Resurfacing
13 - 19 Nov, Ian
I think that this is the first blog that I've
written in flight. We're heading away from Tahiti to Australia with a change at
Auckland in a couple of hours; it feels like a significant transition and I want
to finish off my Rangiroa diary before getting immersed in the next
segment.
The last week at our pension - Les Relais de Josephine - was a good one. After a few nights of dining at our own table we became sociable again. This was kick-started when we met Don and Mike, a very pleasant couple from Ohio who had come over for dinner at our place one evening while staying at the Kia Ora. We got chatting to them and then went back to see them at theirs a couple of day's later, giving us an insider look at the Kia Ora. To me the Kia Ora remains more parody than paradis but there's no denying the attractiveness of the handful of bungalows that are stilted over the turquoise sea - and Don and Mike were in one of these. They have their own steps from their back deck into the sea, with a freshwater shower right there so that you can desalinate without coming inside. And they have a glass coffee table in the bedroom that looks right into the sea - quite twee but entertaining and the girls loved it. The guys took us over to the hotel's fancy pool but the staff wouldn't let us in; we didn't care: it looked to be designed for photography rather than swimming and the sea was only a few yards away so we all swam there instead. Mike and Don had checked in for 10 days having secured a deal that ameliorated the crippling expense of the place, and in that time they were exploring the atoll as actively as you can. They confirmed my impression that most of the Kia Ora's other guests checked in for only one or two nights, barely leaving their air-conditioned units during their brief stay.
We also made some new French friends at the relais - Philippe and Line. Like most of the other French couples we spoke to, they had left young progeny at home - in their case a two year old daughter. I'm sure that all of the Club Med set were perfectly nice too but Line and Philippe struck us as more distinct personalities and we warmed to them straightaway. They live near Paris where Line works as a perfume analyst (yes, she has read Perfume) and Philippe is a project manager for a firm that sources car components. A few years ago we'd toured round a perfume factory in Grasse in the south of France and encountered perfume analysts there; now we know that this is primarily a tourist venue and that the big houses outsource all of their analysis to firms like Line's in Paris. I hope that Line and Philippe come and see us in Somerset one day. Philippe has never been to England and Line's only experience was a miserable-sounding stay with a family in an unattractive town. I know exactly the problem she had - the problem was me, or people like me.
A couple of days ago we all went on one of the boat trips that I've mentioned before; ours was to the Ile aux Récifs. There were a dozen or so of us altogether in a 24 foot boat - it had a spine of double-backed seats running along it from which we faced looking out to either side like vertebrae. When we'd heard about these trips we'd imagined them to be calm since they all take you out over the lagoon (rather than the open sea) to some deserted spot across the atoll. I guess we might have deduced from the fact that the trip was cancelled the preceding day due to bad weather that there can be some chop, and of course since the lagoon extends to 1,000 square kilometres or so and is linked to the sea occasional waves should really be expected. And choppy waves we got. Paula described it as her "worst experience" of the year, though I think that was partly a response to the drama of the moment. The side of the boat where she and the girls sat faced into the waves as we travelled there and they were issued with sou-westers. Paula described it as being like having a bucket of water thrown over you every 30 seconds for the 50 minute duration of the crossing, and it was similar where I sat too. If you ever throw a load of water out of a bucket (say over a car that you're cleaning) it seems to hang in the air for a moment and it was like that watching the curtain of water approaching you. On both sides of the boat we were encouraged to hold onto a rope that ran across our laps. A couple of times loud cracking sounds issued from the floor of the boat that were so violent it seemed as though it was breaking up.
But when we got there it was worth it. There was, inevitably, a beautiful and deserted white coral beach freely decorated with coconut palms. Also, being the Ile aux Récifs, there were pillars that they say are of coral but seemed to me to be of the volcanic rock that Hawaiians onomatopoeically call Ah-Ah because it hurts to walk on. The pillars stood between the lagoon and the sea and we were invited to walk across to them. We were given fair warning that the walking was dangerous and offered a couple of opportunities to turn back. Here, for posterity, is the last photograph that I ever took with the zoomy Olympus that I've been using this year before I slipped over and chucked it in the sea:
Oh well!
The lunch was so nice that Heidi asked as we ate if we could do the trip again. Actually, it was the sharks as much as they food that appealed to her. There were dozens of pretty black tips swimming around in the lagoon shallows by where we were based. By the time you read this (or shortly after) there should be some photo's of them on our homepage. These were taken with Heidi's little Olympus, for which we have a waterproof housing (and if you look at the snaps the sea colour really is as different as it looks when viewed from above and from within). Zoe and Heidi surprised themselves by how keen they were to get a mask and snorkel on and swim amongst the sharks - it really was very cool.
