Spent a couple great days on Rangiroa, one of my favorite stopping-off points in Polynesia, in part because of the fun, small adventures we had here exactly seven years ago, with kayaks. I know it was seven years ago because I can remember sitting in the linoleum-floored great room of Pensione Glorine, watching grainy black-and-white images of the WTC towers crashing down, one year after.
Photo, Pete McBride
A lot has changed since, though the lagoon here stays much the same: Huge. Fifty miles by twenty miles. Then we paddled across it, around it, camping on its sand motus, convening with hermit crabs, luxuriating by simply laying back in the sand and watching the frigates soar on the thermals above. My travel partners then have remained so; Pete McBride and John Armstrong were with me in Antarctica last year, Alex Nicks and I have made several films together since, sadly Willie Williams – who looked after our logistics and always knew exactly where we were on the map – is somewhere soaring on thermals of his own, hopefully with a view of his own special paradise.
Every time I come to Rangiroa I look for my friend Ugo, a local guide and raconteur; usually without luck, since he’s often out exploring the far corners of the big lagoon. Today I’m lucky and find him pulling his wooden boat, the Oviri, up to the cement dock.I first met Ugo in 2001, a very unsettling meeting since while I waited on the sand beach for him – with his wife – Ugo had gone missing. For twenty-four hours no one knew where he was, other than he had taken two fishermen out in his boat.
When he finally showed up, he blamed it on a recalcitrant engine … and big winds. “When I finally got the engine to start, the winds were so strong we couldn’t even try to come back. So I tipped the boat on its side on the shore, used it for protection, and we stayed that way all night. It was nothing!”
Then, and several times since, Ugo has taken me to his secret garden, so to speak. Here’s how I wrote it then:
“C’mon friends, follow me, c’mon, meet my pets,” Ugo shouts, tossing another chunk of bloody bonito into the quintessentially-cobalt South Pacific. “The heads, that’s what they like best.” A gentle big-man, smelling of gasoline and sun block, his solid, sun-browned body quakes with excitement as he dips his hands repeatedly into the white plastic bucket of fish-parts resting on the back of his 40-foot cutter “Oviri” – Tahitian for “Wild” – bobbing in rough seas.
With each handful of chum come more carcharinus melanopterus – black-tip sharks – two dozen, three dozen, 50, 100, 200, so thick it’s impossible to count them, to separate them, for all their swarming and churning just below the surface. With hands like catcher’s mitts Ugo pulls off his clear plastic sandals, replaces them with swim fins, and reaches for his mask and snorkel.
“They’re waiting for us,” he shouts as he jumps smack into the midst of the swarm. He is so positive – so convincing that there is nothing to worry about, being inches from the snapping choppers of eight-foot long, 400-pound sharks even as he continues to toss them bloody fish parts, despite that he’s missing part of a thumb for having gotten “lazy” during one such feeding – that I follow. When I open my eyes, four-feet below the sun-sparkled surface, there are literally hundreds of big sharks circling. Me.
“Look, down there,” shouts Ugo when we surface. “Lemons! Big ones! WELCOME, MY FRIEND, TO SHARK CITY!”
Ugo is a true man of the sea. He has three boats and a simple beachside house on the lagoon of Rangiroa, the world’s second-largest coral reef atoll and the best known of the 78-atoll Tuamotu chain north of Tahiti. His father was a local hotelier. Ugo, 36, speaks good surfer’s English because half his life ago his father handed him a check for $30,000 and a plane ticket to San Francisco. “Go to UC-Berkeley, get an education, learn English,” was his directive. He followed orders . . . but only halfway. Days after arriving in the U.S. he discovered Half Moon Bay, bought a board and made surfer friends. Two years into his scam – complete with phonied “reports” from school – the gig was up. His punishment? Live, and live off the sea, on this beautiful spit of coral-and-sand-and-rubble here in the dead center of the South Pacific.
“Not so bad,” Ugo laughs. From the back of the “Oviri” Ugo continues to play. Baiting a 50-pound baby black-tip with a fish head tied to a plasticized line he pulls it, thrashing, into the air. The struggle lasts 30 seconds before the shark opens its mouth – wide, exposing a long line of fine, sharp teeth – lets go and swims off.
