Cruisers gotta cruise. This truth about the nomads that make up our community is one reason why we weighed heavily the decision to go through the time and effort to extend our allotted 90-day visa to a full year in French Polynesia. This island group is touted as the gorgeous cruising grounds that will never be equaled as one sails west around the world. Added to the need to accommodate the looming Pacific cyclone season by finding a safe harbor, such as that offered up by the Marquesas, we got the long-stay visa and made plans to spend a year in this expansive island paradise. However, cruisers tend to migrate at different paces, and we land on the quicker end of the spectrum. Since arriving here May 11^th, we have explored 3 of the 5 island chains of French Polynesia, traveling from the far southeast Gambiers to the far west Societies.  It has truly been a breathtakingly beautiful adventure. 

Anyone who has been dumped before might guess however that this paragraph is setting the reader up for a “But…”  We recently have made a decision about our next steps, which I will share at the end of this post.  But first, put yourself on our boat as we take our kids and their plus-ones through the Society Islands!

Tahiti

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Your journey begins in Tahiti. After weeks scouring four small stores for meat packaged without parts best identified by an orthopedic surgeon in the Gambiers, you have spent many a delightful afternoon wandering the well-lit aisles of multiple humongous Tahitian Carrefour grocery stores, pinching yourself that you can now once again lunch on a decent ham and cheese sandwich, and then collapsing once back on the boat from all the visual stimulation. You have done your laundry in an actual laundromat and indulged in something other than steak frites at a restaurant. You have identified the best produce stalls at the Papeete market, the best food truck by the cruise ship dock, and where and how to get rid of your trash. (That last bit is one of the more challenging tasks one faces in French Polynesia.)  You have soaked up Polynesian culture via live music, museums, gardens, waterfalls, parades, dance festivals, traditional sport competitions, rooftop bars, driving tours, and shopping.  You are surprised to find that the most urban location in this island chain can still be incredibly charming, with its flower markets, warm Polynesians that don’t seem to resent speaking English (“This is your island, too,” our tour guide told us), and beautiful seaside parks. After your kids arrive in stages, you tear yourself away from the security of the Marina Papeete (and all those Carrefours!) and head west.

Mo’orea

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

You are excited to go back to Moorea as it was your first international tropical destination over thirty years ago. You sail past thatched huts on stilts over the water to anchor in a bay surrounded by green-bedecked volcanic hills that seem frozen in time at the moment they violently erupted out of the water.  At sundown you sit on the roof and drink in not a G&T but the intense floral aroma flooding the bay from the hills. You discover a public beach with a reef packed with colorful fish, hike past irrigated pineapple farms and content cows to a sweeping hilltop view, and sample sweet and tart jellies made from the varied fruits of the island.

Reluctantly moving on too soon, you later learn that you just barely missed having your dinghy pushed off into the sea by an angry local and having a flier taped to your boat, telling you to go away.

Huahine

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

You enjoy a calamity-free overnight sail, appreciating the rarity of doing an inter-island offshore free from commercial fishing boats, pearl farms, and cargo traffic. Upon arrival, your seasickness is forgotten. You grab a mooring ball by a motu surrounded by an expanse of shallow reef and spend a water day kayaking the protected waters. You encounter helpful locals when you accidentally back your dinghy into a corner of the reef.  One day you rent a car and explore the island.  On this tour, Huahine fills all of your senses. You feel the slickness of the sacred eels, smell the rich scents of the vanilla farm, hear the delightful sounds of the beautiful vanilla farm tour guide practicing her English with a Tahitian accent, view the panoply of colors and structures of the seashells lovingly catalogued in the shell museum, and taste the subtle stickiness of Polynesian star apples. Perhaps because it was favored by some influential figures in the past, such as the archeologist Dr. Yoshiko Sinoto and the cultural icon, painter, and musician Bobby Holcomb, Jr., Huahine also provides intellectual stimulation, educating the tourist in a sophisticated way, beginning with its well-maintained marae and ancient Polynesian fish traps. You lose yourself in a peaceful cultural museum, perusing the respectfully arranged objects and dive deep into their history through beautifully written guides and placards.

You can tell a lot about a place from the quality of its placards.

Mel

After all of these experiences, Huahine replaces Mo’orea in your heart.