Our party was led by a local guy whom some lady or other (think it was a Club Med person) had enthused over to Paula. He had George Michael good looks, and the resemblance made me unfairly suspicious (I'm not a huge fan). Well, by the middle of the afternoon I had actual grounds to dislike him since (as we'd been warned) he entertained us all by baiting the sharks with the lunch scraps so that he could hoik one out of the water. When he failed to grab one by the fin a few times he eventually managed to catch one in a noose trap and dropped it onto the dry sand. Then he picked it up and disported himself with it for a while. Everyone else seemed amused; I willed him to lose an arm, and I think my family was with me. Maybe this animal sympathy is an English thing.
Later in the afternoon one of his colleagues returned from a foray with a huge brown and blue crustacean of some sort that he described as a crab. I counted and it didn't have ten legs (including the pincers) so whatever it was it wasn't a decapod. If you can identify it from the photo on the homepage I'd be grateful. Again, there was period of prodding and poking, rendered easier for those interested when the catcher deftly bound all of its non-claw legs with a length of dry palm. Sadly, none of those who taunted it by dangling sticks and dead coral into its pincers lost a finger. I did, though, notice that the crew seemed to be taking this specimen back with them, presumably to eat, which (you may think paradoxically) appeased my sensitivities.
When we got back to the pension Philippe worked patiently and determinedly for a couple of hours dismantling my camera, removing the extraneous water from within the lens and drying out the electronics. But it seems as though in the few hours between my dropping it and us returning the brine had already oxidised some of the parts. When we get to Aus I'll replace it, hoping that the insurance pays up. I'm a little tempted to upgrade to a digital SLR. Since we've been away we've come acroos many people who have them; they all have the same model (to within a version number) - it's a Nikon - and they all love them. I've taken a few photos with them myself and I'd like to be able to justify getting one. But what I really like is the action - the way that taking a photo sounds and feels like shutting the door of a Mercedes - rather than anything rational. I think I'll end up with the same Olympus model I just drowned because it's much smaller, it costs far less, it's less of a theft target and so long as the light's good and you're not in a major hurry it takes reasonable photographs. Change my mind if you can.
Since our excursion we've been tootling around the main part of the atoll. We hired bikes one day but the quality of the hire cycles at our place was much lower than at, say, the Kia Ora where their new chrome glints and sparkles in the sun, and on our first outing I had to abandon Heidi's bike by the roadside before so many parts fell off that it collapsed. On our second outing Paula and Zoe took the same rusty bikes with flat tyres and I hired a scooter and had Heidi on the back. We went to the pearl farm (black pearls are the local thing) because we thought we should. But we just missed a tour and realised that we wanted neither to traipse round after someone past the jaded pearl harvesters nor to buy joke-price jewellry. More usefully, we went to the post office and mailed home more excess luggage. The George Michael lookalike sea-life abuser was also in there and warmed us with his special smile.
Yesterday we flew out of Rangiroa. At the airport we saw a few dozen boxes of live tropical fish being checked through for a flight. I've always liked fish tanks at home but now I'm a little disturbed by the provenance of the fish - it's such a long way to bring them and they really are better off here. I wonder what the survival rate is?
As on the way in, we, through necessity, had a night in a hotel on Papeete. This time we chose the Sheraton so that we could meet up with Bert, Sue, Terry and Tonna, whom we'd met a couple of weeks previously at Les Relais de Josephine. If you're thinking of going to this hotel as a special treat choose somewhere else. The decor, the pool and the towels are all good, and some of the staff are good too: the waiter who served us our lunch was great (Paula and Zoe both chose what he called an "ombourzjair", which is just like a hamburger only 10 times the price), but he insisted we didn't tip him because he doesn't get to keep tips. In corridor encounters the Sheraton staff greeted us with a suspicious amount of Polynesian - when I've heard the locals here speaking to one another they've generally been using French, and I suspect that the Polynesian vocab here will become functionally the same as the conventions of happy speech that Disney staff are instructed to use. But the unforgiveable flaws of the Sheraton are the poor food served to the strains of Phoenix Nights club-style renditions of Everybody's Talkin' (Nilsson would die) and other classics; the dodgy internet access that, despite being the planet's most expensive, doesn't work (a guy on the front desk consoled me that the Sheraton on the island of Mo'orea has a new system that's actually usable); and the families of cockroaches that live behind the tongue-and-groove work in the bathroom. And more than anything the extravagant expense of it all.
