Due to their unique design, Coral atolls are ideal for watersports where you want lots of wind and little waves. As this was our last real chance to play in a wide-open lagoon without a lot of traffic or other people around, both Allan and Greg made it a point to enjoy themselves to the fullest. Allan, being obsessive about the whole wind-power thing, went windsurfing. Greg was more…unorthodox…in his choice of recreation.
Perhaps you noticed the pier and what appeared to be bungalows in the background of the video? That is in fact a resort hotel that you can stay at on the island of Tikehau. Pretty easy to find, just Google “Tikehau + hotel.” It’s not as if there are a lot of choices on the island. Just a little caveat that off season prices for their cheapest room start at $520 US per night. That does not include airfare or transport to the hotel, mind you. With the nearest airport being on the next island over, you may want to plan ahead on your connection. Drinks also are extra and about $20 US at the bar.
When we see things like that it gives us pause for a moment to appreciate what we are doing. Right now we are on an island that people pay thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars just to spend a few days on. It’s just one of the places we’ve seen and that you have enjoyed along with us on this blog. We are very grateful to have this opportunity and we are now convinced that sailing is, without a doubt the best way to see the South Pacific islands.
When starting at $520 a night you expect a seriously awesome experience and being as this atoll has no major attractions aside from the sun, ocean, motu and the lagoon, well, needless to say the snorkeling and diving should be spectacular. It was:
And of course, the main anchorage of Tikehau is on the opposite side of the island from the only navigable entrance to the lagoon. We’re not asking them to pick up their whole village and alter the geological formation of their atoll just for a few boaters (there were only 3 other boats in the anchorage while we were there) but really, it’s like they planned it this way.
The island of Tikehau is of particular interest because it is famed to have beaches with actual pink sand. Wanting to see this natural wonder and having just left the big village of Rangiroa, we had our fill of the city and decided to spend some time exploring one of the islands or “motu” that make up the ring of the atoll. You’d be amazed how much stuff you can find on a small desert island.
The reason Tiffany was poking around dead crabs was that she was looking for purple dead sea urchin spines. Hey, they have peach sand, so why not?
We found a bunch of them:
And using Alison’s beading kit Tiffany was able to create some tropical jewelry:
“In the days when an ice cream sundae cost much less, a 10 year-old boy entered a hotel coffee shop and sat at a table. A waitress put a glass of water in front of him. “How much is an ice cream sundae?” he asked. “50¢,” replied the waitress.
The little boy pulled his hand out of his pocket and studied the coins in it.
“Well, how much is a plain dish of ice cream?” he inquired. By now more people were waiting for a table and the waitress was growing impatient. “35¢!” she brusquely replied.
The little boy again counted his coins. “I’ll have the plain ice cream,” he said. The waitress brought the ice cream, put the bill on the table and walked away. The boy finished the ice cream, paid the cashier and left.
When the waitress came back, she began to cry as she wiped down the table. There, placed neatly beside the empty dish, were two nickels and five pennies. You see, he couldn’t have the sundae, because he had to have enough left to leave her a tip.”
– Source unknown
…and the moral of this story is: you must tip, even when you receive bad service.
We hate the American practice of tipping. Now do we mind leaving a 15% gratuity when we receive good-to-excellent service? Heck no, that’s great. We believe in rewarding people for doing well and often tip very well when someone goes out of their way for us. Both of us have worked in food service jobs before and we know how much it’s appreciated. What we do mind is when wait staff are paid below the minimum wage because it is expected that we will pick up the slack for the employer’s stinginess and if we don’t leave a tip, we are actually taking away from someone’s paycheck. What we do mind is when a cabbie is rude to us the entire trip, we get our own bags, they get lost and make us late (also adding to the meter) and then when we pay our fare without complaint they say “what, no tip?” …Or when we have to decide whether or not a service we are receiving is “supposed to” receive a tip …Or when people are so concerned about leaving the “right tip” that they have to carry tip calculator cards in their wallets or spend 10 minutes splitting a bill and computing it. Seriously, one of our friends carried one of these card things because she was often in a rush and always wanted to make sure she left the right amount of change.