Bora Bora

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

A few days later you find yourself arriving in Bora Bora after a lovely trauma-free spinnaker sail. You pick up a mooring outside the Bora Bora Yacht Club (oooh-la-la!) with a great view of an iconic mountain peak. Like Raiatea, it is hard not to notice the scope of the charter business here, and you are occasionally distracted from your sunset viewing by the need to critique the mooring ball hookup techniques of the charter boats zooming way too close. The explanation for the nostalgia that hits you as you view the mountain is found when you learn of the transformative American presence here during WWII. You rent a car and drive American-hewn roads and look at American-installed cannons. The driving tour teaches you that there are really two Bora Boras these days. One is an insulated, glittery, high-end resort island, offering complete guidance through a highly curated and sophisticated experience.  The other is the grittier, neglected side, with ramshackle houses, slowly disintegrating abandoned hotels, poorly marked hiking trails, and overgrown marae. You walk into the town by the yacht club and see these two worlds intersect, searching for souvenir shops while shielding your eyes from the clouds of dirt stirred up from the unpaved shoulder as cars race past on the 80-year-old road. In town, juxtaposed between piles of trash and the chain-link fences surrounding the cluttered remains of dilapidated buildings are “art galleries”, actually shops for Marquesan wood carvings, and surprisingly high-end pearl shops, requiring special appointments to go to the pearl AND diamond room.  Perhaps they give you a good dusting off first?  You nevertheless have a delightful time in the shops deciding between the tiki-shaped soaps and the Bora Bora seasoned salt. All over the island you see construction crews furiously upgrading the roads and infrastructure in an attempt to merge the two Boras.

Realizing that Bora Bora is probably a spectacular experience for the resort attendees and a less compelling place for a cruiser who has worked their way (and bled money) through French Polynesia already, you spend some delightful boat days in a lovely setting playing games, swimming, and enjoying your guests before putting them on planes at the American-built airport and heading back to Raiatea.

Raiatea

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

You visit Raiatea twice.  On your approach from the east, you fly your spinnaker, triumphantly overcoming the Spinnaker Trauma experienced months ago when the halyard snapped and the sail dragged under the boat. After sorting out the complex geography of Raiatea/Tah’aa, resembling what looks like a semicolon that’s been eaten by a paramecium with only a few pores for passage, you find a mooring ball in the blue lagoon between the two islands, a lagoon with such staggered and varying depths the seafloor likely resembles one of those laser-cut wooden lake souvenir cutting boards from space. You and your guests go on a snorkel excursion, zipping across the lagoon in a powerboat with a marine biologist, explore a healthy coral garden teeming with fish, and hover in awe over your first-ever live sea anemone. You end up surrounded by 10 black-tipped reef sharks that you swear are putting on a performance, behaving more like trained circus dogs than formidable ocean predators.

At a later point in time you anchor in a muddy bay in the south. You and your family dinghy along with some cruising friends down a river, taking an inland river tour for the first time since the Caribbean. Your eyes, used to seeing shades of blue from below to above, almost fail to process the browns, greens, and jewel tones flooding their fields as you glide past fecund jungle, explore a well-presented botanical garden, and fulfill the petting demands of the garden watchdog. You journey across the river and encounter a vigorous older man who visibly pulls his energy from the earth as he escorts you through speed-dating the results of his fruit-farm labors. Under Andre’s guidance, and literally under Andre as he scrabbles over your head through the trees, you begin to appreciate the subtle differences in the taste of the fruits of each of his lychee trees. You are astounded by all of the textures and flavors the botanical world uses to protect its seeds, and encouraged by Andre’s reassurance, you defy your instinct to not eat the teeny tiny pepper or the fruit that smells like it has a bad case of gas gangrene. 

You recover from tasting that fruit, and after some socializing on your own boat and others, you decide you miss your blue visual palette and thread your way through abandoned monohulls and charterers into a gusty anchorage near Raiatea’s western reef, processing your experiences with your keels floating just 2 feet above the sand.

Next Steps

Did you enjoy your tour?  Like selecting a puppy from a litter, the islands look similar on the surface, but a little play tends to reveal personalities as distinct as their names.  For the curious, here’s a wonderful video with instruction on how to pronounce these beautiful island names.

At this point, our daughter Allie is the only guest that remains. She will be with us until she flies off to study abroad in England in early September. With each passing day, cyclone season approaches, which typically begins Nov 1.  However, if we experience the strong, “Super El-Nino” that is increasingly predicted, cyclones can occur as early as October, and they are more likely than typical to reach as far east as Tahiti. This means: no more putting off a cyclone season plan. As much as we have enjoyed this group of islands, we cannot see ourselves turning around and heading almost a thousand miles back east to the Marquesas and staying put for 5-6 months.