We had a very good evening anyway, and caught up with our friends who have been boating around the islands. Tonna has a little story that sounds like a fable: she was snorkelling over coral in a metre or two of water when she accidentally flipped off one of her gold ear rings. Terry saw a beautiful fish swallow it straight up as it landed on the sea bed and as he was telling Tonna and she was bemoaning her bad luck to Bert the fish swam right round to the very same spot and spat the ear ring back out, where she retrieved it. Terry and Tonna left last night to catch a flight back to the States, while Bert and Sue stayed over and are on this flight with us now.
Personally, I didn't sleep much last night. I was awoken in the small hours, as I have for several of the past nights, by the irritation of mosquito bites. Whatever anyone in Maine or Alaska or Zambia or anywhere else tells you the mozzies here are the worst, although thankfully they're not malarial. I've found that the best tonic is an hour of Fiona Apple. Last night I was still restless after this and I got to thinking about the way that men and women have a different temporal structure of experience. If I can think of anyone out there who I haven't yet managed to piss off at some point from these pages I may write down my reflections on this topic in one of the coming blogs. In the meantime, you can do a few little experiments that I devised when I was trying to convince myself that this could be science. You'll need an opposite-sex friend. For the second and third of the two little tests it would be much better if you got together before you read the sentences immediately below...
First, pick an absent friend (say Paula or me) and over the next few days or weeks make a note of whether you think about them, and if so what prompted it. Then compare notes.
Second, think of a few people whom you've both met with recently. Now, see if you can remember (a) what they were wearing when you last met them and (b) what colour their eyes are. See how well you both do.
Third, agree on some notable events of the past years such as holidays, projects and/or the birth of friends' children and then see who is better at working out when they happened.
I have predictions in all cases.
This flight is going nicely. There are films but I don't want to watch any of them, so writing this has been a nice distraction. At the start of the flight I finished the novel Tar Baby by Toni Morrison, which someone (I think Ewa) swapped with us recently. If you've ever read it drop me a line and let me know what you thought.
I'm looking forward to being in Aus. I want to buy books, to visit a mac shop and to get properly on line. Three weeks off line and with no phone network was okay, but enough.
The last week at our pension - Les Relais de Josephine - was a good one. After a few nights of dining at our own table we became sociable again. This was kick-started when we met Don and Mike, a very pleasant couple from Ohio who had come over for dinner at our place one evening while staying at the Kia Ora. We got chatting to them and then went back to see them at theirs a couple of day's later, giving us an insider look at the Kia Ora. To me the Kia Ora remains more parody than paradis but there's no denying the attractiveness of the handful of bungalows that are stilted over the turquoise sea - and Don and Mike were in one of these. They have their own steps from their back deck into the sea, with a freshwater shower right there so that you can desalinate without coming inside. And they have a glass coffee table in the bedroom that looks right into the sea - quite twee but entertaining and the girls loved it. The guys took us over to the hotel's fancy pool but the staff wouldn't let us in; we didn't care: it looked to be designed for photography rather than swimming and the sea was only a few yards away so we all swam there instead. Mike and Don had checked in for 10 days having secured a deal that ameliorated the crippling expense of the place, and in that time they were exploring the atoll as actively as you can. They confirmed my impression that most of the Kia Ora's other guests checked in for only one or two nights, barely leaving their air-conditioned units during their brief stay.
We also made some new French friends at the relais - Philippe and Line. Like most of the other French couples we spoke to, they had left young progeny at home - in their case a two year old daughter. I'm sure that all of the Club Med set were perfectly nice too but Line and Philippe struck us as more distinct personalities and we warmed to them straightaway. They live near Paris where Line works as a perfume analyst (yes, she has read Perfume) and Philippe is a project manager for a firm that sources car components. A few years ago we'd toured round a perfume factory in Grasse in the south of France and encountered perfume analysts there; now we know that this is primarily a tourist venue and that the big houses outsource all of their analysis to firms like Line's in Paris. I hope that Line and Philippe come and see us in Somerset one day. Philippe has never been to England and Line's only experience was a miserable-sounding stay with a family in an unattractive town. I know exactly the problem she had - the problem was me, or people like me.
