Tahiti

Daydreaming about Tahiti is a universal pastime and now all of a sudden, thanks to jet air travel, one can make the dream come true and go to this heretofore inaccessible place in about twenty-four hours.

But do you really want to go? Is it for you? Will it be what you've expected; what the writers, the movies and travel posters have claimed for it? Or will you find a land of toothless beauties and hairy spiders, a country long on fruit salad and fish and painfully short on hot running water and news of the outside world? In other words, have you heard the unvarnished truth about this place?

Tahiti is not for everyone. But when a man's been given a bad time by his boss, when his wife's made him feel inadequate as a husband and father, when he's caught his mistress cheating on him, when the insurance premiums and car payments smolder unpaid and payable on the desk, where does a man think of heading for after he chucks it all?

Canada? Venice? Bombay? Tokyo?

No – he'll generally stare out the window and dream a familiar dream of one place: the South Seas. And in the minds of most men, that is Tahiti. For three hundred years now, an island no longer than thirty miles and no wider than eighteen has captivated the romantic imaginations of men as no other place in the world has been able to do.

Why? What has Tahiti got, besides such good press agents as R. L. Stevenson, Gauguin, and Nordhoff and Hall? Except for England, more books have been written about Tahiti than any other island. I had read just about every one, plus dozens of magazine articles, since I was fifteen, but I still didn't know what the place was really like till I went there a year ago. I'll try to give it to you straight, without succumbing to the overripe adjectives, the wishful thinking, and the romance of the past which so often clouds writings about Polynesia.

Before we get to the woman question (which seems to be uppermost in the minds of prospective travelers, both the males and their apprehensive wives), let's list a few things Tahiti does not have, and in so doing we will indirectly be explaining why this place can charm the harassed American looking for surcease even more than it charmed Captain Bligh and his lustily libidinous crew of sailors back in the year 1788.

Tahiti has no: Newspaper, television, juvenile delinquency, stop lights, tipping, suicide, neon, golf course, murder, billboards, rape, PTA, trains or psychiatrists.

Of how many other places in the world is this still true? No wonder writers have to struggle to resist employing the tired phrase "The Last Paradise."

The only evidence of modern life on the island is the new-fangled modes of transportation; there are over one thousand cars, generally little Renaults, and there are another couple of thousand scooters or motorized bicycles. This is the biggest difference in the Tahiti of today compared to yesteryear; otherwise, it has changed very little, probably less than any other place in the modern world. The main reason it has maintained its charm over the centuries has been its inaccessibility.

First of all, the French have always discouraged tourism there – they want no "touristes bananes" as they refer to would-be beachcombers, types who intend to live off bananas and coconuts in a thatched hut; before being granted a visa you must show ability to support yourself without a job and you must have a return ticket. Secondly, travel facilities have always been expensive and awkward. For example, last year I took a direct cruise from San Francisco and it cost around twelve hundred dollars before I was through. I flew back, and, what with changing planes and waitting at Bora Bora, Fiji and Honolulu, it took four exhausting days and cost another twelve hundred dollars.

Now the travel picture has changed virtually overnight, and Tahiti, which has so bravely resisted the advance of civilization, might be doomed. Some gloomy oldtimers are saying that in ten years Papeete (pronounced pah-pay-AY-tay, the capital and only real town of Tahiti) will be just another Waikiki. Others say that Tahiti is made of sterner stuff and will never change much. The situation is that Tahiti has always been an expensive plaything for the French; since it was a beloved one, however, they didn't mind putting out millions of francs a year to maintain it. But now they simply can't afford it. De Gaulle has given the order: the island must pay its own way. With the income from copra and phosphate dwindling, the French realize that there is only one way for the virginal pearl of the Pacific to make money: to submit to the lusts of tourists, mainly les Americains with all those nice heavy dollars in their seersucker pockets.

So Otaheite (as Captain Cook called it) is about to be sacrificed to the damnedest tourist boom in recent travel history, and no one is happy about it except those for whom profit is all, and they are rubbing their hands with glee. And with reason, mon vieux; where there were only three thousand tourists of any nationality last year, they are now talking in terms of fifty thousand Americans alone within two years!

The long-time resident foreign colony of Tahiti is sick at the thought, and the Tahitians themselves couldn't care less. The French are revolted by the possibility of this lovely place being strewn with cola bottles and awash with pale, Brownie-snapping tourists, yet merdealors, they shrug, what is one to do? Actually, what they would like most of all, only they haven't figured out a way to say it diplomatically, is for us just to stay home and send our money to them in an envelope.