So where do we now plan to ring in the new year? A whole new country with new experiences – a place with plentiful cheese, boiling mud pools, and funny-looking birds…

New Zealand!

Mel hasn’t posted much lately as her role has been transformed from free-wheeling, blogging cruiser to Mom and concierge to four visiting Gen-Z’ers. To imagine what this is like, take the logistics required to live on a sailboat in a foreign country, and square it.  No, strike that. Triple it.  

Before the arrival of our guests, Mel cleaned out the port hull.  This was not a small task, requiring the stuffing of provisions purchased in Panama and residing in bins on the beds into the plastic pantry occupying the port forward shower. Numerous spare parts were shoved into crevices in the forepeaks, under the beds, and in the bilges.  The starboard hull’s capacious passageway narrowed.

Mel’s success at this project was short-lived.  Our guests arrived laden with boat parts and supplies that were either difficult to obtain or ridiculously expensive in French Polynesia. As a result, Jerry is sitting much lower in the water these days.  We now assume Jerry’s draft is a full foot deeper than the official 4’10” listed in the factory specs.  We have set the zero-point of our depth sensor at keel level, to play it safe.

For the curious, here’s a partial list of our cherished imports:

1. Our two kids and their significant others
2. Backup Raymarine rotary autopilot
3. Backup Lewmar 60000191 spare windlass motor and gearbox
4. Underwater lights (some of ours are broken)
5. Articulating boroscope
6. Yet another rigging knife
7. More rechargable LED flashlights of a brand that was the sole survivor of 5 different brands tried (Trixhub rechargable super-brights)
8. Various stainless steel cleaners and lubricants like Lubriplate
9. USB-C dustplugs to protect phone charging ports, UV-resistant zipties of various sizes
10. A variety of electrical equipment such as junction boxes that only Greg understands
11. Domestics: Oxo Dish brush for washing dishes, with refills, Blueland scentless laundry washing tablets, Vanicreme scentless body soaps, Sonicare toothbrush refills, Mel’s favorite plastic clothespins that don’t rust, nonskid shelf liner
12. Ninja Airfryer grill replacement (original was sacrificed to Poseidon, which was too bad, since the gesture failed to fix the autopilot.)
13. Food: Dried bay leaves, black beans, taco seasoning, red pepper flakes, gochujang
14. Pharmacy: Neutrogena Sport SPF 70+ face sunscreen, melatonin, Lotrimin (to treat Mel’s finger, which has “sailor’s hand” from wearing wet sailing gloves 12 hours a day while hand-steering for 13 days.)
15. Sewable Velcro, a yard of boat blanket material (anti-chafe), sailrite snap rivets to repair enclosure
16. Party games, such as the Poetry for Neanderthals expansion pack
17. Better snorkel gear
18. Clothing
19. Alcohol

One might draw from this list the following conclusions:

1. Americans who have previously had unlimited access to the winners of free-market competition end up with brand and product preferences that are difficult to maintain when abroad.
2. All cleaning products in French Polynesia are scented. In retrospect, this was entirely predictable. We are in France!
3. While it is possible to obtain some boat parts in Tahiti, it is often impossible to obtain the exact boat part you need.
4. Any sort of liquid, gel, cream, or chemical is exorbitantly expensive in French Polynesia.  That $50 bottle of Barnacle Buster you bought in Panama?  According to the lovely French man who came to fix our port air conditioner, it’s $1000 here!
5. The Polynesians are not fans of Tex-Mex. Or spicy food. More hardship for the Americans!

Alas, more storing and stuffing took place!  Mel then compounded the problem by grocery shopping. For some reason, provisioning for two Gen-Xers and four twenty-somethings for just a few days in French Polynesia has proven to be a more daunting task than provisioning for three Gen-Xers for sixty days in Panama.

Nevertheless, Hotel Jerry opened for business Aug 1. Since then Jerry’s crew has enjoyed packed days, taking in the experiences pictured below. Next stop: Huahine!

It’s time Mel gets out her thoughts about Tahiti in one of her long, rambling posts! Prepare for long sentences with lots of commas and a gazillion photos with informative captions! And many, many exclamation points! No punchy-perfect AI sentences here!

