The Girls of Tahiti

Ever since 18th century sailors returned to port with their tales of the loving girls of the South Seas, no gentleman's pipe dream has been more persistent than that of the palm-fronded tropical isle, isolated by a vast ocean and an encircling reef, rich in scents and colors beyond the temperate imagination, and teeming with passionate child-women whose only desire is to lie on the beach and make love. Wanderers who pursue this dream into the southern ocean are usually drawn by the siren lure of Tahiti, crossroads of the South Pacific and island home of some of the world's most forthright females. Like most dreams, this one conceals a sprinkling of fiction, a dash of fancy--and a large dose of fact. The fact is that while Tahiti may mean Gauguin to the art buff, marlin to the sports fisherman, Melville to the littérateur, even poisson cru to the gourmet, its reputation with the world at large is built on a firm foundation of compliant femininity; a reputation by no means undeserved, since the girls of Tahiti have been famous for their amatory proclivities since the white man first touched their island--and them.

Credit for the white discovery of Tahiti goes to Captain Samuel Wallis of the British ship Dolphin, who sighted the island's beckoning peaks on June 8, 1767. After sending a crew ashore to seek water, Wallis dazedly noted in the ship's log that the girls--"very handsome, some really great beauties--stripped themselves naked and made all the alluring gestures they could to entice the men on shore." The crew soon learned that those few who wouldn't give themselves freely would exchange their favors for nails--on a one-for-one basis. A thriving trade blossomed overnight, coming to Wallis' attention when a boom tumbled to the Dolphin's deck and the carpenters discovered that "every cleat in the ship was drawn and all the nails carried off." Hardly more than a heap of spars laced together with purau bark, the Dolphin limped back to London, and Tahiti has never been the same.

In subsequent years, relations with the outside world undeniably have grown more sophisticated--but both Tahiti and its girls have managed to retain much of the charm that so captivated the first whites. Missionary influence, the scourge of many another fun-loving Pacific culture, was bloody but brief--and generally ineffectual. Today, while the girls of Tahiti no longer shed their pareus to lure the incoming visitor through Customs, they remain--particularly in matters sexual--among the most candid, relaxed and unself-conscious women in the world. Indeed, more than a few visitors have left the island with the impression that the entire female population has banded together with the sole purpose of pleasing the traveling stranger.

More than just her openness distinguishes the vahine (it's wahine in Hawaiian, but in Tahiti everything is simpler, including the 13-letter alphabet) from her sisters around the world. Tahiti, after all, is more than 2000 miles from almost anywhere (4100 miles southwest of Los Angeles, 2500 miles northeast of Auckland), and in a world of increasing moral enlightenment, it's difficult to envision even the most hapless jet-age roué traveling that far to gratify urges he could more conveniently assuage at home. The traveler who does make the trip will discover that the vahine is unique in her every thought and action, from her broadest view of the paradise around her to the way she performs the most insignificant daily task.

All this may not immediately dawn on the typical American tourist, recovered from his eight-hour flight from L.A. and rubbernecking in the swirl of femininity along Papeete's Quai Bir-Hackeim--a South Pacific adaptation of Fifth Avenue and Lake Shore Drive. Papeete, which the cognoscenti pronounce in Tahitian ("Pa-pay-eh-tay"), is the only "city" in the South Seas and capital of the sprawling island empire of French Polynesia.

What our man does immediately realize is that the doll-like vahine of the Melville idyls, if she ever existed beyond men's idle dreams, has long gone the way of the Pequod. As he drifts through this ground swell of smiling faces, whose well-formed features eschew cosmetics: as he hears from their unreddened lips a sonorous potpourri of Tahitian, with its jawbreaking vowels and explosive stops, sprinkled with the South Sea version of French and English; as he senses the unencumbered grace and outspoken sensuality of their pareu-clad figures; as he dodges an endless stream of motorized two-wheelers--Vespas, Solexes and Mobylettes--ridden by a phalanx of Godiva-like beauties whose miniskirts may provoke (continued on page 295)Tahiti(continued from page 212) a double take from even the sated Tahitian male; as he discovers that the vahine of today has embraced many of the conveniences of civilization with a gusto she formerly reserved for tamure dancing and lovemaking, while still retaining her legendary approachability, her existential delight in the transitory and her historic unconcern for such non-Tahitian institutions as chastity and marriage; as all these discoveries wash over him, our man about Papeete may well decide--as many have before him--that the vahine, 1966 style, is an infinitely more attractive version of her 19th Century cousin.