(I'll get to the women, but I do have to get in a few facts, no matter how spindly they may be.

The blame for the rape of Tahiti lands squarely in the lap of the Wright brothers. The island has never had an airport, the once-a-week plane service being wonderful vintage British flying boats that take off from the lagoon and connect with other islands like Aitutaki and Bora Bora which do have landing strips. Now they are filling in that lovely lagoon for a jet port. All day and most of the night the trucks rumble along the road with loads of boulders to dump in the transparent coral waters. They've been working a year now; it's ready for prop jobs, and by April 1961 it will be finished – and so might old Tahiti.

They speeded the sickening process last year by inaugurating direct flights from Honolulu to Born Bora (TAI and South Pacific have round-trip tickets for about five hundred dollars). From there it's less than two hours to Papeete. Travel companies are starting cut-rate flights and tours ("twenty-one romantic days for only sixteen hundred dollars!") and the prices promise to drop even lower when the hordes of tourists swarm to the area. It's unfortunate that the Americans by going there will be helping to eliminate the very thing that drew them there in the first place, i.e., the absence of the American attitude and way of life.

So, should you pack up and rush down to Tahiti quickly before it gets ruined? The answer is the same I give to people asking whether they should get married: if there's any doubt in your mind, don't. Tahiti depends upon who you are, what you want, and what you expect the island to be.

If you are trying to make up your mind among various resorts and vacation spas, forget Tahiti. It's not an either/or place – "either we go to Jamaica or Bermuda or Palm Springs or Tahiti." If that's the way you're thinking, skip it, because, as the Chinese storekeeper says when he tells you you're crazy in Papeete, "You top-side savvy box no belongee proper."

Tahiti is unique and in no sense a resort – yet. The five little hotels are primitive, most not having hot water and none accommodating more than sixty people. (The two best are Les Tropiques and the new Hotel Tahiti, both attractive bungalow style on the edge of town.) While there are no poisonous reptiles, there are bugs, giant moths, spiders, lizards, mosquitoes, and big land crabs all over the place, generally in one's bedroom. (I'll never forget the night my companion woke me up to ask me to come in and kill a spider that was in the basin. Grumbling sleepily at the alarmist, constant-burglar-hearing species of female, I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. There I woke up quickly, for in the washbowl was something as large as my fist, twice as hairy, and vaguely resembling Godzilla. "I hope you didn't kill it," said the landlord the next day, "spiders eat insects, they are our friends, you know." "Kill it, hell," I said, "I jumped back in bed and pulled the covers over my head!")

There are few pre-fab entertainments of any sort for the tourist. After you've (continued on page 84)Tahiti (continued from page 82) taken a tour around the island once (half a day) and spent a day or two over at the beautiful neighbouring island of Moorea, you've just about had it as far as organized sight-seeing is concerned. You can also consume one Sunday and a lot of local Hinano beer at the Tahitians' ridiculous and charming version of horse races (the jockeys ride bareback, saronged and drunk). And you can kill a few nights watching the wild and wooly tamure dances in the three so-called nightclubs. Also you can go over to Les Tropiques or the Hotel Tahiti when a cruise ship comes in for its three-day layover and enjoy one of Tahiti's favorite pastimes: tourist watching. They nearly all look exactly the same – gray, pale, becamera-ed, and militantly in pursuit of pleasure. After the luau-type dinner the hotel tosses for the tourists, dancing girls – stars like Tehura and Choua – come churning out with everything God gave them in exciting motion, and every silver-blue-haired Mom's mouth sets in a grim Victorian line of disapproval and every paunchy Dad's eyes light up with the recollection of fleshly delights he never had.

(Don't bug me – slowly but surely I am getting to the matter of the women.)

But after the first three or four days there's really nothing much to do – nothing, that is, that you or your libido don't think up by yourselves. The sport fishing is lousy compared to Mexico or Nassau, there's no water skiing, riding, tennis or golf, and compared to Honolulu or the Virgin Islands the beaches are rocky and second rate. There are only two swimming pools on the island. There's no public library, or even a stand to buy current magazines.

There are less than two dozen permanent American residents on the whole island of thirty-five thousand people and these are hardly of the international, partying, jet-set variety you run across in Jamaica and Cannes.

And Tahiti's not cheap; don't expect another Spain or Majorca. Just about everything, except fresh fish, coconuts, and women, costs as much or more than in the United States.