Really, we have to carry this? Is this necessary?
In short, we hate it when tipping is expected and/or required because at that point, it isn’t a tip; it’s a fee. Let’s just be honest here and put it on the bill instead of creating some clandestine social stigma that people constantly argue over day to day.
We bring this up because despite the huge cost of a burger and beer in French Polynesia, tips are not even expected and in fact people look at you weird if you give them. You get your food, you pay what’s on your bill and oddly enough, you get excellent service anyway because that’s just the way these people are. They don’t require a quasi-federally mandated and taxed (what the heck? People get TAXED on a tip?!?) bribe to put a good foot forward on the hospitality front. They just do it anyway as part of their daily life. Also, they receive an actual wage from their employer vice having to enter some awkward social dance with each and every customer. I think everyone on both sides of the tipping equation could learn something from this.
For you diners out there, do you prefer the current policy of tipping in America or would you prefer to just have the entire amount on your bill like they do it out here?
And for you all out there in the service industry, which would you prefer? Larger base checks and no tips or the current system?
The quest for sustenance is more complex than you might imagine.
First off, you may not recall that Greg is the ship’s only French speaker (and by “speaker” we mean a vocab of about 100 words…and about 7 verbs.) So when he’s not around and often even when he is, obtaining food requires our fellow crewmembers to overcome certain linguistic hurdles. Even on the few occasions where there is some level of reasonable verbal communications, cultural obstacles also seek to derail us. Our attempts to surmount these challenges are met with varying degrees of success:
When repeated communications attempts fail or what happens more often is that our wallets can not bear the strain of eating out more than once a week without mortgaging a first born child (which, oddly enough, no one on this ship actually has) we must instead resort to our own dwindling Mexican shipboard supplies to sustain our appetites. Which, after months of isolation from the necessities of life (like Trader Joe’s) those precious stores are beginning to run “a little thin” by our fellow crewmember’s standards.
Ok, you know, we have no idea how many cartons of rice milk they had onboard when we left Mexico. We also never actually even saw where they stored all of this milk on the 44 foot boat that we have all been living on together for several months now. Think about that for a second, we never saw the rice milk on the boat, and it’s not like it doesn’t take up some space. This ship has more secret storage compartments than the Millennium Falcon.
We do alright though. Mostly based on these meager and vastly depleted supplies we manage to cobble together rudimentary meals that we share with our fellow cruisers:
Alright, in all seriousness, for those of you planning on plying the seas of the South Pacific, cheap Mexican beer (Pacifico mostly) is a viable form of forex currency out here and the exchange rate is through the roof! Those yellow cans are greeted with sighs of satisfaction and envious looks when a captain brings out a drink at dinner. A sign of true friendship between cruisers is to share one’s “Mexican beer stash.” Being as Hinano, the local brew, comes in at least $5 US per can at the grocery store, spending a few pesos on some Mexican beer is one of the smartest investments in ensuring popularity with your fellow cruisers that you can make before departing.
As for us? Suppose we’ll just have to muddle through on Tahitian wine and French baguette pizza.
Outside of town we find the other inhabitants of the atoll: the wildlife.
Bored with getting schooled by 9 year old island ping-pong champions? Well then, your new playmate can be as close as the nearest coconut crab hole:
Some of you may not remember Greg’s previous encounters with the avian species but he has extensive diplomatic experience in “aggressive negations” with:
We would be remiss to mention the creatures of Rangiroa and omit the diving. Like Fakarava, Rangiroa is world-renown for its dive areas and the water is crystal clear. The difference is that Rangiroa is far more accessible (remember the daily flights) and also far more developed. As a result, there are a lot more divers that swim in Rangiroa’s lagoon and the fish are actually very accustomed to humans in the water. The fish actually swim towards the dingy instead of away from it and when we tied up and jumped into the water we found ourselves immediately swarmed by a cloud of butterfly fish!