On closer look, he might begin to notice that even the smallest details set these girls off from the run-of-the-globe female. Each seems to boast the loose-limbed grace of the pearl diver and the liquid, unabashed sensuousness of the tamure dancer. The vahine walks effortlessly and erect, hips and shoulders swaying with feline fluidity, head high with pride in her body's agility, yet without a trace of the concomitant hauteur one might expect to encounter in a similarly endowed jeune fille in Paris, London or Hollywood. Her clothes reflect neither the haut monde style-consciousness of the Manhattan secretary nor the studied simplicity of the Stockholm svenska. Like everything else in her sun-kissed life, her dress is an unpretentious response to the benign exigencies of paradise: a simple cotton shift, usually in pareu, the boldly patterned cloth that adorns not only the girls of Tahiti but their tables, chairs, doorways, windows, beds and automobiles as well.

While the vahine avoids cosmetic alchemy--save, perhaps, a touch of lipstick on a big night out--she will go to elaborate lengths to select and position the flower she'll wear over her ear: perhaps a frangipani, tiare Tahiti or hibiscus, perfectly placed to complement, but not outshine, her own natural beauty. On this sexually straightforward island, despite what the guidebooks say, the ear flower has a social as well as an aesthetic function. Behind the left ear, it indicates that the vahine is unattached, and by extension, willing and even eager to strike up a conversation--and, chances are, a great deal more--with an interested male. Worn behind the right ear, the flower indicates that she's married or otherwise committed. Perhaps because the committed don't wish to advertise, or perhaps because there are few enduring commitments in Tahiti, left-ear flowers predominate.

As our man continues his stroll, it will probably occur to him by degrees that more than just their faces and figures set these girls off from their city cousins abroad. Universally, they're smiling, laughing, even singing. Gone is the furrowed brow of the Gotham career woman, the ice-blue coolness of the Berlin Fräuleinwunder, the tight-lipped reserve of the Paris fashion model. In Tahiti, many of the vahines work--as waitresses in Papeete's restaurants, as clerks in the musty caverns of the French administrative labyrinth, as chambermaids and even bartenders at the tourist hotels--but none of them has ever been known to worry about working.

Papeete, where virtually everything in Tahiti takes place, is a city in transition. Since 1961, with the opening of a jet-age airport at nearby Faaa (all three a's are pronounced), its population has almost doubled--to about 26,000. In the process the town has grown, for better or worse, from a quiet port village in an out-of-the-way corner of the world to a bustling city-in-the-rough, humming with construction activity and center of a vast network of airline connections and military apparatus. C'est la guerre, rather than the jet-propelled tourist, that has wrought the metamorphosis. After France lost her African colonies, the entire French overseas military operation--encompassing perhaps 8000 men, the redoubtable French Foreign Legion and all the French atomic paraphernalia--was transferred to Polynesia, with headquarters in Tahiti. The gallants of the F. F. L. are now digging sewers around Papeete, and the once-serene archipelago of Mururoa, some 775 miles southeast of Tahiti, is suffering the indignation of the French atomic bomb.

The swell of soldiers in Papeete has precipitated a major construction boom; building means jobs; jobs, money; and money in Tahiti--while it lasts--means only good times. Not surprisingly, the New York effect daily draws vahines from "the districts" (anywhere in Tahiti outside Papeete) in search of employment, bright lights, good times--and men. Not a few of these newcomers are married women who have simply walked out on their Tahitian husbands--many of whom still think a weekly wife beating is the best proof of conjugal devotion--to seek less-taxing liaisons. In addition, the little interisland schooners fortnightly disgorge their share of anxious and well-starched young girls from the out islands: the Marquesas, Gambiers, Australs and Tuamotus. The attraction of Papeete now is such that connoisseurs of femininity need spend only a few afternoons at one of the strategic sidewalk tables of the waterfront Vaima Bar to appraise virtually every available vahine on the island--and most likely, to strike up several rewarding acquaintances as well.