Flicking pieces of bait off his forehead with a giant finger, Ugo grins, his smile as wide as the shark’s mouth. “This, my friends, is paradise! No?”
Today, Ugo reports the sharks are growing in number. “And now I have a lemon shark nearly as big as my boat! We should go see it! Now!!!”
The ground floor of the open-air market at Raiatea is filled with vendors hawking exotic fruits stacked high on long wooden tables; several coolers of the mornings catch feature bonito, tuna and Dorado on crushed ice. Shaded from the mid-morning heat, an occasional ocean breeze blows the brightly flowered cloths stapled to the tables, revealing plywood boxes of even more fruit below. Shafts of sunlight slice the piles of yams and coconuts, mangos and bananas from skylights overhead. Business on a midweek morning is light but steady; the clientele mostly upscale French expatriates and sailors wandered over from the nearby marina.Talk among the wide, smiling women doing the selling is soft; mostly they sit quietly on tall stools, waving themselves with bamboo fans.
A wide balcony rims the two-story market and is chocked with stalls selling shells and woodcarvings, black pearls and pareos, mostly to tourists. A ukulele band plays in one corner. I prefer the fresh fruit scene if merely because after eight years it feels like I’ve seen every possible kind of knick-knack made from sandalwood, woven palm and batik. I do stop to bang a stick on a wooden drum, not paying much attention to the salesperson until a big woman with a big voice asks if I’d like a demonstration of how to play the drum. Looking up I am reminded of something still very unique to Polynesia: The sales person is tall, with thick arms, definitely not a woman though he wears a distinctly feminine pareo. His hair is long and braided, his beard has been plucked and he’s not shy about the very-male belly pooching from beneath his cut-off t-shirt.
Transgenderism is alive and well across French Polynesia, as it was long before Gauguin arrived. On the big island of Tahiti many of the maitre d’s in the best restaurants are men dressed as women; on the smaller islands – like Raiatea – they most often work in shops. Discrimination is kept mostly quiet. There are four or five working in the stalls on the balcony this morning, accepted by locals, standing out only to visitors.
Known as mahu, one theory is that the eldest male in a family was often raised to be feminine because work for women was more reliable, insuring the family a breadwinner. In small communities, only one mahu was allowed. But I’m going to let an expert fill in some details: Roberta Perkins is a transgender, living in Australia:
“Tahiti has long had a romantic reputation for sexual permissiveness. Indeed, young people were encouraged to freely engage in sex and experiment with various sexual behaviors with many partners as a precondition of later satisfactory marriage. And, as 18th and 19th century seafarers discovered, Europeans were considered most desirable by Tahitian girls because their white skins indicated they were gods and nothing could be better than giving birth to a demigod. The early Europeans visitors to the Society Islands were also amazed to find Tahitian males who lived as women and were totally accepted in this role by the island community. They were soon to discover that the condoned social condition of males living as women existed right across the many islands of Polynesia, from Hawaii to New Zealand and from Tonga to Easter Island.
“There is an amusing tale about a sailor aboard the British frigate Mercury in 1789 who on making a short stop at Tahiti was smitten by a beautiful dancing girl. He gave gifts of beads, combs and other knick-knacks in the hope of pleasing her and then persuading her to go with him on board the ship. She consented, but to his surprise (perhaps shock) when she removed her lap-lap the body of a young male stood before him. The Tahitians showed their obvious enjoyment of the episode by laughing aloud on the beach at the sailor’s embarrassment. Such was often the way Englishmen were introduced to the mahu of Tahiti, the fa’a fafine in Samoa, the fakaleiti in Tonga, or other terms for them on the other islands, which was often followed by much mirth on the part of the islanders. Perhaps the nearest interpretation to these terms is that given by Samoans when asked about the fa’a fafine, which is like a lady, you know 50/50. So, in traditional Polynesian societies male–to–female transgenders were not seen as women, but as something in between. Nevertheless, they were widely accepted by the Polynesians. King Kamehameha I of Hawaii even had them dwell near his house because he considered them lucky, and in Tahiti every village had one mahu because it was thought to be fortunate for the village.