Greg has been told by his shipmates that by learning to dive in French Polynesia he is “spoiled for life” on diving. Wait, there are places in the world where you don’t see at least 10 sharks per dive and have to beat off the cornucopia of rainbow fish with a stick?
Look closely, there’s a spider in this plumeria (frangipani) flower!
There’s a winery on Rangiroa! We’ve been told that it’s the only winery on a coral atoll. The amazing thing is that they’re able to grow anything here at all. Back in the day, the islanders struggled to grow their crops. Plants had to be constantly fed with other food scraps and compost in the hopes that they would grow. Why? There’s no topsoil out here! When you walk around in the “brush” of the island, you’re crunching on shells and coral. Dirt is not native. Sand is, but sand doesn’t contain minerals. Only the extremely hardy plants can survive out here without help, and since when have you heard of grape vines as being extremely hardy? Never, that’s when. Even in California wine country they baby the grapes and make sure they get enough water and protection from the bugs and frost.
**20100527 – photo – Rangiroa (106).JPG**
We’d heard about this place quite a way back in our travels. As we’ve been going, we’re specifically looking for wineries, because, um, we like wine 🙂 The guidebook for French Polynesia mentions it briefly, but we had a hard time believing that there would only be one winery in the entire country of French Polynesia. I mean, come on… they’re FRENCH! And usually where there’s one winery, there are about 50 more. There’s bound to be more, so we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled!
Unfortunately the winery, Vin de Tahiti, was closed for the season when we arrived on Rangiroa (closed for the season!?! We arrived in the middle of the tourist season!?!). We did manage to get a nice guy to open the door for us and to answer a few questions. Here’s their story:
The wine wasn’t spectacular, but it was pretty solid. Definitely drinkable, but not something we’d go out of my way to find. (oh, wait, too late 😉 The most awesome thing about it is that it’s the only Tahitian wine you can get.
The funniest thing about our wine tasting experience was the chicken that kept wandering into the bar. Now, you would think we’d be used to it by now. After months in Mexico hanging around a cat that would steal your drink when you weren’t looking and sailing around a bunch of small islands with free range chicken working the copra industry, we shouldn’t be surprised where they end up! Maybe if the chicken had stayed outside the bar, we wouldn’t have thought it unusual. Heck, the chicken could even have just gone inside the door and we probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it, even though we’re talking lagoon view, individual bungalows, high end hotel here! No, we probably wouldn’t have been too excited about it. But when you’re sitting in the bar of a high end hotel, and a scraggly chicken jumps up onto a table near you and basically orders a cold one, well… you notice it…
Did you see that? A paved road! We’ve seen paved roads before in the islands but now we start putting this information together. How do you make a paved road on a remote desert island…well concrete requires sand, rocks, fresh water and cement. Cement you have to import on the boat, no surprise there. Fresh water can be harvested from the rain; take a while but do-able. Sand can come from the beaches but rocks…rocks are a bit of stumbling point. In the Marquesas they had mountains of rocks (literally) to turn into roads but in the Tuamotu, their land is not made up of rock anymore and shipping in tons of rocks can get expensive. So what is an islander to do except improvise?
And while we’re on the topic of logistics, Greg ran into something that seems out of place in the islands: a graveyard. Yes, we understand that people die (heck, they did a lot of dying not so long ago) but it’s where they go when they die that concerns me, and not in the spiritual sense either.
We’ve already made it clear that there isn’t a whole heck of a lot of real estate out here. Also, Catholic doctrine is pretty clear on the matter: no cremation. So how long will it be before these people are deciding between housing for the living and housing for the dead?
Speaking of the Catholic Church, they have one here and it’s gorgeous.