Jerry is currently moored in a marina for the first time since leaving Panama in April. He is backed up right next to a park, with Mel and Greg’s performance of their aft cockpit chores, such as hanging laundry and upgrading the starboard alternator, providing entertainment for the boatwatchers slowing their pace as they jog by. Jerry’s beautiful Leopard 48 butt, with his exotic non-French ensign flying in the breeze, his strange “Shell Knob, MO” home port displayed prominently between the transoms, and his sweaty crew strewing the cockpit table with toolbags and sewing paraphernalia has become a magnetic cultural attraction, a tableau of life on a modern ocean-going multihull, set in a land originally populated via Jerry’s ancient multihull ancestors.

Mel and Greg took a nontraditional route from the Gambiers to Tahiti, spending only a few days on the rarely-visited island of Hao in the Tuamotus before beelining it here for the Heiva Festival and the imminent arrival of their children. Ask most cruisers which location is preferable, and they will unanimously vote for the gorgeous Tuamotus. They will be shocked we didn’t stay there longer. Don’t worry, Jerry will get there some day!  Many will say, to the point of it becoming a “Cruiser Meme”: “When visiting Tahiti, you get your stuff done, and then you get out.” After spending a couple of weeks here, Mel disagrees.  It’s frickin’ Tahiti!

So Tahiti doesn’t have the plentiful gorgeous waters, quiet anchorages near palm-strewn beaches, and small-town feel of the less populated islands. Its main city, Papeete, with its 200,000 people and cruise ship port, has the usual city baggage of noisy traffic, police sirens, loud bar chatter, and people sleeping on sidewalks, reminding one of how terrible most nations are at supporting their remote island territories that no longer have any natural resources to exploit. However, Mel has chosen to optimize her experience here — to “Tahitimaxx”, as it were.  After all, she travels not only to soak up Earth’s natural beauty, but also to expose herself to novel experiences and all the different ways humans have chosen to live on this planet.

To paraphrase a line from the fantastic TV show Ted Lasso (which we are re-watching now that we are in soccer country):

“I try to love Tahiti for what it is and forgive it for what it isn’t.”

–Leslie Higgins

And so here are some glimpses of how one experiences Tahiti with an open heart and mind:

We have a wonderful view of a park with a walking/biking path that goes right by our boat.  We love to see people out enjoying the 78-degree weather. We have been impressed with how many Polynesian men are out walking in the parks with their kids.

Mel has identified, through a Spotify crawl as she builds her Mel’s Polynesian Breeze playlist, some talented French Polynesian musicians. This playlist includes Barthélémy, primarily because they met the brother of this late musician on Hao. It also includes songs in French by the duo Vaiteani and the lovely, up-and-coming singer Papehau. After learning Papehau was playing at a local bar, Greg and Mel joined SV Drishti for a night of lovely live music.

Nightly, Mel watches the sunset over beautiful Moorea, which sits to the West. Every sunset is different, and every sunset is apparently un-photographable?!  Mel’s iPhone is not good at pink!

Rooftop bars! Bakeries! We have enjoyed finding wonderful restaurants off the beaten track that take care to provide delicious food and a fun atmosphere – one of the benefits of visiting a city with plenty of restaurant competition.  Mel has had her first good hamburger since she left the States!

There are colorful murals painted on many buildings in downtown Papeete displaying the beauty of Tahiti – and they are free of graffiti!

Drivers are nice here! They stop for people in crosswalks and merge in civilized fashion. They smile and use lots of hand signals.

The festivals! We’ve seen indigenous games, dancing, singing, a parade…

There is still more to explore! Once our kids arrive, we will tour the inland peaks, waterfalls, gardens, and museums. We might take in a surfing competition. Mel is also interested in learning more about the town of Punaauia, home of the “passionate orange carriers.” This town happens to have the best municipal website Mel has seen in a while.

Once again Mel has let her photo collection build up to bursting, so here’s a few!

The Intrepid Jerry is doing the cruiser thing of waiting for parts in exotic locations. Our autopilot will not reach the Gambiers until early July.  Once we get Jerry ship-shape, which now includes having TWO entire autopilots and assorted parts in triplicate aboard, we are considering sailing on to Tahiti.

One would think that people as nomadic as cruisers would get restless after six weeks in one region. After all, there are so many pictures of beautiful islands one can take.  If Mel searches her iPhone’s photo gallery for the word “sea”, 3500+ results turn up. Most of these photos are expendable, looking like many others in the gallery, striped with different shades of blue with a sliver of yellow or green in the middle, failing to capture the emotion of the moment when displayed as a search result. Moving anchorages mixes things up a bit, but the opportunity to look at pretty things is not enough to keep one going in this sometimes-difficult lifestyle.