“The universal incidence of transgenders across Polynesia is a remarkable phenomenon, especially when in neighboring Melanesia (New Guinea, the Solomon’s, New Caledonia, Fiji etc) individuals changing gender were almost unknown in pre-European days (although ceremonial transvestism, homosexuality and male pederasty was prevalent and widespread), Perhaps, the concept of gender crossing had not occurred to the older island settlers of Melanesia, whereas, the newer Polynesians, who arrived in the Pacific only about 500 years ago, may have brought the idea with them from South East Asia, where gender crossing has been an important function in traditional societies there for many millennia.
“For the English, French and Dutch seafarers who visited the South Pacific Islands in the 18th century, confronting the Polynesian transgenders was a mixture of shock, fascination and repulsion. The best reports of these early contacts come from the H.M.S. Bounty expedition to Tahiti (1789 – 91) under Captain William Bligh. One of his officers, Lt. Morrison, wrote: ‘They have a set of men called mahu. These men are in some respects like the eunuchs of India but they are not castrated. They never cohabit with women but live as they do. They pick their beards out and dress as women, dance and sing with them and are as effeminate in their voice. They are generally excellent hands at making and painting of cloth, making mats and every other woman’s employment.’ Being a thorough gentleman who considered it his duty to investigate everything, Captain Bligh’s curiosity got the better of him ‘I found with her a person, who although I was certain was a man, had great marks of effeminacy about him and created in me certain notions which I wished to find out … The effeminacy of this persons speech induced me to think he had suffered castration … Here the young man took his mantle off which he had about him to show me the connection. He had the appearance of a woman, his yard and testicles being so drawn in under him, having the art from custom of keeping them in this position … On examining his privacies I found them both very small and the testicles remarkable so, being not larger than a boy’s five or six years old, and very soft as if in a state of decay or a total incapacity of being larger, so that in either case he appeared to me as effectually a Eunuch as if the stones were away.’ One can imagine old stiff and proper Captain Bligh in full dress uniform fingering the mahu’s genitals with his starchy white-gloved hands.
“An unexplained phenomenon on Tahiti was that just one, and only one, mahu resided in each village at any one time. As one Tahitian pointed out: “When one dies then another substitutes … God arranges it like that … It isn’t allowed … two mahus in one place. I’ve traveled around Huahine (the Society or Tahitian Islands) and I haven’t seen two mahus in one place. I never saw it.” How this phenomenon worked is still a mystery, but obviously some sociological mechanism must have been at work in each village to ensure that not more than one mahu lived there at a time. Since, as we know the desire to change gender is spontaneous and not an orderly event, how then did such precision occur on cue? Perhaps a young mahu growing up in a village, which already had an established older mahu, may have been forced to seek a village where none existed. Another suggestion is that the community, who selected a boy to be raised as a girl to replace the established mahu when she passed on, made a mahu. The question remains, though, what criteria was used for this selection? However it was achieved, mahus were accorded great respect and dignity.
“Bligh observed: ‘The women treat him (mahu) as one of their sex, and he observed every restriction that they do, and is equally respected and esteemed.’ Anthropologist Robert Suggs reported a similar attitude towards mahus on the Marquesas Islands, while another ethnographer, Donald Marshall, said much the same for Cook Islanders, and by all accounts it was similar on Hawaii. On Mangaia, the mahus were not only well regarded by the rest of the population, but they excelled at women’s tasks, sang in an excellent high pitch falsetto and were better dancers than all other women. Anthropologist Robert Levy claimed that the mahus on Tahiti served as an object lesson for demarcating the sexes. Since the sex roles were similar in many respects and some tasks were performed equally by men and women, the mahu was pointed to as neither wholly man nor wholly woman. However, this does not explain the presence of mahus in more warlike societies such as the Marquesans, the Hawaiians or the Maoris, where the sexes were clearly defined by the warrior status of men.
