My teenage summer . . . . . . in Tahiti
Feigning a passion for French was a small price to pay to be let loose on the ‘islands of love’, writes Lorna Thornber.
It was the summer of ’99 and, like Bryan Adams three decades beforehand, I was preparing for the best days of my life. Aged 16, I didn’t think I was living the best days of my life – in fact I was pretty sure they could only get better – but I told myself that that summer would be different. I was going on my first overseas holiday. Without my parents. To Tahiti. Adventure would finally be mine. Perhaps, I dared hope, even romance.
My parents had agreed to shell out for the airfares because it was a student exchange and therefore ‘‘educational’’. I’m sure they were well aware I wasn’t so desperate to go because I was desperate to improve my French but I suppose we all hoped that would be a happy byproduct of spending six weeks with a French Polynesian family. And I was happy to muster enthusiasm for learning the language if it meant I got to trade my ordinarily uneventful summer holidays for being let loose on the ‘‘islands of love’’.
My friend Selena was the only one I knew to have been placed with a person of the opposite sex and, while this filled her with immense anxiety, it filled me with immense, albeit unspoken, jealousy. What could be a more perfect set-up for a holiday romance than sharing a house in paradise with a handsome stranger (the types of movies and novels I enjoyed at the time told me the hero in such a scenario had to be goodlooking) whose native tongue was the language of love?
I was set to stay with a girl named Maruia in the capital, Papeete, before flying (the extra ticket in my introduction pack told me) to an island I’d never heard of. These were the days before social media and comprehensive travel information online, so I was unable to cyber-stalk Maruia before departure or find out anything much about the island I was headed to (visiting a library somehow didn’t occur to me). Looking back, it’s probably the only time I’ve headed overseas having done zero research. Which of course meant that everything I experienced came as a surprise.
Maruia and her younger sister and brother, it transpired, lived with their aunt, uncle, fiveyear-old cousin and a motley crew of hyperactive mutts in a far-flung suburb of the distinctly nonparadisiacal capital during term time, returning to their home island in the Tuamotu archipelago in the holidays.
In Papeete, us kids shared a mattress on the floor of one of the two bedrooms, waking to the sound of dogs barking, cocks crowing, giant flying cockroaches taking off and, occasionally, on expedition missions across our bodies. I say waking but, unacclimatised to the tropical heat, I got little sleep. Nights were spent in a hot sweat; tossing, turning and praying that Maruia was right that an airconditioning unit would be installed in the windowless outhouse by the time we got back from the Tuamotus.
That first week, I tagged along with Maruia to school, where I understood about as much in English class as I did in French (I’m not sure where the English teacher was from but it certainly wasn’t an English-speaking country). We went on blood-boiling runs through the surrounding hills for PE and to the local market at lunchtime to gorge on lolly-sweet pineapples and baguettes marinated in Pepsi.
On the last day of school, I spotted Selena across the quad and broke my jandals in my rush to get to her – my first experience of how wonderful it feels to spot a compatriot, and better yet a friend, when you’ve been overseas for a while. The guy she was staying with was, she said, gorgeous. Incredibly for a goodlooking boy, or so I then thought, he was also a nice person. Selena didn’t divulge many juicy details before we had to go our separate ways but it was clear she was winning the race – although most likely she was unaware she was a competitor – to find true love.
For a tropical island virgin, the short flight to the 77-atoll Tuamotus was a revelation. And, after my time in the capital, a relief. The technicolour blues of tourism brochures, I now saw, weren’t just a marketing gimmick. They were the actual colours of the water in these parts. Set with emerald-centred motu ringed with white-gold sand, the archipelago was more exquisite in real life, I decided, than anything printed on a glossy brochure.
The tiny, open-air airport terminal was packed, with men, women and an astonishing number of children spilling out almost onto the tarmac. Maruia’s parents welcomed us all with open arms and tiare (flowers) to tuck behind our ears, but made it clear from the outset that they’d be speaking French to no-one but me. Why should they use the language of colonists from the other side of the world, they asked, when they had a perfectly good one of their own? Deciding that ‘‘because my teachers will report back to my parents if I don’t improve my French at all on this trip’’ wasn’t a good enough answer, I kept quiet.
Riding in the back of their pick-up truck along the dusty road to their house, my pasty complexion provoked pointing and giggles from pretty much every kid we passed. Being in the ethnic minority, I was discovering, can make one feel very conspicuous – and self-conscious.