The vahine's candor in sexual matters is legendary. Ever since Captain Cook, she has been educating the inhibitions out of those who have had the good fortune to come in contact with her. Anchoring the Endeavour off Tahiti in 1769, Cook was somewhat prepared, from Wallis' experiences, for the orgy of good will that followed. Still, he sounded more like a Victorian housemother than a latter-day salt when he wrote in his log that the girls of Tahiti "have entered into a resolution of enjoying free liberty in love without being troubled or disturbed by its consequences. They amuse themselves by dancing indecent dances in which they give full liberty to their desires, express the most indecent ideas in conversation without the least emotion, and delight in such conversation beyond any other. Chastity indeed is but little valued. The men will readily offer their young women--even their own daughters--to strangers, and think it very strange if you refuse them." Cook appropriately christened the palm-shaded black-sand spit near his anchorage "Point Venus."

Perhaps subsequent long nights at sea gave him pause to reappraise his feelings about the vahine's attitude toward sex, for after his second visit to Tahiti (he ultimately returned for thirds and even fourths), he concluded: "One ought not to be too severe upon these people. In continence in the unmarried can hardly be called a vice, since neither the state nor individuals are injured by it."

This is precisely the attitude of today's vahine, and one she can well articulate--if not in words, in the unmistakable sign language of deeds. The candor of her loose little island, her upbringing and virtually her every experience have taught this kinetic creature to regard sex as an appetite to be gratified as instinctively--and sometimes as frequently--as hunger or thirst. For her, sex is life itself: neither fetish nor phobia, but all-embracing and--as Cook noted--freely indulged and joyfully discussed. In fact, one 19th Century linguistic observer delicately concluded: "The predominant theme of conversation, from youth to old age, is the coition of the sexes."

Her sexual garrulousness is enhanced by a language uniquely equipped for such banter. The most insignificant street-corner chatter, literally translated from Tahitian into English, is likely to emerge a steaming stream of obscenity--the fault of English, not of Tahitian, which with Freudian gusto rejoices in the intimate connection between sexual phenomena and everyday life.Certainly, in no other language could the vahine convey as pithily as she does with her own word tirau the information that "a pair of giant sea turtles has been seen copulating."

In addition to being weaned on a conversational diet of erotica, the young vahine, long before she has learned to write her own name, has been taught to emulate--precisely, provocatively and proudly--the motions of sexual intercourse, in the pelvic metronomy of the tamure, Captain Cook's "indecent" dance. And she certainly knows its significance, for in the wall-less one or two-room home in which she is raised, Western concepts of privacy are as foreign as television--which, incidentally, was introduced to Papeete a year ago. Before she reaches puberty, every major scene in the life cycle--copulation, birth, marriage, death--is acted out before her unblinking brown eyes, to be stored away in the vast repository of her practical experience with the photographically descriptive accuracy that all Tahitian girls seem to possess.

Not surprisingly, virginity is a concept foreign to Tahiti. A vahine's arrival at puberty usually signals the commencement of frequent sexual dalliance, sometimes virtually beneath the benevolently averted eyes of her elders. Underlying her frisky concupiscence is an attitude--perfectly understandable, considering her casual regard for sexual activity--that has precipitated some of the most caustic Western criticism of la vie Tahitienne. For the vahine, sex often has little or nothing to do with love. In fact, it is customarily no more than a delightful and inexpensive diversion, a scintillating counterpoint to the languid and worry-free boredom of endless days--and 12-hour nights--in paradise. Following the tradition of young girls everywhere, at a given time she may or may not be in love. If she is, chances are she'll confine herself to her boyfriend, but more out of convenience than devotion; and if she's not, her sex life drifts on independently, caught up in a tide of impulses she's secure enough not to swim against. Her affairs usually generate more heat than warmth, a trait that works decidedly to the advantage of tourist and transient, but that has discomfited a few visitors who benefited from her casual sexual heritage but weren't able to reconcile her unemotional approach to sex with their own.

A corollary of the vahine's objective sexual outlook is her unwillingness to engage in the games of loveplay. None of the traditional prerequisites--save the presence of the all-important chemistry--are necessary to take her: She prefers her entree sans hors d'oeuvres. Lip kissing and the caressing of the breasts she ordinarily regards with the same puzzled tolerance she has for bikini tops and bathroom doors--diverting and curious evidence of a manifest refusal to see life as it really is.