“The mahu tradition continues today on Tahiti, Samoa, Tonga and the other islands, but due to the intrusions of white missionaries to Polynesia in the 19th century it is much modified from its pre-European development. Mahus no longer have the respect of their communities and many have migrated to such cities as Papeete, Fagatongo, Nukualofa, Auckland and Honolulu, where transgender subcultures similar to those in Australian cities have formed. But the western cultural influence in these cities has resulted in the derogatory image of “drag queen” and the kind of persecutions that we transgenders in Australia are familiar with. As a consequence, some mahus have returned to their traditional communities where, in spite of a predominance of judgmental Christian dogma, at least the extremes of western oppression do not exist.”
It’s been amazingly windy across this stretch of the South Pacific during the past two weeks, from Tahiti out to the Cook Islands, the winds blowing out of the east and southeast, scudding clouds and rain overhead all day long. On the small motu of Tahaa yesterday I had lunch with veteran ship’s captain Tony Mirkovic; we have sailed together many times and both share a great affection for the South Pacific as well as his native Croatia.
I ask him to name the various winds he grew up with on the Adriatic … because in Croatian there are as many words for wind as Eskimos have for snow: Tramontana, Bura, Lavant, Jugo, Ostro, Pulenat, Lebic, Maestral and more.There each wind comes from a different direction, sometimes arriving simultaneously, overlapping. Tony says these South Pacific winds are most like the tramontana he grew up with, strong, unceasing.
“Remember, we were here one year ago in early September and had weather similar to this. That was the first time I had seen these kind of high pressure systems here at this time of year. It’s the same now.” I ask if he thinks warmer ocean surface temperatures are influencing the changing conditions, encouraging stronger storms at different times of the year … something I’ve seen impacting coastlines around the world during the past decade.
“Absolutely,” is the captain’s response. “There is no question that the world’s changing climate is starting to have an impact on the weather out here.”
It used to be that the “rainy season” in this part of the world was November to April; now you find long spells of sunny weather during those months … and a lot more rain during what used to be the “dry season.” In support of the changes affecting the one million square miles of South Pacific, the World Wide Fund for Nature reported recently that predictions about climate change’s impact on this region have been largely underestimated. And that by underestimating, have put at risk millions of people who live on low-lying coasts across the Pacific.
Experts say that the tiny Pacific Island nations, which collectively account for a mere 0.0012 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, are the most vulnerable and would be the first to feel the full brunt of global warming. Among those most at risk are some of the world’s lowest-lying islands, like Kiribati, Vanuatu, the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, parts of Papua New Guinea, and many in the the Cook islands and French Polynesia. Because the Pacific Islands are small and un-influential and their concerns easily ignored, their governments have only recently gotten engaged in international climate change negotiations, through the Alliance of Small Islands States or AOSIS.
The other day we sat in a building surf off Raratonga, unable to land due to big winds creating big seas. The weather forecast predicted the same for the next several days, so we gave on a second landing in the Cook’s, as well as a planned visit to the Austral island of Tubuai. While we all pay lip service to the coming rising seas, it’s only out here that the real impact is already being felt.
In most Pacific islands, the people, agricultural land, tourist resorts and infrastructure (including roads and airports) are concentrated in the coastal zones, and are thus especially vulnerable to any rise in sea level. Determining how severe this problem is, or might be, is complicated by natural shifts in sea level associated with the recurring ice ages. For example, over the past 16,000 years, the sea level rose some 450 feet in the Southwest Pacific reaching its present state about 6,000 years ago. This would indicate an average rise of about one inch a year during the 10,000 years it took for sea level to reach its present level following the last glacial epoch.
The potential socio-economic impacts of climate change on the smaller Pacific island countries are estimated in a series of vulnerability studies. Depending on the worst-case scenario (three feet of sea level rise by the end of this century), the studies suggest that sea level rise will have negative impacts on tourism, freshwater availability and quality, aquaculture, agriculture, human settlements, financial services and human health. Similarly, storm surges are likely to have a harmful impact on low-lying islands.
Low lying coastal areas of all islands are especially vulnerable to rising seas, as well as to changes in rainfall, storm frequency and intensity. Inundation, flooding, erosion and intrusion of seawater are among the likely impacts. These catastrophes would result in economic and social costs beyond the capacity of most Pacific island countries and threaten the very existence of small atoll countries. Shifts in rainfall regimes and any increase in tropical cyclone intensity and frequency greatly amplify the impact of sea level rise. A rise of average sea level by three feet, when superimposed on storm surges, could easily submerge low-lying islands.