And the weather. I have to come right out and say it can be rotten; let's just say that if I owned Man-Tan I'd get a branch factory going down there as fast as possible. It rained so much last summer (theoretically the best time to go) that I came home after three months paler than when I had left San Francisco.

So what, then, is so good about the famous Tahiti? Why did I bawl like a baby when I left last year? Why did I go back this year – and reserve the house for next year, and the next?

Part of the magic, of course, lies in the visual. The island is beautiful, rainor shine. I've never seen a more breath-taking sight than I did when first sailing through that coral reef into that toy harbor at dawn with the volcanic mountains springing suddenly out of the sea and clawing up higher than seven thousand feet into the clouds. (Arrival by airplane is all right but not quite so staggering.) And the little town of Papeete, while dirty and crowded, is – sorry, there's no other word – picturesque.

But it's the people who live in Tahiti and the people who go to Tahiti that make for the constant fascination of the place. Every day you sit on the quai at the sidewalk café called Vaima and you sip your rum and discuss who slept with whom the night before and watch the never-ending parade of characters.

For example, Emile Gauguin is sure to waddle by and put some sort of bite on you; he's the painter's sixty-year-old son, the only beggar on the island, and he can usually be found selling autographs or posing for tourists' gag shots. ("Look, I picked up a genuine Gauguin picture when I was in Tahiti!")

The French baron, who gave up a château in Tours for a grass hut, strolls by hand in hand with his saronged vahine. The lovely daughter of writer James Norman Hall comes from market staggering under the weight of a tuna fish. And a few feet away a grandson of the twenty-sixth President of the U.S.A. ties up the small boat he sailed there from Honolulu. Over there, in front of the Bar Lea, Andre Kostelanetz has a local musician cornered trying to find out why there's no minor-key music on the island, and he is temporarily distracted when a gorgeous Tahitian-Peruvian brunette with the incredible name of Nita Wanamaker ankles by in a Dior dress. She, in turn, stops to talk to someone more incredibly named than herself, Cambridge Shiu, the Chinese merchant.

Characters, does this island have characters! Take my neighbours, for instance. I was talking to one, a bald, bearded fellow who had introduced himself as Bengt Danielsson, anthropologist, and I complained that it had taken me ten whole days to get there by steamship.

"Well," he said in his pleasant Swedish accent, "it took me three months." Danielsson was on Kon Tiki.

Then take the eccentric American millionaire down the beach from my house. He hates noise, and every dawn his native neighbors' roosters would wake him up. So he had his butler buy them all and kill them. Soon a new crop and another appeared and he had these killed also. He still doesn't know that he's the greatest single outlet for the rooster market in all Polynesia.

Or meet the Noel Coward trio across the way; a retired Englishman, his attractive Parisian wife, plus the most beautiful hunk of Bardot-type sixteen-year-old Polynesian female you ever saw. They are all in love with each other. Interesting.

Which, at last, brings me to the main, and perhaps sole, reason that you're reading this article: les vahines. Is it true that they're all beautiful and that it doesn't mean anything more to them than a handshake?

People have been kissing and telling on Tahitian women for centuries. Here's one of the first evaluations of them, written in 1773 by Captain Cook:

"Great injustice has been done the women of Otaheite ... by those who have represented them, without exception, as ready to grant the last favor to any man who will come up to their price. But this is by no means the case; the favors of married women, and also the unmarried of the better sort, are as difficult to be obtained here as in any other country whatever. . . . On the whole, a stranger who visits England might, with equal justice, draw the characters of the women there, from those which he might meet with on board the ships in one of the naval ports, or in the purlieus of Covent Garden and Drury Lane. I must, however, allow that they are all completely versed in the art of coquetry, and that very few of them fix any bounds to their conversation. It is therefore no wonder that they have obtained the character of libertines . . ."

No question about it, most Tahitian women are more relaxed and overtly delighted by sex than most of our women. But then they're more relaxed about everything in life. And if you walk into some bar like the famous Quinn's on the waterfront, you're going to find the most relaxed atmosphere you've ever been exposed to. I won't say it's the most open joint I've ever been in, but I will say that it's the only public place I've ever walked into at high noon for the first time and immediately had some unidentified vahine give me the warmest and lowest greeting I've ever experienced.

Their reputation for greatness in the hay seems to be well deserved. A prominent doctor studying the customs there told me that it's because of their uninhibited natures and also because of certain interior muscles which the girls develop through doing those incredible, convulsive dances which they perform from childhood. ("Like a man shaking hands," he stated, though somehow it sounded more scientific when he said it.)