Did you see that tabernacle? It was the tiny little castle up on the altar at the beginning of the video. (For the uninitiated: Tabernacle is the little box they keep the blessed bread in. So in the minds of us Catholics this is the place where the physical presence of Jesus resides.) In the states, you find a lot of tabernacles made out of precious materials like gold & silver. Here they don’t have stuff like that so what they lack in metal they make up for in expert craftsmanship & skill.
The largest of these stores is Magazin (French for “store”) Daniel, which is so important as to be noted in our guidebooks as “the best supermarket on the island”. So this, according to our printed guidebooks mind you, is the best supermarket in the main city of the largest, most developed, most populous island of the 78 atolls of the Tuamotu chain. Here’s the tour:
And as a special treat for all of Greg’s fellow sci-fi nerd friends out there, look what he found!
If you don’t get it, it’s ok, he forgives you. If you do get it, you know why he put it up here… so awesome!
Oh the third place stuff from the boats go? Like we mentioned before, some stuff is custom ordered. Which is why this video is so amazing:
Greg getting his butt handed to him by an island kid in a game of ping pong is not remarkable. It’s the cultural significance of the thing! (no, not of me getting power slammed by a 10 year old, why are you fixated on that!?) It was the ping pong table, focus on his table! (I might note I scored some points.) What is remarkable is that the table was there in the first place. This most assuredly overshadows any *cough* – minor – *cough* point spread difference there may have been.
In the United States, if we want some lettuce, we go to the fridge and get some lettuce
(what does this have to do with Polynesian life? Stay with me a sec.)
Fridge empty? Fine, we go to the grocery store. But what would we do if the grocery store had no lettuce? What if all the grocery stores had no lettuce because there was none to be had? What if we couldn’t go to the farm, organic or otherwise, to get our lettuce because it was literally impossible to get to one via land?
Well then I’d guess we’d just have to sit on our happy hands and wait a few weeks / months for the next delivery, now wouldn’t we?
Alright, take that paragraph above and replace “lettuce” with everything from “milk” to “vegetables” to “paint” to “beer” to “wheels for my car” to “computer monitor” to “gas for my stove” to anything you use in your daily life.
You can now understand what we mean when we say the supply ship plays a very critical part in the lives of Polynesians.
The M/V ARANUI 3 makes 16 trips a year to resupply many of the Marquesan islands and a couple of the Tuamotu islands. “Oh, that’s a lot of trips.” No, no it is not. Imagine that only 16 times a year, basically once a month, you could get fresh vegetables or a new TV or your favorite book series or just about anything over the size of an airmail package. Think of the mindset shift for a purchasing consumer. First off, you’d better be darn sure you want whatever you’re ordering, because it isn’t $5.95 shipping and handing, we can tell you that. After having to deal with the Polynesian internet “service”.These people have to order things far enough in advance to get it delivered to Tahiti (which is not exactly on the beaten path to start with) early enough for it to get onto this ship so it can get delivered. The boat only comes by 16 times a year and if your package isn’t onboard when the ship leaves Tahiti, well, guess you’ll just have to wait another month then, won’t you? So that new bike you want to get your kid for Christmas? Might want to think about ordering that around September or so. Just in case there’s a delay somewhere along the delivery chain (sure that never happens) or just in case the weather’s bad on the day the delivery ship shows up and it can’t make any deliveries so it leaves to make it’s next appointment (because we’ve be told that does happen).
Sure stores stock stuff and here on Rangiroa there are more stores than on most islands (about 3) but they each don’t carry much, and by “not much” I mean “not much beyond basic living necessities like clothes, food and cookware” and none of them are specialty stores. You want your XBOX 360 video games or a replacement laptop because yours broke? That you special order and wait for the boat.