And unlike the all-too-common bastion of American female virtue, the vahine seldom succumbs under protracted, ritual siege. Nor, of course, does she invariably consent to a bald-faced proposition. But when a similarly inclined gentleman happens to strike her fancy, there's no need for the peekaboo parlor game of seductive hide-and-seek so popular elsewhere. The vahine voices her mating call with disarming directness. If the electricity is there--and the volatile environs of Papeete are quite conducive to sparks--nothing remains but the consummation of the friendship.

A vast amount of unfettered lovemaking naturally produces its side effects. In any boisterous port city, even more so in the heady atmosphere of Papeete, the uncautious traveler faces the possible discovery that he has left town with an unpleasant token of a lady's esteem. Though almost every vahine is spotless, visitors who plan to frequent the waterfront bars and change partners regularly should proceed with caution.

Contraception, involving preparation for a nonevent fully nine months off, contradicts the vahine's aita pe'a pe'a philosophy and she employs it only infrequently. However, anthropologists have noted that in this and other sexually free cultures--for reasons unknown--the prospects of a young girl's pregnancy seem proportionately less than her constant indulgence would call for. Surprisingly few Tahitian girls become pregnant before they reach 18. She who does--like her older sister--faces none of the quiet desperation confronting the single American girl similarly bestowed. The vahine reacts to such a situation with a serenity borne of the knowledge that the ancient culture of her id-happy island has amply provided for just such contingencies. If she loves the father, or even if she just wants his baby, she may have the child with no stigmas attached, to raise it herself or--if she's not ready to curtail her pursuit of pleasure--to present it to a favorite older relative. Despite missionary efforts to enshrine the small, Western-style family, the vahine maintains her loyalty to a larger clan of relatives. The shifting of children among these kinsmen has always been common, the women of Tahiti having long ago learned that tender, loving care is necessary to raise a healthy child but the biological mother is not.

When the vahine doesn't love the father or desire his baby, abortion is available and frequently employed. The method is far from clinical--a homemade abortifacient of roots and herbs--but is easy to procure, relatively painless and, if taken soon enough, invariably effective. It's not unusual for a vahine to have had half a dozen such treatments before she reaches 25, and almost every Tahitian girl has at least one.

If by Western standards the vahine becomes a sexually mature woman long before her time, much of her remains indefinitely in childhood. Traits that mark sophistication in the European girl--her ambiance of sexuality and her security in her femininity--are in the vahine more instinctive than understood. For the rest, her outlook on life is without greed or guile--comparable to that of an unsophisticated, charming child.

For instance, she's often afraid of the dark. She may speak five languages fluently and have studied psychology at the local secondary school, but that doesn't shake her belief that the night air is crawling with tupapa'u, semitransparent ghosts (or minions of the Devil, for those who've been converted), who take a lecherous delight in startling young girls by pawing at them invisibly. At a party, she'll probably ask her escort to hold her hand and accompany her to the woods while she relieves herself.

As the inquisitive bachelor will discover anon, her docile exterior also hides a pent-up volcano of passion and fury. Provoked to eruption, she'll square off against an opponent--not with the ineffectuality that generally characterizes the fair sex in combat but in the bare-knuckled attitude of John L. Sullivan. The vahine has been fighting with her fists since she was old enough to clench them; unless her opponent boasts a similar background, he should outweigh her by at least 40 pounds to emerge victorious--or even upright--from a serious intramural tiff.

Visitors accustomed to the thing-oriented preoccupations of the American city girl will also find the vahine heartwarmingly unobsessed with possessions. On her benevolent island of abundance, where few have ever lacked the essentials of life and where the essentials of life are only a prerequisite to happiness and the pursuit of pleasure, the accumulation of material goods becomes not a raison d'être but an inexplicable eccentricity. Moreover, the vahine's communal family heritage has long taught her that anything worth while--food, wealth, happiness, sex--is to be shared, in an attempt to achieve the ancient Polynesian ideal that "no head or shoulders shall be above any other."