Whatever their sex life, the girls are friendly and delightful. At first many people are disappointed in their looks; unfortunately, every girl in Tahiti does not look like a tanned Elizabeth Taylor. Many are fine looking in every other way (continued on page 94)Tahiti (continued from page 84) but in the teeth department, due to the lack of dental care and absence of minerals in the drinking water. When you're driving along Tahiti's one road you frequently see up ahead a motor scooter, and astride it a superb nineteen-year-old body dressed in a scanty flowered print, waist-length hair flying in the breeze. You speed up, come alongside, and see that she has the face of a goddess. You smile. And then she smiles. No teeth! The classic present for a popaa (white visjtor) to give his vahine when he leaves the island is a dental bridge. Marlon Brando put this deficiency to great practical use when he and the company that remade Mutiny on the Bounty went there. The girls are notoriously undependable and work only when they feel so inclined. Money doesn't interest them enough, so Brando & Company played on their vanity. They took a dentist to fill their oral gaps with bridges. However, the girls had to turn in the false teeth every night before leaving the set.

Of course there are girls with perfect teeth and perfect everything, girls so beautiful they make you ache inside, but they are not as plentiful as the travel folders would like to have you believe. I think the Tahitians have acquired their reputations for beauty largely because of their magnificent bodies and hair. Also, the Tahitian girl's skin is usually of a beautiful color and amazingly soft, and their eyes are nearly always lovely. A delightful custom is that the standard form of greeting in Tahiti is kissing – on both cheeks, yet.

As for communication, it helps if you speak a little French, since almost to one speaks English. The basic tongue is Tahitian, a mellifluous and intricate language. However, the language barrier has been surmounted or ignored in more than one highly successful liaison.

One pleasant surprise I wasn't prepared for was the costumes of men and women. I figured it would be like Honolulu, they'd put on sarongs for ship departures, luaus and dance performances. But in Tahiti the natives dress in pareus (pronounced pah-Ray-ooh) most of the time. This consists of a wrap-around garment of beautifully designed flowered cloth. Both sexes wear it, plus a bra to match for the women. Disappointingly, you won't find any girls wandering around without bras, but when you get to know them they'll take them off in a trice when a group of you go swimming in the fresh-water pools up the valleys. They are, however, excessively modest about the lower garment and sometimes never take it off, even when going to bed with a lover.

The Tahitians are the cleanest people I've ever seen. They generally bathe in the fresh-water streams three times a day. There is never any odor about them, even in the tiny bars where dozens of sweaty dancers are writhing to the frantic beat of a tamure drum.

They are a dignified, friendly, independent and happy people, but basically very lazy. Why not be? They have everything they want. There's fish in the sea, and bananas, oranges, breadfruit and coconuts in the trees. Leave the worry and striving for the crazy popaas and the Chinese.

The Tahitians want almost nothing that they can't get from nature, and this has driven more than one European crazy. Movie companies have frequently given up in disgust halfway through filming a picture because the natives suddenly get fiu (fed up) with work and wander off. The main reason they work for money at all is to get enough Hinano beer to get drunk on the weekend. They don't drink during the week, but come Saturday, the whole family is usually off on a party that lasts till Sunday night. They are amiable drunks who just love a good outdoor party with their friends.

The best time of all for them is the Bastille Celebration. This starts on July 14, is supposed to last a week, but generally drags on for three weeks; the intensity of the mooing of the unmilked cows and the barking of the unfed dogs tells you how long the family's been in town. There are spear-throwing contests and the men's accuracy is astonishing; they can hit a coconut atop a fifty-foot pole at two hundred feet. There are canoe races and singing and dancing exhibitions and cockfights. But most of all the Tahitians enjoy les baraques, the booths made of woven palm leaves along the waterfront. Here they have carnival games of skill and chance and little dance pavilions where they drink and do the tamure dance ecstatically all night and most of the day, loving each other, loving life, and loving their island.

Does it all sound too pat, too platitudinous, too traveloguey, this picture of the happy native in the garden of Eden as the sun sets behind a silhouetted palm frond? I keep looking for the catch but I can't find any; I'm afraid that they are the happiest people on earth in the loveliest setting left to the world.

