There is one guest at Kia Ora whom I've managed to bump into most days. He seems to be a property developer and is what I should probably call a Swedish American, and he's travelling with his Swedish American wife; they left their kids with someone else. In the few days that they've been here (they arrived on the same flight as us) they've been over to the Kia Ora "Sauvage" retreat on the other side of the atoll for the thrill of a night without electricity, and they've cycled up and down the road on rental bikes. When I saw him yesterday he professed that he was fed up with sitting in the sun and he'd left his wife for a few hours to go for a walk. He seemed stir crazy. He said to me, perfectly accurately but with a hint of a derisive sneer, that Rangiroa is the sort of place where you need a good book.
Since we've been here there are a few songs that have been ringing around in my head like advertising jingles. One is Heroes by David Bowie (I, I wish I could swim, Like the dolphins, Like dolphins can swim), although I actually have it sung by him in French (he also did it in German). Another is City of Angels by 10,000 Maniacs (Heaven, Is this heaven, Where we are?) and the third is Heaven by Talking Heads (Heaven, Heaven is a place, A place where nothing, Nothing ever happens). If it is heaven here you certainly pay for it. We had, of course, negotiated the cost of our half-board accommodation before we arrived but the cost of every other little thing (a taxi to the bank, a roll for lunch) is shocking. Yesterday, when we weren't even sure that we had enough cash to pay for a taxi to the ATM, which itself only offered an uncertain probability of dispensing more cash, we reached the "what are our options?" time of the month. We calculated that we could bail out, fly to Auckland early and spend a week or so in New Zealand anywhere we liked and still save money. Well, we did manage to get some cash and we've looked at the numbers calmly and decided that we can come in under budget for the month so the panic is off. And it is beautiful here, and restful. And we do have those books.
Posted: Thu - November 3, 2005 at 03:34 PM
Quick Links
Links
Archives
XML/RSS Feed
Calendar
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
Categories
Comments powered by
Statistics
Total entries in this blog:
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Nov 19, 2005 01:58 PM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Nov 19, 2005 01:58 PM