Which immediately makes me think of one of my favorite island groups – the Tuamotus – where we are headed in a couple days. The 77 atolls in the chain rise at most six feet above sea level, suggesting that by the end of this century they will be uninhabitable. I promise to ask my friend Ugo, who has lived on Rangiroa the past ten years, what he thinks about rising seas, if he does at all, and what he tells his sons about their future in the islands.
HUAHINE – It’s been unusually gray in Paradise for the past couple days, windy and rain swept, especially so here on the remote edge of the Leeward or Society Islands of Polynesia. I said the other day that I find Moorea to be the most beautiful island in Polynesia … but Huahine gives it a run for the money on one front: If its peaks are not as stark or dramatic, they are still tall and lush, its greatest advantage is far fewer people. The reality is that for all its paradisiacal beauty, Moorea is a bedroom community to Tahiti, its solitary ring road thick with traffic in the early morning and late afternoon as commuters rush to and from the fast ferry to the big island. Here on Huahine you get a similar lush, green beauty with ten percent of the people. One hundred miles northwest of Tahiti it’s out of the way, hard to get to … perfect if you are, like me, always looking for escape.
River eel, on a schoolyard window
Home to a plethora of ancient Polynesian Maraes (ceremonial temples) carefully preserved and reconstructed along the shoreline of its main village of Fare, in the 1800s this was mostly a whaling port. Today it’s home to eight small villages; in Fare a ferry boat has arrived to carry its school children back to boarding school on Raritea.
Following a mostly grown-over road to the coast I trace the island’s southern shoreline, paralleling deep coconut palm forests, in search of a couple very different sites: An abandoned hotel wiped out a decade ago by cyclone and a river said to be overflowing with “sacred” Tahitian river eels. I am only successful at finding the latter, and that thanks to an old woman in a red-flowered dress at the last house, at the end of the beach.
After a couple hours of a gentle walk along the coast – the local dirt red and healthy, the jungle dense and wet – I’d run into a dead end and she was there, sitting in her yard on a metal chair surrounded by a half-dozen languorous tabby cats, almost as if she’d been planted there to give directions to lost wanderers. She knew of the hotel (“everything in it was made by hand, and beautiful,” she said, “but now the only thing left are a few cement slabs”). In broken French and using her hands she indicated I was “two mountains and a lagoon away” from finding it.
The eels were easier and she pointed me in the right direction. Three to six feet long, with fins along their side which locals cal “ears” and eyes a translucent cold blue, they are found only on Huahine, Tahiti and Moorea. Their sacredness comes from legend, which says they are the product of a union between an eel and a Tahitian maiden. I find them swirling in the eddy of a narrow, black river, pointed out to me by a half dozen locals who are feeding them “sacred mackerel” from “sacred cans” found at a nearby “sacred market.” Two hundred years ago this was a center for Polynesian culture; today it is still very emblematic, “sacred” obviously having taken on very twenty-first century definition.
Wait until you see these IMAX 3D images of Kelly Slater and Raimana van Bastolaer surfing out of the tube at Tahiti’s Teahupo’o – arguably the wildest, most dangerous, most perfect surf wave on the planet – projected eighty feet high on a giant screen near you (coming, February 2010). In Moorea and Tahiti I had a peek at some of the rushes dumped onto a fifteen-inch computer screen and literally had to step back fromeven that small screen, overwhelmed by the real feel of Raimana – Tahiti’s godfather of surfing – jumping to his feet on the board, peeking back over this shoulder to judge the whereabouts of a monstrous roller heading towards him, the splash of the clear-blue South Pacific washing over the lens and the grim/exultant look on his face as he realizes he’s successfully up and not going to get washing-machined by a fifty-foot wave. Look for my story about the ‘making of’ surfing’s first IMAX 3D film – Ultimate Wave Tahiti – in December’s National Geographic Adventure and I imagine for a trailer soon at the Stephen Low Company’s website.
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