Yes, it's great – for them. But the modern man doesn't always fit in this environment. It's nice to think of going back to nature in theory, but that fed-up guy on the Madison Avenue treadmill who thinks he yearns for Tahiti usually can't take it for very long once he gets there. Tahiti tells you who you are quicker than any place I know; it's interesting to see how different people react to the revelation. Thoreau (or was (continued on page 130) Tahiti(continued from page 94) it Emerson?) said that the happiest man is the one who can do without the most things. You don't have much of a choice down there – you're forced to do without things you take for granted in America. The guys who find a vahine and a little that hed cottage on the lagoon and "settle down to do some stock taking and really live" don't seem to stick it out very long, unless they have a lot of inner resources. They generally take to the booze pretty hard, and then one day after a few weeks they quietly leave for the familiar frantic pace again, there to dine out on tales of Tahiti, "where they really know how to live."

In the transition period from rat-race to man to confirmed Tahiti lover, the worst time is about the third week. The astonishment over the physical beauty has begun to wear off, you've done all the obvious things to do, met all the girls, and you begin to get itchy for a play or a newspaper or a bookstore or a nice new Hollywood movie. That's when the longtime residents of the island look wise and say: "Three weeks in Tahiti is too long – and three months is too short."

How does an average day go by in Tahiti? Well, when I'm there I try to get up fairly early and do a little writing or painting. I say try, because too often I just say to hell with it (and the longer you live there the more often you find that little phrase coming to your lips about anything that involves any effort whatsoever). After breakfast is served in the big thatched house by two handsome girls in bright pareus, I slide the big outrigger down the beach to the water – (or rather, I wait for the gardener to do it!) – and spend the morning out on the lagoon goggle fishing. The water and the fish are beautiful, but it's tough fishing, since the native spear fisherman have made them pretty wary. Incidentally, there are no sharks in the lagoon but there are plenty of moray eels, some four to five feet long with heads and jaws on them like fox terriers.

Then comes lunch, and what a lunch it can be: marinated tuna, or parrot fish, the freshest lobsters, giant grapefruit and avocados, breadfruit, yams, fried bananas, and best of all, poe, the arrowroot dessert (which has nothing whatsoever to do with that mucilaginous Hawaiian paste called poi). The food all over the island is generally surprisingly good.

After lunch, you read or take a nap or drive into town to check the biweekly mail arrival and see who's new in town. Usually there's a fellow writer visiting, the most recent being Graham Greene (doesn't like Tahiti much), Eugene Burdick (likes it) and James Ramsey Ullman (loves it). Tahiti's so small that it's hard to miss meeting any personality who comes through, though the Tahitians themselves are completely unimpressed with success and successful people; someone remarked that the only two people in the whole world who could cause a stir in Tahiti would be General de Gaulle and Tino Rossi, a longtime popular Italian crooner whose records the Tahitians love.

So anyway, after you've cased the town and shot the breeze at a sidewalk café, if you have the energy, you can grab a girl and drive out through the lush countryside, so lush and fertile that even the fence posts sprout and turn into trees. Then you stop at a fresh stream in the greenest valley you ever saw. And if you've chosen right, how you spend the rest of the afternoon is up to you. To wind the day up to you can, if you've a mind and the mosquitoes don't get too bad, cut a bamboo rod, use your pareu as a net to catch some shrimp for bait, and then snag a few nato, a scrappy and delicious trout-like fish. Pull down a breadfruit from a tree, build a fire, and broil your fish at the same time you roast the breadfruit in the coals. There are bananas and oranges for the grabbing and the girl will show you how to husk and open a coconut.

Or if you feel fancier, you can go back out of the wilds, clean up and go to a cocktail party, if that's the kick you want. It seems as if there's one a night. Then there are a couple of good little modest restaurants in town, and after dinner it's off to the Lafayette nightclub for some of that great dancing. Or if you're hardy, you can take in a movie at one of Papeete's two theatres, where the film vintage is usually twenty years old at least (last season's big event was the first showing of Gone with the Wind there). Rats run under the seats, and the Tahitians get terribly excited and yell obscenities at the villain, since nothing can persuade them that the happenings on the screen didn't actually occur. (The Tahitians' favorite actor is Roy Rogers, which they pronounce "Rowah Roshay.")

And so the days go by on this island. If you make it through the first restless periods, little by little the great peace of the place will filter into your being; you will forget the inconveniences, you will lose interest in the outside world.

Any man who tries to describe a Tahitian sunset is a fool, so let me just say that once you've seen one, you won't forget it as long as you live – the stars in this dustless, smogless, cloudless atmosphere seeming as large and well defined as in a planetarium.

But most of all there is in the air a strange pervading peace of mind, an absence of urgency, the removal of the weight of our tomorrows. This is the allure of Tahiti – the past, the present, the esternal allure – this is what the island has to teach us, us of the "civilized" world.