Did we mention that the supply ship also has to enter the port via the the aforementioned narrow pass of tidal death? It comes inside the lagoon and anchors off the pass and deploys small boats, since it’s too big to tie up at the shallow pier. Then it uses its crane to put things into the small boat. You know the video arcade grabby claw? Ok, play that game, except if you screw up, you lose the island’s ration of potatoes for the month, retail value several hundred to several thousand dollars. We did mention this game is being played on a fluid maritime environment where nothing is stable, right?
We have heard stories of new cars and trucks being dumped overboard during transfer…oops!
When the stars do align and the delivery ship can drop anchor, release its tender boat and actually make deliveries, it’s a big deal that a good part of the whole village turns out for.
These people get their supplies from outboard motorboats. The Port of Oakland or New York, this is not.
People buying and selling, right there on the dock. Why? Because if there are 50 wheels of cheese to be delivered to Rangiroa this month, you want to make sure you get your cheese before it’s all gone.
Oh you want the zoomed out picture? Being as on that Google map we showed you before the scale was 1 pixel = somewhere around 500 miles or something, I don’t think it would change very much. We’re still in the middle of the blue stuff. 😉
With about 2400 permanent inhabitants (this is a HUGE number by the way, we haven’t seen cities so populous since Nuku Hiva) being only a paltry 220 miles from Tahiti (laughable distance really) and with an airport with actual daily flights (*gasp!*) Rangiroa is the de facto capital of the Tuamotu. Its coral reef is made up of 415 motu (islands) and it has only 2 passes in or out. This is where our story begins:
We had gotten a little cocky about the whole “sailing though a dangerous coral reef” thing but don’t you worry, Rangiroa was kind enough to re-humble us. Her lagoon is big: about 50 miles long and 20 miles wide. This atoll actually has its own horizon and generates its own localized micro weather patterns. Land’s still about 300 yards across though, so no help there. 50 miles long, 20 miles wide and a lagoon about 100 feet deep. That’s a lot of water and there are only two skinny little passes (say about 100 yards across) in or out. Perhaps you can see where we’re going here.
Rangiroa has a tidal current.
Those weren’t jumping fish; they were 5 foot long dolphins surfing in the standing waves. Rangiroa is famous for them. Also, some genius French entrepreneur (they did invent the word, after all) built a channel-side bar with an observation deck to watch the struggling boats…it’s like the nautical version of celebrity death match with dolphin cheerleaders & umbrella drinks!
A 6 – 7 knot tidal current shifts back and forth throughout the day, creating 5 foot standing waves in addition to the coral on both sides of the channel just waiting to snack on your fiberglass hull. If you don’t know anything about tides and currents, let us give you a visual. We watched one boat who thought that the reports of the rip tide were exaggerated and decided to just push though. For a full hour we watched this cruising boat, at all ahead full, pedal to the metal, going though gas like a drunken sailor though vodka, transit this 300 yard long pass. 300 yards! At sea – calm. In the lagoon – calm. In the pass, one little boat struggled to get in while 2.09×1013 gallons of water wanted to get out…all at once. Oh yes, we just broke out the scientific numbering system. The same system they use to measure the distance to other galaxies. Do we have your attention?
“Oh but that isn’t so bad”, you say. “Just go in while the current is pushing you into the lagoon.” Bad idea for two reasons:
1) For the non-sailors out there, the way a rudder works is that it’s a board sticking out of the bottom of your boat that turns you by pushing against the water. Turn the rudder, the water flowing past it hits it at an angle, which pushes the board and the boat attached to it, in a new direction. If water isn’t flowing past the rudder, the boat won’t turn. When a boat is in a following current (aka being pushed) in a narrow channel where the speed of the water is equal to the speed of the boat, then no water is flowing over the rudder and your half million dollar floating condo just became the world’s biggest pinball.
2) You know that desert island with the one palm tree that people get shipwrecked on in the movies? Found it. It’s at the end of the fast flowing channel of Rangiroa, right there in the smack dab middle of where all the really fast water lets out.
It’s cute, when the current isn’t pushing you right into it – then it’s scary!
