Tahiti: Beyond the beaches
Credit to Author: Dave Pottinger| Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2020 02:01:39 +0000
Along the meandering paths of Pape’ete’s palm-lined waterfront park, thousands of Tahitian spectators are gathered, cellphones poised, awaiting the return of 40 or so sprinting participants in one of the world’s weirdest sports.
Beneath the trees, cheering follows the barefoot, near-naked runners as they approach the finish line. After a 1.3 km-long dash through the capital of Tahiti, the men appear, sweating profusely, each carrying on his shoulder a massive log, both ends bound with dangling green banana clusters, coconuts, taro roots, all interwoven with orchid and hibiscus flowers. This fruit-carrying competition — joined with coconut tree climbing, stone-lifting, fire-walking, outrigger canoe racing, javelin-throwing, drumming and hula dancing — is part of Heiva, a Polynesian word that means party.
This strange race — a component of a pan-Pacific indigenous Olympics — marks the redemption of a maritime world, one almost lost through 200 years of colonialism and church-led oppression.
Early morning sun over Bora Bora Pearl Beach Resort & Spa.
That evening, thousands more fill the seats in Pape’ete’s To’ata Amphitheater as fierce drumming announces the semi-finals of the Heiva dance competition. Lights go up and scores of costumed performers flood the outdoor dancefloor. The women are dressed in halved coconut-shell bras, tutu-like grass skirts, and metre-high floral head-dresses. The men are in leafy loin-cloths — with bums on full display.
While the women perform a furious hip-shaking, Tahitian-style hula, the men do equally frenzied, leg-spread shimmies and procreative pelvic thrusts. The women and men spin, they explode apart, they form patterns, they coalesce in energetic, drum-fueled movement. It’s a display of sexuality perhaps a bit too overt for some parents of children in the audience. But Heiva is about reviving traditional Polynesian culture: dancing, drumming, dress, sports, sexuality, skin, and all.
It’s easy to see how late-18thcentury European explorers found the South Pacific’s tropical islands so seductive; and how subsequent 19thcentury European clergy took a far, far dimmer view — and for their objections occasionally became dinner — towards the sexual attitudes of the often naked, newly-colonized, sometimes resentful, cannibalistic subjects.
A string of encircling, beach-lined islands protect Bora Bora from the open Pacific.
“Heiva’s a form of resistance,” says Moana’ura Tehei’ura, a famed Tahitian choreographer and cultural historian, as he sits poolside at a Pape’ete hotel. “In 1842, the French banned all forms of traditional expression here: speaking Tahitian, Tahitian dances, Tahitian singing. Strictly forbidden! We were supposed to become European: Dress like us. Worship like us. Be like us. But you can’t just mold people to another identity. When we dance, it’s an expression of Tahitian pride. It’s about togetherness. You leave your ego and think of yourself as part of a community. That’s the way it was in the villages.Heiva’s a struggle against globalization, modernization — the buzzing world.”
An hour’s ferry ride west of Tahiti lies Mo’orea, a smaller, mountainous island where the buzzing of modernity is a whisper. On a three-hour drive around the island’s perimeter, it’s clear life here proceeds in a quieter key.
A thrilling ATV-ride ends on a bluff high above Bora Bora’s lagoon.
Little seaside villages are marked by dozens of outrigger boats, suspended airborne above the lagoon on winched slings for easy launching. People pass carrying fresh, metre-long baguettes in their bicycle baskets. Women wear colourful, homemade headpieces woven of local ti leaves, raffia, frangipani, hibiscus, and fragrant tiare flowers. Ubiquitous cellphone towers mimic palm trees. Chickens cross — and recross — the road, raising that old question of… why? Offshore, the edge of the turquoise lagoon ends where deep-ocean waves collide with the island’s protective coral reef in endless explosions of spindrift.
The road climbs steeply upward through the Ōpūnohu Valley toward the summit of 1207-m. Mt. Tohiea, the island’s highest peak. It is here at the Belvédere Lookout that an extraordinary panorama opens northward toward the distant Mo’orean lagoon, and far below the very bay where Captain James Cook anchored in 1777, initiating the end of Tahiti’s tropical isolation.