The next four weeks are now a bit of a blur, with one day passing much the same as the next. I’d wake on my mat in the upstairs bedroom the family shared, realise I was the last up as usual and head downstairs to pour a couple of buckets of cold water over my head (there was no running water on the island). When my host dad returned from his morning shift at the black pearl farm, we’d pile into the family dinghy and, after he’d speared a few multi-coloured fish in the lagoon and wrenched a few oysters free from the rocks, go in search of a desert island to while away the afternoon on. We’d build a bonfire, cook the fish and eat it with boiled rice and my host mother’s dense, addictively sweet coconut bread. On Christmas Day, she brought along a cake she’d flavoured with Wattie’s Tomato Sauce. Not the kind of French cuisine I’d been expecting, but not unpalatable.
Thus satiated, we’d swim in the lagoon or, if it happened to be teeming with baby sharks, as it often was, collapse under a coconut palm before heading home to collapse on the couch. Usually to ancient episodes of Friends dubbed into French. The family would fall asleep almost immediately and, with no-one but Ross, Rachel and the rest of the fantastic five for company, I would succumb to feelings of homesickness that often brought me to tears. Away from my entire immediate family for the first time, I realised I’d been wrong to pass up their company so often for that of my friends. I loved them dearly really. Even my sister. At midnight, my host dad would rise to drive to the end of the island to turn off its power supply – my cue for bed.
Bored out of my mind late one night, I grabbed a torch and headed out for a walk, destination unknown. Following the sole road out of town through a coconut grove, I decided to keep going until I reached a secluded enough spot for a skinny dip. I’d been walking for about 20 minutes when I heard a rustling in the bushes and scenes from I Know What You Did Last Summer (this was the late 1990s) flashed through my mind. I’d begun creeping back in the direction I’d
come from when I heard a low hum – Maruia! Approaching, I scared her as much as she had me.
‘‘What are you doing here?’’ she asked in French when she’d recovered.
‘‘What are you doing here?’’ I responded in something resembling that language when I had.
She often visited that spot, she told me, when she couldn’t sleep; something that was happening more often the closer she got to finishing school.
Like me, she had a year to go but, unlike me, she knew what she wanted to do with her life: become a doctor. There was no medical school in French Polynesia so she’d have to leave Tahiti for the first time. Most likely, as Tahitians have French citizenship, for France. I told her I thought that would be amazing – I would have watched Pokemon every day after school for my entire final year if it meant I got to escape to Europe, but she was far less enthused.
As conflicted as she was about her home island (chief among her complaints were the lack of job and entertainment options and that she knew every boy on the island and only wanted to kiss the one her best friend was dating), she knew she lived in a version of paradise.
Even so, she’d make major modifications if she had it her way. Her parents had told her and her siblings to follow their dreams overseas if they must, but that would mean breaking the long line of blackpearl farmers in their family and away from their traditional way of life. And, quite possibly, their parents’ hearts.
Having suffered acute homesickness on this trip and the year I’d spent in England – although as yet ignorant of how sanity-destroying it can get – I was able to sympathise. But it took moving overseas myself years later to fully comprehend truths about home, family, identity and happiness that she seemed to understand intrinsically. As well as the many benefits of a simple life. At that point, I couldn’t see past my longing to travel the world.
After that night, we used our own cross-breed form of communication: part French, part English, part te reo Tahiti (similar to te reo Ma¯ ori) and part mime. By the time the six weeks were up, I’d come to think of Maruia and her relatives as my second family. While so badly sunburnt that my host mother refused to let me go out in daylight, I looked and felt far better than when I had arrived. My eczema had disappeared and I’d discovered long walks can actually be quite enjoyable when you’re exploring somewhere new.
At some point I mentioned that I’d like to get a tattoo one day and, probably because I mixed up my tenses, the family took it to mean I wanted to get one on that trip. Told one morning we were off to the tattoo parlour, I only had an hour to decide what to get. Describing what I wanted to the tattoo artist wasn’t easy in my still inadequate French but I emerged with a small dolphin in a traditional Tahitian design above my ankle that takes me back to being a teenager in Tahiti whenever I catch sight of it. While not the summer of love I had hoped for (the only boy I had a lengthy conversation with was Maruia’s 10-year-old brother), it was certainly lovely – and the adventure of my young life. And educational after all, even if my French afterward would have still made a language purist wince. See mum, your money wasn’t wasted really.