Not only in her view of matters material but in her temporal sense she departs dramatically from Western standards. The vahine lives in an endless present, untroubled by either memories of the past or speculations of the future. Whehe says "the other day" she may mean anything from "this morning" to "15 years ago." "Tomorrow" may mean "next week" or "never"--the two being quite synonymous. Perhaps uniquely among the women of the world, she lives for the moment, unmindful of either her landfalls or her destination. Pop hedonists who have established this attitude as the pinnacle of cool would profit from a field trip to Tahiti. Hers is a point of view at once enchanting and disturbing.

Naturally, all the vahine's glitter isn't gold. Vast chambers of the labyrinth of her mind--a three-dimensional maze perfused with glacier-slow moods and protean emotions--remain forever closed to the Western visitor, at best beguilingly enigmatic, at worst perplexing, incomprehensible, distressing. Her carefree, nonchalant attitude can also support a callous disregard for the grimmer realities of life. Her ideal that "no head or shoulders shall be above any other," while assuring equity, can do so often only at the expense of originality and initiative. Her basking in the moment can breed a blithe disregard for the future effects of present actions--resulting in occasional misfortune. Even her apparent lack of materialism is misleading. Her well-meaning disdain for property unfortunately often extends not only to her own possessions but to those of others. And the veneer of her unconcern for material goods masks a childlike fascination with glittering trinkets--transistor radios, studded motorcycle jackets and the like--the latterday counterparts of the shiny nails that captivated her ancestors. The charm of her ingenuity--at sewing boldly patterned bedspreads or arranging flowers--sometimes fades with the realization that there's only one type of bedspread, one floral arrangement, which, beautiful as they are, share a machine-tooled similarity.

Happily, however, the girls themselves stand out from one another almost as distinctly as they contrast with their cousins around the world.

Two centuries of boisterously enthusiastic racial mingling--product of Tahiti's strategic location, a large influx of foreign labor and its longtime reputation as a haven for the artist, castoff, beachcomber and bum--have forged in its females an exotic ethnic amalgam, uniquely combining Polynesian joie de vivre, European sophistication and Oriental serenity. Tahiti's 46,000 inhabitants probably boast the blood of every ethnic group in the world, but its women, like all Gaul, are divided into three parts: Polynesian, French and Chinese. In many cases, of course, they have blended, producing such delicate hybrids as the Chinese-tahitiennes, certainly among the most beautiful women in the world. These subtle variations are too plentiful to detail, but the armchair voyager can still gain a fair mastery of the broad spectrum of Tahitian beauty by interpolating from the three primary hues.

Of the trio, the true Tahitian has contributed most to the melting pot, and as a consequence, she's disappearing. Even considering the constant influx of females into Papeete, no more than five percent of its girls are pure Polynesian. The true tahitienne belongs to Rubens and Gauguin. Her smoothly molded features at once exude innocence, mystery and the passionate grace of the hibiscus. Her face is circular, rather than oval; lips arching and bee-stung; raven hair waist-length when she lets down her topknot. By contemporary standards, her limbs, waist, ankles and calves are almost masculine.

An evening with a Tahitian vahine might well start, after cocktails, at your own hotel with an immobilizing Tahitian tamaaraa--an endless feast of pig, breadfruit, bananas and fish, painstakingly cooked in a stone-lined underground himaa--and followed by the colorful tamure of a hula-skirted local troupe. If your vahine knows the dance and can interpret the movements for you, so much the better. Thence en ville, where she may direct you to the starkly unpretentious confines of the Bar Lea, where tourists are seldom seen, French never spoken, and the music, atmosphere and clientele are all authentically Tahitian. If the rigors of the Bar Lea don't exhaust her, she may coax you on to a waterfront stroll, past the glowing charcoal fires of the brochette vendors, whose skewered bits of marinated meat are perfect for that late-evening snack before you wind your way back to your hotel for a final punch rhum à deux. No hotel in Tahiti, incidentally, would even consider questioning a resident's right to a female guest--whether for an evening or for the length of his stay.