This must be why National Geographic has text as well as photos. Exploring the local people and culture is what sustains us now.

Before coming here, we had heard that one of the wonderful things about the Gambiers was its welcoming local community.  We have been thrilled to confirm this through our positive interactions with local shopkeepers, tour guides, and residents, despite the fact that we cannot speak French. We have attended Sunday picnics at resident homes, played volleyball with locals, met some interesting characters during beach cleanups, exchanged provisioning tips with American expats living on Mangareva, frequented almost every shop on the island, and, bedecked in our new black pearls, attended many cultural events, including the school dance recitals pictured at the end of this post. We also have learned about Europe and Australia through our interactions with the large and wonderful cruising community here, which is slowly making its way to the Tuamotus.

We are having so much fun attending festivals that we plan to sail to Tahiti next in order to catch the Heiva i Tahiti cultural festival that runs until July 18.  Mel is especially excited about watching the Tū’aro Mā’ohi traditional sports competition, which includes events such as Polynesian stone lifting. Even after being in French Polynesia for more than six weeks, Mel’s mind is still blown whenever she witnesses a cocoa-skinned, heavily-inked, musclebound man speak French. Certainly a different visual than what is seen in a Paris café! Move over, Jean-Claude Van Damme!

In the meantime, Mel has assigned herself a French Polynesia reading list. She is currently reading W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (admittedly not entirely about Tahiti). Other books include Bungalow: A Novel by Sarah Jio, Island of Shattered Dreams by Chantal T. Spitz, Daughter of the Reef by Clare Coleman, and Frangipani by Celeste Vaite.

AI tells me the title of this post means “beautiful children” in Mangarevan. I hope it is right!  Below are photos of some of the amazing young people of Mangareva, celebrating the end of their school year.  This post is all about the kids, so let’s get to it! If you are a woman of Mel’s generation, be forewarned – viewing these photos will methylate your DNA and activate any grandmother genes you may possess!

The Intrepid Jerry is currently anchored in Onemea Bay, Taravai, surrounded by the odd mixture of coconut palms and evergreen trees that march up the island’s low hills in rank-and-file order, with the palms consigned to the rear at the shorelines because their mode of reproduction happens to involve giant nut-like balls that are better suited to bobbing in the sea than staying put on a slope. Intermittently one overhears a heated discourse of bleating originating from deep in the forest, presumably caused by goats being goats. Aboard, Jerry’s crew are resting their 50-something bodies and minds after a couple days of novel but tiring experiences.

One of these experiences was a pearl farm tour. Not normally excited to go on a “farm tour” as such things always involve a lot of dirt, manure, bad smells, and grunting noises, Mel had to remind herself that the pearl kind of farming produces not a cob of corn or a sculpted chunk of flesh after years of work but rather a sparkly gemstone. And unlike its kin such as diamonds and rubies, pearls are not laboriously dug out of the Earth with picks and shovels but rather extracted out of living oysters with delicate dental instruments.  Vanilla and pearls in paradise? Is this place for real?

And so it passed that a truck and then a large metal boat deposited Jerry’s crew and some other English-speaking cruisers on one of the little houses on stilts on the western side of Mangareva, where friendly Mohea explained how her pearl farm works. Transporting us to the other side of the island for the tour was important. In the Gambiers, the island of Mangareva physically segregates the oysters by sex, much like Victorians after dinner: boys (making pearls) to the west, girls (making eggs) to the east. Being on the western shore allowed us to appreciate the entire process.

Pearl Farming

Mohea was an amazing tour guide and shared many facts about pearl farming, probably better described as “oyster husbandry” given how much the oysters run the show. Here are the more fascinating bits of our knowledge gained, both from the tour and Mel’s internet research afterwards:

• The black pearls of the Gambiers primarily come from one species of oyster, the black-lipped pearl oyster (Pinctada margaritifera).  Mohea gave us a mnemonic for the scientific name: “Pina-Colada-Margarita.” Yum!
• The margaritas are princesses; even the males. They must be handled gently and cleaned regularly in order to produce good pearls.
• The oysters are sequential, protandric hermaphrodites. meaning they can change sexes. They begin life as males and transition into females as they age and become bigger. And smarter. Environmental conditions, such as sea temperature, can influence the timing of this change, and sometimes they switch back and forth.
• Sea temperature also influences the spawning period. Typically when the sea begins to warm in September, sperm and eggs are released into the water via broadcast spawning, and eggs are fertilized randomly.  This procreation event apparently fills the lagoon with a “rich, umami, and “planty” sea aroma”. As they say in Nebraska when you drive past a corn field freshly fertilized with manure, “Smells like money!”
• Once egg and sperm unite, the resulting larvae is called “spat”, and the little spats hopefully snag on one of the many “spat collectors” that dangle from the numerous pearl floats in the lagoon.  These collectors are made of plastic and resemble three-foot-long sections of Marilyn Manson’s black Christmas tree tinsel.  Or Mel’s hair when she runs out of mousse.
• Since 2018 there has been a “spat” drought, with the spat collectors housing less than 20% of the former number of baby oysters.  The cause is presumably multi-factorial, with climate change being the big culprit via rising seas, rising sea temperatures, and changing currents through the lagoon. There also may be contributions from microplastics and selective breeding causing a loss of genetic diversity and therefore resilience to changes in the environment.
• You can eat the oyster’s adductor muscle, which pulls the shell together, and even get it on the local pizza, where it is called, “korori”.  Caving to peer pressure, Mel ate a raw korori during the tour. How was it? A once-in-a-lifetime experience!
• See the photos for more cool pearl farming facts!

The Color of Pearls

Even the pearls themselves are fascinating! Who knew pearls would prompt Mel to learn about materials science?  The pearly coating, called nacre, consists of tiles of calcium carbonate in a crystalline structure called aragonite. Organic aragonite forms tiles that can stack on each other. These tiles, and the proteinacous glue that holds them together, called conchiolin, is secreted by the mantle of the oyster to wall in an irritant.

Some very smart people studied pearls to determine the underpinnings of the different pearl colors. Fascinating facts Mel learned:

• The nacre of black pearls is structurally the most neatly organized of all pearl colors. The blackest ones have the least irregularity in size, shape, and spacing of the aragonite tiles. The structure must be very soothing to view under the microscope. It turns out our Pina-Colada-Margaritas are the Martha Stewart of oysters!
• The black pearl nacre also has the narrowest spacing of all the pearl colors between rows and stacks of tiles.
• Scientifically speaking, the nacre of a pearl is a “multi-layer thin-film diffraction layer stack.” Mel is not sure what this means exactly, but apparently the glue between the tiles has holes in it, like a grating. Organizing the tiles and the proteinaceous glue in layers creates the color and also a highly reflective mirror effect – the luster of the pearl. Humans use synthetic multi-layer thin films in the high-tech worlds of lasers, semiconductors, electronics, and optics.  Okay then.  Maybe the male oysters aren’t so dumb…
• It is thought that the cooler waters of the Gambier slows down nacre formation and allows it to become more organized and with thinner layers, producing a lustrous, black pearl.
• There also may be a component of melanin from the “black lips” of the oyster.

Motu Clean-Up Day

Those who made it through Mel’s science class today will learn about the next adventure for Jerry’s crew.  For World Oceans Day, 33 cruisers and several locals set out to pick up and process trash, hopefully helping to address the “microplastics” problem.  After meeting at the crack of dawn, Mel and Greg boarded a shallow-draft powerboat which deposited them, their noble guide, a hardy French sailor, and several teenagers on Tepapuri, a small motu on the north side of the archipelago. After four hours of core work consisting of bending over, straightening up again, and gingerly walking over coral and holes dug by pigs, the trash collectors were treated to a feast and then partook in a massive community trash-triage effort.

The trash sorting was something to watch. Mel studied the locals especially, finding several vigorous souls, men and women, who zoomed around the tarp, everywhere at once, powerfully lifting all sorts of erratically-shaped farm and fishing refuse into the appropriate bin. Maybe it’s the American in her that seeks out the hard workers. Frequently her eyes would settle on “Orange Guy,” presumably not a wallflower, who never sat down, constantly hauling trash even while jamming to music, smoking a cigarette, or drinking from a coconut. Another standout was “Smiles and Muscles”, real name Tinihau, who worked hard to drum up enthusiasm throughout the day, efforts that proved futile as we all sat and stared, exhausted, on the slow ferry ride home.

Enjoy my yin and yang photos of pearls… and trash!