A couple of days ago we all went on one of the boat trips that I've mentioned before; ours was to the Ile aux Récifs. There were a dozen or so of us altogether in a 24 foot boat - it had a spine of double-backed seats running along it from which we faced looking out to either side like vertebrae. When we'd heard about these trips we'd imagined them to be calm since they all take you out over the lagoon (rather than the open sea) to some deserted spot across the atoll. I guess we might have deduced from the fact that the trip was cancelled the preceding day due to bad weather that there can be some chop, and of course since the lagoon extends to 1,000 square kilometres or so and is linked to the sea occasional waves should really be expected. And choppy waves we got. Paula described it as her "worst experience" of the year, though I think that was partly a response to the drama of the moment. The side of the boat where she and the girls sat faced into the waves as we travelled there and they were issued with sou-westers. Paula described it as being like having a bucket of water thrown over you every 30 seconds for the 50 minute duration of the crossing, and it was similar where I sat too. If you ever throw a load of water out of a bucket (say over a car that you're cleaning) it seems to hang in the air for a moment and it was like that watching the curtain of water approaching you. On both sides of the boat we were encouraged to hold onto a rope that ran across our laps. A couple of times loud cracking sounds issued from the floor of the boat that were so violent it seemed as though it was breaking up.
But when we got there it was worth it. There was, inevitably, a beautiful and deserted white coral beach freely decorated with coconut palms. Also, being the Ile aux Récifs, there were pillars that they say are of coral but seemed to me to be of the volcanic rock that Hawaiians onomatopoeically call Ah-Ah because it hurts to walk on. The pillars stood between the lagoon and the sea and we were invited to walk across to them. We were given fair warning that the walking was dangerous and offered a couple of opportunities to turn back. Here, for posterity, is the last photograph that I ever took with the zoomy Olympus that I've been using this year before I slipped over and chucked it in the sea:
Oh well!
The lunch was so nice that Heidi asked as we ate if we could do the trip again. Actually, it was the sharks as much as they food that appealed to her. There were dozens of pretty black tips swimming around in the lagoon shallows by where we were based. By the time you read this (or shortly after) there should be some photo's of them on our homepage. These were taken with Heidi's little Olympus, for which we have a waterproof housing (and if you look at the snaps the sea colour really is as different as it looks when viewed from above and from within). Zoe and Heidi surprised themselves by how keen they were to get a mask and snorkel on and swim amongst the sharks - it really was very cool.
Our party was led by a local guy whom some lady or other (think it was a Club Med person) had enthused over to Paula. He had George Michael good looks, and the resemblance made me unfairly suspicious (I'm not a huge fan). Well, by the middle of the afternoon I had actual grounds to dislike him since (as we'd been warned) he entertained us all by baiting the sharks with the lunch scraps so that he could hoik one out of the water. When he failed to grab one by the fin a few times he eventually managed to catch one in a noose trap and dropped it onto the dry sand. Then he picked it up and disported himself with it for a while. Everyone else seemed amused; I willed him to lose an arm, and I think my family was with me. Maybe this animal sympathy is an English thing.
Later in the afternoon one of his colleagues returned from a foray with a huge brown and blue crustacean of some sort that he described as a crab. I counted and it didn't have ten legs (including the pincers) so whatever it was it wasn't a decapod. If you can identify it from the photo on the homepage I'd be grateful. Again, there was period of prodding and poking, rendered easier for those interested when the catcher deftly bound all of its non-claw legs with a length of dry palm. Sadly, none of those who taunted it by dangling sticks and dead coral into its pincers lost a finger. I did, though, notice that the crew seemed to be taking this specimen back with them, presumably to eat, which (you may think paradoxically) appeased my sensitivities.
When we got back to the pension Philippe worked patiently and determinedly for a couple of hours dismantling my camera, removing the extraneous water from within the lens and drying out the electronics. But it seems as though in the few hours between my dropping it and us returning the brine had already oxidised some of the parts. When we get to Aus I'll replace it, hoping that the insurance pays up. I'm a little tempted to upgrade to a digital SLR. Since we've been away we've come acroos many people who have them; they all have the same model (to within a version number) - it's a Nikon - and they all love them. I've taken a few photos with them myself and I'd like to be able to justify getting one. But what I really like is the action - the way that taking a photo sounds and feels like shutting the door of a Mercedes - rather than anything rational. I think I'll end up with the same Olympus model I just drowned because it's much smaller, it costs far less, it's less of a theft target and so long as the light's good and you're not in a major hurry it takes reasonable photographs. Change my mind if you can.
