The Miss Tutti Frutti Contest

by Graeme Lay

  As we swoop through the traffic of downtown Papeete and head out east of the town, Poken tells me that his mother is Marquesan, his father Tahitian. He honks and waves at people everywhere: road workers, gendarmes, taxi drivers, bus drivers. He explains that he is well known through his cultural group performances. He plays guitar, ukelele and drums; has toured Europe, America and Australasia. He also tells me proudly that he has two children: a boy called Teanuanua, which means rainbow, and a girl called Orama, which means shooting star. Poken is also a cross-island guide, one of several who take people like me into the interior of Tahiti.

  On the open road now, we speed past Matavai Bay, where Cook anchored and Parkinson wrote of the mountain view, alongside the lagoon, now still and shiny in the morning sun, past outrigger canoes in which fishermen sit idly, past black-sand beaches and surfers pivoting and twisting in the glassy waves, and come to the village of Papenoo. There Poken swings the ute inland.

  I see from the map on my knee that the valley of the Papenoo River cuts wide and deep into the centre of Tahiti. It’s the dry season, and the river runs gently over stones and between boulders. The road beside it is unsealed, as rocky as the river bed. To our right and left the sides of the valley rise abruptly to sharp, sinuous ridges hundreds of metres high. Bush extends from the valley floor to the skyline. From time to time we come across men operating earthmoving machinery, taming the river with front-end loaders, bulldozers, excavators, making it tractable by digging trenches, laying culverts, and building dams, steel bridges and small hydroelectric power stations. The Papenoo is a source of power and fresh water for the people of coastal Tahiti. Forty percent of the island’s electricity comes from hydroelectric schemes.

  In the wet season, from November to March, the in-spate river must be formidable, but the going now is surprisingly easy. Poken’s ute eases us over bumps and boulders, climbing steadily alongside the watercourse. Studying the map again, I notice a recurring French word I have never seen before. Gué. There is a number beside it and the other gués: Gué 4, Gué 5, and so on. ‘What is gué?’ I ask. Poken twists the wheel to avoid a boulder, tries to explain in his halting English. ‘It is … when … there is no bridge, but we still must cross. Go through the river in the truck.’

  ‘Oh, a ford.’

  Poken’s frown deepens. ‘No. A Toyota.’

  ‘No. Gué, a ford.’

  ‘Toyota.’ He points to the vehicle’s name on the gear change. Before I’m able to explain, we come to another gué. Here the river is wide and swift, and Poken drives straight into it. The truck becomes a kind of submarine and the water comes up to then over the bonnet. The engine is unaffected. As we emerge on to the shingle on the far side, I say to Poken, ‘That was some gué. En Anglais, a ford.’

  ‘Ah,’ he replies, finally understanding. But he shakes his head in confusion, obviously struck by the irrationality of English. Why name a vehicle after a place in the river that you drive through?

  The river flows passively as we continue to climb alongside it. Opposite Gué 5 a waterfall, Cascade Vaiharuru, spills vertically into a pool, its backdrop a wall of bush-covered rock. We pass another hydroelectric station, a tidy modern building built over the river. I’m struck by the total absence of power lines or pylons. The fully automated stations have been designed by French engineers to blend as much as possible with the valley environment. Transmission lines are all underground, so that apart from the small rectangular buildings and the low hum of the turbines within them, the valley is undisturbed by the power-generating developments.

  Climbing more steeply, we round a tight bend and pull over to the roadside for a fruit drink and a biscuit. Now I can see the head of the Papenoo valley. It is an enormous basin eight kilometres wide, enclosed by ramparts of rock and serrated peaks, the remnants of a huge volcanic crater which collapsed a million years ago. What strikes me is the scale and steepness of the mountains. One which looks unclimbable lies directly in front of us, blocking the head of the valley like a massive battlement. This is Mt Tetufera, 1,800 metres high and Tahiti’s third highest mountain. Tetufera is not a peak but a sheer green wall several kilometres across, its rock face grooved from top to bottom by cascading water. Its summit ridges stand dramatically against the pure blue sky.

  ‘In the wet season,’ says Poken, ‘many cascades on Tetufera. Very beautiful.’ It’s not hard to imagine the merging waterfalls forming a silver veil over the face of the mountain.

  We pass a larger dam, climb a rough, zigzagging road and emerge on to a flat-topped bluff, on which there’s a complex of one-storey buildings. This is Relais de la Maroto, the only inland hotel in Tahiti.

  When the hydroelectric schemes began, a place was needed to accommodate the workers so that they could avoid the long, lumpy drive to Papeete and back every day. An accommodation block and dining area were built here, high in the catchment zone. When the dams and powerhouses on the upper reaches of the Papenoo river were completed, the hostel was converted to a hotel. Relais is one of those French words which is not quite translatable into English. It means a wayside inn which has a reputation for serving fine food.

  The director of Relais de la Maroto is a young Tahitian-born Frenchwoman, Christina Auroy, whose father, Dominique, a wine-lover, built the complex. Poken goes off for a smoke with a mate, and Christina shows me the view from the hotel deck. Only now do I realise that the relais is built on the edge of a sheer cliff. From the deck we look down to where the river tumbles through the bush and over basalt boulders, its course punctuated with pools of mountain-fed water. The air is still and scorchingly hot, the only noise that of gushing water, and big dragonflies hover about the railing like miniature helicopters. And talking of helicopters, at the front of the hotel there’s a helipad. For a few hundred dollars you can be whisked from Tahiti’s Fa’a Airport up and over the great mountains, across the valley and drop in for lunch at Maroto. Not only that, you can get to look down on Tahiti’s highest peak, Mt Orohena, 2,240 metres high and just over a ridge to the west of the Papenoo valley.