The French girl in Tahiti is seen more often than her scant number--hardly 800--would justify. She lives almost exclusively in Papeete, and by virtue of her multilinguality, her affiliation with ruling officialdom and her undeniable attractiveness, she's likely to be found decorating the counters of most of the airline offices, hotels and gift shops--eager to serve the male traveler in a business way; and if her ear flower is portside and her antennae receiving favorably, ready to strike up a more familiar relationship as well. Besides a Tahitian world view, the Papeete française has the manifold virtues of her Parisian sisters--Harper's Bazaar face, lithe limbs, pixy features, an aura of sexuality, an instinctive sense of haut monde--and a flair for the dramatic. You might meet her in the market at five on a Sunday morning (incredibly enough, the most active hour of the Tahitian week), hair cut à la Bardot, clad in a brief halter and hip-hugging toreadors--and dragging a 20-pound tuna on a purau thong. At a more reasonable hour, the feteful meeting might occur when you encounter her bikini-clad figure lounging poolside at the Hotel Taaone--one of her favorite hangouts, possibly because of its excellent French cuisine. Among the françaises, even the gamine and freckle-faced nymphet, hardly past the Frenchimposed age of consent (for all practical purposes, 16), has the sexual attraction of a mature, sophisticated woman. A lifetime of speaking French--whose vowels, especially the acrobatic "u," require much less jaw wagging than English, but rely much more on tongue and lips--has made the French girl's mouth, whether drawn up in a tight-lipped, elfin smile or pursed into a provocative pout, the most expressive part of her decidedly expressive body.

The best of all possible whirls with her might begin over a late-afternoon café au lait at the red-and-white sidewalk tables of the Manava Snackbar--which commands an incomparable, if slightly unnerving, view of the early-evening crazy quilt of traffic on the Rue de Gaulle. (Tahitian traffic, she won't have to point out, is unlike any other. It consists mainly of motorized two-wheelers, a sprinkling of preposterous French autos such as the Citröen deux chevaux, and a vocal minority of disembodied American cars transmogrified into open station wagons capable of carrying an entire Tahitian family, the neighborhood children, all the household furniture and animals, and an outrigger full of breadfruit and fish.) After a leisurely aperitif, your française may wish to sample Escargots à la bourguignionne and Marseillain bouillabaisse in the cathedralside garden of Cercle le Bougainville. From there, after coffee and a liqueur, a ten-mile seaside drive brings you to the charming outdoor dance terrace of Au Vieux Montmartre, in the district of Punaauia, a dozen miles from Papeete, the gold coast of Tahiti and former residence of Gauguin. She's probably more attuned to the Boston monkey than to the tamure, and before the evening is spent may persuade you to head back to town to the aural wonders of the Bounty Club. After several hours in the high-infidelity atmosphere of this frisky discothèque, you'll probably both be ready to stroll out into the quiet of the night and search the horizon for the Southern Cross--an obscure constellation that "blazes" only in travel brochures--and for your hotel.

Though she numbers several thousand, the third member of Tahiti's female triumvirate, the Chinese girl, has only begun to assert herself. Her ancestors arrived in Tahiti in several waves commencing in the 1860s, but for almost a century, the traditional Oriental notion that women should be neither seen nor heard prevailed against the Tahitian attitude that girls are to be enjoyed, with all five senses, to the frontiers of the imagination. However, in the last few years, French colonial legislation--still somewhat discriminatory against the chinoise--has encouraged her to look for companionship, and possible permanent liaisons, outside her own race. The ancestral barriers are crumbling, and she is seeking pleasures and men with a deliberation evidencing her eagerness to make up for generations of lost time. You'll see her petite, exquisitely formed figure whisk by on a Solex (roughly equivalent to an American bicycle with a one-cylinder motor on the front fender), or find her exotic face--high cheekbones, aquiline nose, almond eyes, dazzling smile--behind the counters of myriad little shops, each a carbon copy of the other, that encircle the Papeete market. Besides her obvious physical assets, she's pert and bright--as well fed, well bred and well read as any East Egg debutante--and probably a better speaker of English than either her Tahitian or her French neighbors, thanks to the family emphasis on education and perhaps the two years she spent with relatives in San Francisco.