Since our excursion we've been tootling around the main part of the atoll. We hired bikes one day but the quality of the hire cycles at our place was much lower than at, say, the Kia Ora where their new chrome glints and sparkles in the sun, and on our first outing I had to abandon Heidi's bike by the roadside before so many parts fell off that it collapsed. On our second outing Paula and Zoe took the same rusty bikes with flat tyres and I hired a scooter and had Heidi on the back. We went to the pearl farm (black pearls are the local thing) because we thought we should. But we just missed a tour and realised that we wanted neither to traipse round after someone past the jaded pearl harvesters nor to buy joke-price jewellry. More usefully, we went to the post office and mailed home more excess luggage. The George Michael lookalike sea-life abuser was also in there and warmed us with his special smile.
Yesterday we flew out of Rangiroa. At the airport we saw a few dozen boxes of live tropical fish being checked through for a flight. I've always liked fish tanks at home but now I'm a little disturbed by the provenance of the fish - it's such a long way to bring them and they really are better off here. I wonder what the survival rate is?
As on the way in, we, through necessity, had a night in a hotel on Papeete. This time we chose the Sheraton so that we could meet up with Bert, Sue, Terry and Tonna, whom we'd met a couple of weeks previously at Les Relais de Josephine. If you're thinking of going to this hotel as a special treat choose somewhere else. The decor, the pool and the towels are all good, and some of the staff are good too: the waiter who served us our lunch was great (Paula and Zoe both chose what he called an "ombourzjair", which is just like a hamburger only 10 times the price), but he insisted we didn't tip him because he doesn't get to keep tips. In corridor encounters the Sheraton staff greeted us with a suspicious amount of Polynesian - when I've heard the locals here speaking to one another they've generally been using French, and I suspect that the Polynesian vocab here will become functionally the same as the conventions of happy speech that Disney staff are instructed to use. But the unforgiveable flaws of the Sheraton are the poor food served to the strains of Phoenix Nights club-style renditions of Everybody's Talkin' (Nilsson would die) and other classics; the dodgy internet access that, despite being the planet's most expensive, doesn't work (a guy on the front desk consoled me that the Sheraton on the island of Mo'orea has a new system that's actually usable); and the families of cockroaches that live behind the tongue-and-groove work in the bathroom. And more than anything the extravagant expense of it all.
We had a very good evening anyway, and caught up with our friends who have been boating around the islands. Tonna has a little story that sounds like a fable: she was snorkelling over coral in a metre or two of water when she accidentally flipped off one of her gold ear rings. Terry saw a beautiful fish swallow it straight up as it landed on the sea bed and as he was telling Tonna and she was bemoaning her bad luck to Bert the fish swam right round to the very same spot and spat the ear ring back out, where she retrieved it. Terry and Tonna left last night to catch a flight back to the States, while Bert and Sue stayed over and are on this flight with us now.
Personally, I didn't sleep much last night. I was awoken in the small hours, as I have for several of the past nights, by the irritation of mosquito bites. Whatever anyone in Maine or Alaska or Zambia or anywhere else tells you the mozzies here are the worst, although thankfully they're not malarial. I've found that the best tonic is an hour of Fiona Apple. Last night I was still restless after this and I got to thinking about the way that men and women have a different temporal structure of experience. If I can think of anyone out there who I haven't yet managed to piss off at some point from these pages I may write down my reflections on this topic in one of the coming blogs. In the meantime, you can do a few little experiments that I devised when I was trying to convince myself that this could be science. You'll need an opposite-sex friend. For the second and third of the two little tests it would be much better if you got together before you read the sentences immediately below...
First, pick an absent friend (say Paula or me) and over the next few days or weeks make a note of whether you think about them, and if so what prompted it. Then compare notes.
Second, think of a few people whom you've both met with recently. Now, see if you can remember (a) what they were wearing when you last met them and (b) what colour their eyes are. See how well you both do.
Third, agree on some notable events of the past years such as holidays, projects and/or the birth of friends' children and then see who is better at working out when they happened.
I have predictions in all cases.
This flight is going nicely. There are films but I don't want to watch any of them, so writing this has been a nice distraction. At the start of the flight I finished the novel Tar Baby by Toni Morrison, which someone (I think Ewa) swapped with us recently. If you've ever read it drop me a line and let me know what you thought.
I'm looking forward to being in Aus. I want to buy books, to visit a mac shop and to get properly on line. Three weeks off line and with no phone network was okay, but enough.
Posted: Sun - November 20, 2005 at 07:57 AM
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Published On: Nov 24, 2005 05:40 PM
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Published On: Nov 24, 2005 05:40 PM