The Windward Isles makes a perfect scenic destination for Dianne Boardman
Dianne Boardman travels to the Windward Isles, where there’s breathtaking scenery at every turn.
THIS was what the beginning of the world must have looked like, I thought, standing in a crater on the top of a volcanic mountain densely covered with green rainforest and shaped like a wisdom tooth.
My thin clothes were damp with humidity, especially after bending and twisting through the jungle path of tangled old vines to the summit.
But it was worth it for the 360-degrees view of a seemingly eternal babyblue sea and sky melting together in the heat haze.
Here at last was the South Sea island of my imagination, described as a Garden of Eden by Captain Cook’s crew and the Paradise of the old writers of exotic tales that had enthralled me as a youth, all vividly depicted in the paintings of Paul Gauguin.
My friend Sheila and I had arrived in French Polynesia after a six-hour flight across the Pacific Ocean from Los Angeles.
Tahiti had been a disappointment despite the flower-garlanded welcome at the airport.
There had been an air of festivity in the capital Papeete, with neat palm trees regimented along the promenade and the clamouring of the bars and bustling of the French shops, but we could just as easily have been in Marseilles.
Later, standing in the warm wind on the deck of the ferry, crossing the indigo and turquoise water of the romantically named Sea of the Moon to Tahiti’s heart-shaped sister island of Moorea, we watched the peaks that local legend said were formed from the fins of a giant sea-creature sharpen into focus and reveal the deep green valleys folded below.
It began to feel like an adventure at last.
We were staying with a French couple, Denise and Christian, who’d retired to this Windward Isle, mimicking those earlier travellers who’d visited and never left.
It also looked as though our English friend Paul might be doing the same thing, as he’d been renting a bungalow in their garden
for over a month.
Denise is an artist who creates her pictures using debris and shells found on her walks and flowers from her tropical garden, including the national emblem, the sweet, creamy Tiare Flower.
Denise is a human dynamo, ever on the move.
As soon as we’d settled into the bungalow with Paul, she took us off on the island’s circular road, pointing out the supermarket, the place to collect free drinking water, the best roadside fruit and vegetable stalls and where the fishing boats landed their catches.
Over the next weeks, while Paul and Christian messed around in boats, we rose early before the heat was overwhelming and joined Denise’s walking group through vanilla plantations and steamy pineapple groves.
We were given juice to taste from the small factory and allowed to put windfall in our rucksacks, and moving into the lush interior, we cooled our overheated bodies in waterfalls that cascaded down the rockfaces into cold green pools amongst the ruins of ancient Polynesian temples.
I have never seen such fertility – blazes of tropical flowers of vibrant reds and oranges poking from deep green foliage, fruit heavy on trees everywhere: grapefruit, pomegranates, mango, papaya, star fruit, jackfruit and many more we couldn’t name.
Some days we joined
Paul on Christian’s boat, drifting around neighbouring islands as spinner dolphins pirouetted and surfed beside us, sometimes coming close enough for us to feel their rubber-toy skins.
We slipped from the side of the boat into the chestdeep, flat shiny sea, as warm as our sun-soaked bodies and so clear it was just like getting into a bath, minus the suds.
Once, as we swam amongst the fish, dodging the giant stingrays that would slither benignly over us, a shoal of harmless reef sharks rushed past us in the opposite direction like commuters when a train pulls in, making us shriek while Christian in the boat just laughed.
To learn about Polynesian culture, we visited shows where traditions were being kept alive in bright costumes by delicate ladies and fierce men dancing or firewalking on the beach, but most evenings we bought fish and shrimps from the easy-going Polynesians near the beach.
We cooked them on a grill with slivers of pink ginger and chunks of pineapple or coconut.
We lit our citronella candles on the balcony against the mosquitos and simply watched the crimson sky turn to honey and then treacle as Venus heralded the arrival of a champagne of stars, before retreating under our mosquito nets to reread the adventures of those earlier South Seas travellers. ■