An evening with her might begin over cocktails or an aperitif at the bamboo-trimmed Vaima Bar, headquarters for Papeete's English-speaking community, which meets daily to recall how life was before 8000 French soldiers turned the boy-girl ratio askew. (Where vahines once outnumbered tanes by two or even three to one, it's now a standoff. Considering the field day a single man still has in Papeete, one can only join in marveling at the good old days.) From the Vaima you and your date can watch the western sky--over a foreground panoply of yachts, catamarans and circus-colored candy vendors' carts--gradually turn from aquamarine to the color of orange sherbet. The nightly spectacle of the sun setting over the coronet peaks of the neighboring island of Moorea still transfixes those who have been watching it for a lifetime. When the show is over, a short walk will bring you to the Lucullan pagodas of Le Dragon d'Or or A la Soupe Chinoise, where the Oriental cuisine is unexceptionable and the waitresses all vahines. At dinner's end, if your dragon lady is both intrepid and curious, she may be willing to risk a sortie into Quinn's Bar, a legendary South Seas watering spot still flowing on the strength of its past--and its ever-present coterie of readily available girls. They're not really prostitutes, but during the course of an evening with one--an alternative not recommended unless you wish to abandon the pleasures of the chase, if it can be called that in Tahiti--she'll most certainly discover she needs a few hundred francs to send momma home in a taxi, pay the baby sitter or satisfy some equally implausible charity. Entertainment chez Quinn is provided by both band and clientele, and only the coed bathroom, a vestige of the South Pacific of Melville, Stevenson and Gauguin, is something to write home about. If her eyes are still open when Quinn's closes, your chinoise may talk you into taking le truck--one of Tahiti's open wooden buses--six miles into the woods to Lafayette, a bar that opens when the others close and offers only more of the same; after which you should be doubly glad to have a local girl in tow, if only to guide you back to your hotel.

Though the Polynesian, Chinese and French girls may differ superficially, they've got Tahiti under their skin. Their very differences, under the catalytic chemistry of their island paradise, have fostered an ambiance of mutual tolerance that cements them in sisterhood. After generations of living in an area roughly the size of Los Angeles, they share blood ties not only with one another, but with the looming yellow-green peaks--some thrusting almost 8000 feet into the trade winds--that lured the first Tahitians east some 2000 years ago. So strong is this mystique that not only the française and the chinoise but even the mainland-pink San Francisco secretary, kicking up her heels on a ten-day stopover, begins to succumb to the island's uninhibited camaraderie. More than one visitor has noted the happy transformation that overcomes normally reticent Stateside girls vacationing in the South Pacific.

For the pelf-assured bachelor with time on his hands, getting to Tahiti is easier than staying there. Jets depart almost daily from Los Angeles, Honolulu and Acapulco, and anyone who possesses a vaccination certificate, a passport and the round-trip fare ($750 from L. A., whether direct or via Hawaii) can spend ten days on the island without even the formality of a visa. When buying your ticket, incidentally, make sure you ask for a stopover at scenic, unspoiled Bora-Bora: Because of a quirk in the air map, it's free, and since no jet stops there, you get a round-trip island excursion from Papeete by DC-4. On application, either in Tahiti or on the mainland, tourist visas of up to three months are granted, usually renewable for another three months. Though no foreigners are supposed to remain in French Polynesia for more than half a year, the number of permanent popa'a in Tahiti attests to the Gallic flexibility of this rule.

Even if you're staying for just a month or two, your vahine may suggest that you rent a bungalow for two--a move that will combine privacy with economy and permit you to see a side of Polynesian life unavailable at the tourist hotels. If, at the same time, you find yourself fiu (a frequently heard Tahitian expression that roughly means "fed up") with the dusty and hectic streets, constant noise and ever-present French military of Papeete, you may decide to move out to the districts--perhaps to Punaauia.

The likelihood of becoming fiu is more than remote during a short sojourn, however, and the male visitor will be quite happy to stay with the positive embarras du choix in the midst of Tahiti's tropical abundance. Certainly in few places in the world is love as free or as frequent, the life as easy or as enjoyable, the atmosphere as fertile or as frank, the girls as varied or as available. And in the words of longtime Tahitians Charles Nordoff and James Norman Hall, coauthors of Mutiny on the Bounty: "There remains the charm of living among people whose outlook upon life is basically different from our own; of living with a simplicity foreign to anything in one's experience, amid surroundings of a beauty unreal both in actuality and in retrospect."