Welcome to paradise...
From delicious passion fruit mojitos to amazing underwater adventures, Tahiti really is perfect, says Diana Preston
BE JOYFUL!’ smiled the Tahitian barman mixing passion fruit mojitos, as surf washing over the distant reef went pink in the setting sun. Visitors to Tahiti and its islands have seldom had a problem feeling joyful ever since, in 1767, Samuel Wallis and the crew of HMS Dolphin became the first Europeans to land here, followed by James Cook, William Bligh and their men. No wonder Bligh called it paradise.
These early British arrivals anchored in Matavai Bay, a curve of black volcanic sand protected by a narrow spit known as Point Venus, so-called because Cook set up an observatory here to monitor the planet’s transit across the sun.
Bligh chose the same spot to grow seedlings of bright green uru – breadfruit – that the government had dispatched him aboard HMS Bounty to collect, with famously fateful consequences.
Monuments on Point Venus commemorate their visits. So does the Tahitian dance hivinau – the name is said to derive from the ‘heave ho’ of sailors hauling the anchor winch.
It’s easy to see why Tahiti’s exuberant beauty seduced them all. Scarlet flame trees, spiky wild ginger and purau – a wild hibiscus that blooms and dies in a day – overhang the road twisting up through the Papenoo Valley to a volcanic crater. Dense groves of pandanus palms, and papaya and banana trees conceal basalt and coral platforms called marae, where islanders performed sacred rituals.
In Cook and Bligh’s time, Tahiti sometimes fought with neighbouring Moorea, sending out tattooed warriors in long war canoes. These days, things are more friendly, and heart-shaped Moorea is a just short catamaran ride across the 7,500ftdeep trench that separates them.
To the first foreign visitors, the exotic fruits dangling from the trees, needing no cultivation and just waiting to be plucked, must have seemed like Eden. I got a similar feeling in Moorea’s tropical plantations when I tasted tart star fruit, super-sweet pineapple, and noni, the knobbly fruit of the ‘universal medicine tree’, which is said to cure all aches and pains. An equally abundant world lies beneath Moorea’s lagoon.
The snorkelling is fantastic but I also took an underwater walk. Wearing a helmet with an air pipe attached to the mother boat, I plodded back and forth while black-andblue striped Picasso triggerfish with yellow lips so pouting that they looked as if they had been injected with collagen, clownfish, and pointynosed angelfish peered at me.
Moorea is a good jumping-off point for Tahiti’s Leeward Islands to the north-west. Lush Raiatea – a brief plane hop away – shares a tranquil lagoon with Taha’a, its smaller but equally luxuriant neighbour famed for its vanilla. As our boat skimmed across the lagoon, our garlanded guide Davita – whose elaborate tattoos of turtles, crocodiles and canoes make David Beckham’s body art seem understated – serenaded us with his guitar.
He taught us to weave baskets from palm leaves and grate white coconut flesh with a machete, and he also advised on the etiquette of swimming with rays (‘avoid the barbed tails but stroke their soft, silky underside very gently’) and black-tipped reef sharks (‘don’t point or hold your hand out’). Then he let us loose in the warm waters to become the least graceful part of a balletic performance of toe-nuzzling rays and widemouthed sharks.
As we swam, on the horizon the unmistakable cloud-dusted finger of rock of Mount Otemanu on Bora Bora pointed skywards. With its crystalline waters and palm-crested motus – islets within the reef – this island is perhaps the most glamorous and glitzy. It’s the place to wear a bikini studded with lustrous black Tahitian pearls – if you can afford it! Yet it’s also home to a rescue project where green turtles poisoned by pollution, or perhaps minus a flipper after being trapped in fishing nets, are prepared for their return to the ocean.
A day spent learning to feed and care for these creatures is very ther-
apeutic. Bora Bora offers an experience unique in French Polynesia – the chance to ride an aquabike. It allows non-divers, non-snorkellers, nonswimmers or people with disabilities a chance to access the deep.
A glass dome with an air supply is placed over each two-person scooter. Then the platform on which the scooter sits is lowered into the water to a depth of 15ft and it’s time to go.
AS A barracuda slunk past us into deeper waters, we followed our guide at a sedate rate of two or three knots through canyons of pink and purple corals colonised by darting jewel-bright fish and giant sea cucumbers.
Fellow aquabikers were honeymooners attracted by the islands’ romantic languor. More mature couples also come to celebrate anniversaries in a place where locals, every bit as beautiful and graceful as figures in Gauguin’s paintings, still wear flowers in their hair and welcome visitors with garlands.
Some hotels even have their own romance concierge to arrange Polynesian-style wedding ceremonies, the delivery by canoe of breakfasts to over-water bungalows, or torchlit dinners for two on the beach, featuring local delicacies such as red tuna carpaccio.
Nearby Huahine has a different vibe, powerfully evoking the Polynesian seafarers who first settled on these islands. Circular stone traps show how they once caught fish, while among groves of rosewood and iron trees is a marae dedicated to Oro, the god of war. It was sometimes used for human sacrifice before battle.
Today in the Tahitian islands, the greatest danger is being hit on the head by a coconut falling from a swaying palm. But perhaps that risk is a small price to pay for visiting somewhere even curmudgeonly Captain Bligh called paradise.