Cook didn’t know then that in the jungle around his anchorage lay scores of Polynesian temples, called maera, that had served the islanders in their worship for millennia. The old gods are, of course, long gone, abandoned to the Europeans’ monotheism. But the structures are still there, huge stone platforms, half-hidden amid ironwood trees, mementos of a great Tahitian seafaring society that conquered the entire Pacific 1000 years before the arrival of Cook.
The evening’s last light silhouettes a pod of luxurious overwater cabins.
Captain Tiana Maiau, 46, is a descendent of this maritime legacy, having spent 35 years sailing around Mo’orea. In recent decades, she has regularly taken tourists offshore in her glass-bottomed boat: to snorkel the waters near the Isle of Dreams amid a phantasmagoria of corals, tropical fish, non-predatory black-tipped sharks, sea turtles, and stingrays. Then: making lunch on her family’s Motu Irioa, a tiny islet on the atoll’s encircling reef that provides a glimpse of a swept-away, Robinson Crusoe existence.
An hour’s flight northwest of Tahiti, the plane descends on the most famous of Polynesian islands: Bora Bora —with its vertical, emerald peaks appearing to float amid an encircling blue lagoon. The linked, thatched-roofed, overwater bungalows of the island’s ten high-end resorts protrude from the surrounding reef’s many islets like fingers from an open hand. Speedboats leave their calligraphic wakes, silver on turquoise. It is a cliché of beauty. Like something seen in an opium dream.
Ukelele music, tattoos, and snorkeling in Mo’orea’s lagoon.
On Bora Bora during Heiva, there are mid-day coconut-chopping competitions with teams — often composed of broad-hipped, axe-wielding women — racing to split and separate the husks from the meat of 100 piled coconuts. There are furious four-man outrigger canoe races. And beneath a full moon, there are outdoor choral competitions in Bora Bora’s tiny capital, Viatape, where 60 or so women sing in righteous, four-part harmony — and in Tahitian — to the accompaniment of drums, ukuleles, and guitars.
It could be easy for a foreign visitor to overlook — lying beneath a tropical sun; snorkeling among a thousand iridescent fish, eating at a resort’s elaborate French buffet, watching a moonrise over Bora Bora — that the people of the Islands of Tahiti want to preserve their cultural heritage, their sense of home, their happy uniqueness amid the assault of the modern, buzzing world.
The annual Heiva competitions occur from late June through July across the five South Pacific archipelagos that form the Islands of Tahiti, formerly known as French Polynesia. Following local sports and cultural competitions throughout the 118 Tahitian islands (and elsewhere across Polynesia), the most important cultural performances — dancing, percussion, and singing — culminate in grand finales held at the To’ata Amphitheater in Pape’ete, Tahiti. For details, contact: Tahiti Tourism
From North America, it’s a direct 8.5-hour flight on French Bee from San Francisco to Pape’ete. Other airlines depart Montreal for Pape’ete, but include one or two stops, with journeys lasting over 20 hours.
Captain Taina Maiau leads a delightful exploration of Moorea’s shallow lagoon, including an alfresco seafood lunch on her family’s private island, with plenty of time for snorkeling the warm, fish-filled lagoon. www.glass-bottom-boat-moorea.com
Bora Bora Pearl Beach Resort & Spa has both land accommodations and 50 luxury, over-water bungalows offering spectacular view across the lagoon to Bora Bora itself and its central 727 m. peak of Mt. Otemanu. Email: enquiries@boraborapearlbookings.com
Bora Bora ATV/Quad Tours provide a thrilling way to get an overview of the island’s aquamarine lagoon on a vertiginous, backroad ascent to a high, cliffside viewpoint.
In 1947, Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl set out on the famed balsawood raft Kontiki, sailing westward from Peru, to prove his theory that Polynesia was settled by South American migrants. It is now known, using linguistic, archeological, and DNA evidence, that Heyerdahl was wrong.
One thousand years before Cook arrived in Mo’orea, the people of Tahiti had, in fact, sailed the Pacific on huge double-hulled outriggers, using ancient navigational techniques of close observation of birds’ flight, wave motions, and the daily transit of the sun and stars. They sailed north, discovering Hawaii. They sailed southwest, discovering New Zealand. And they sailed 8000 km east and settled South America, leaving evidence of their wayfaring in the yams and chickens — of Asian origins — that suddenly appeared there.