  My room is on the top floor of the dormitory block. Walking along the gallery, I notice that instead of numbers the rooms have the names of French wines on the door: ‘Nuits Saint Georges’, ‘Château Lafite Rothschild’, ‘Châteauneuf du Pape’ and so on. To my disappointment, I’m shown into ‘Pétrus’. I’ve not heard of Pétrus. I’d rather be next door in ‘Château Lafite Rothschild’, which I know is a fine wine. Still, ‘Pétrus’ is clean, fresh and comfortable, and from the balcony there’s a splendid view up the valley.

  Poken heads off in his truck, after agreeing to pick me up on his way through later in the week. After a siesta – the sun is still ferocious – I head up to the bar for a Hinano beer, and there meet the maitre d’hôtel, Noel. Like the majority of people on the island, he is part-Tahitian, part-French: in the local parlance, a demi. Noel is an affable young man, in spite of his right hand and lower arm being heavily strapped and bandaged – the result, he tells me, of a fall in the mountains which gashed his wrist.

  As we sit and chat, I notice that an unusual number of the men coming and going about the hotel are, like Noel, nursing injuries. Here a bandaged knee, there a strapped ankle; here a patched eye, there a dressed ear. The pharmaceutical business in Tahiti must be booming. When these walking wounded meet, they greet each other with a handshake in the French manner, then refer to each other’s injuries, proudly, as if comparing chest sizes. One man with a heavily bandaged leg limps up to Noel, grips his (left) hand, points to Noel’s afflicted wrist, then at his own wound, and speculates as to which of them will be more handicapped sexually. Being French, neither man concedes that there is a serious problem. ‘It’s my hand that’s strapped, not my cock,’ Noel laughs. As for this propensity to injury, a friend later explains that many Tahitians are reckless to the point of lunacy. They seem to believe they are immortal. Later, back in Papeete, I witness two adults and two children crammed on to a Vespa scooter and weaving throu
gh the rush-hour traffic, a barefoot girl on a bike hanging on to the tray of a speeding truck, and helmetless Vespa riders racing three abreast down the motorway.

  The Relais de la Maroto remains a watering hole for everyone who works in the mountains. At lunchtime gangs of sweaty men, many wearing bandages, come trooping in for a beer and a meal, mixing readily with the well-dressed visitors who are passing through on a day excursion. As always in French-derived society, meal times are sacrosanct. The tables on the deck are filled with visitors: a mélange of brown-skinned Tahitians, dusky New Caledonians, chic French, slender Chinese, and their offspring, children straight from the melting pot who will grow up without racial prejudice because they carry the genes of three regions – Europe, Asia and Polynesia.

  One thing puzzles me about these visitors, though. When they arrive Noel takes them first not to the bar, or the restaurant, or even the toilets. Instead they go off with him down some steps beside Christina’s office. When they return about half an hour later, they go out to the deck to dine. After seeing this happen several times, I ask Noel where he takes the guests.

  ‘Oh, à la cave,’ he replies.

  ‘La cave?’

  ‘Oui. Would you like to see it?’

  We go down three flights of concrete steps to the bottom of the dormitory block. There Noel unlocks a door and switches on a light to reveal a long, cool room whose concrete, windowless walls are lined with wooden shelves filled with bottles of wine. French wine. Very good French wine. At one end of the cellar are tables and chairs, racks of glasses and, on the walls, detailed maps of French wine districts colour-coded with different vintages. Côte de Beaune, Bordeaux, Côtes du Rhône. Noel explains that Christina’s father came originally from the Beaune district of the Bourgogne, one of France’s leading wine-growing regions. After he arrived he had a cellar built, then shipped over 3,000 bottles of French wine and cellared them here in air-conditioned comfort, at 16 degrees Celsius. A wine club down in Papeete regularly helicopters up here for tastings; casual visitors to Maroto also call in. So dedicated is Dominique Auroy to cultivating wine that he’s even started a vineyard on Rangiroa atoll, in the middle of the Tuamotu archipelago, 355 kilometres north-west of Tahiti. And, outlandish as it may seem, his three hectares of Carignan grapes, cultivated on a tropical atoll, are now producing fine wines.

  As I wander about the cellar, appreciating its coolness and richness, a thought occurs to me. ‘Noel,’ I ask, ‘do you have a wine called Pétrus?’

  His expression becomes very respectful. ‘Oh yes, we have three bottles of Pétrus.’ He leads me to a space where a trio of dusty bottles of red wine lie. ‘They are our rarest wine,’ he declares, then watches nervously as I pick up one of the bottles. It has an unpretentious, even dowdy label. Later, when I study Le Relais de la Maroto’s wine list, I begin to appreciate Noel’s discomfort. Pétrus sells for over US$750 a bottle. I am now much happier with my room.

  From the balcony of Pétrus I can see, at the head of the valley far below, an area of cleared, level land, surrounded by bush, on which there stand some low, rectangular structures. I consult the map and work out that this must be the ‘Site archéologique de Farehape marae’. From boyhood I have harboured a fantasy of being an archaeologist, so I grab my pack and head off down to the valley.

  The road is rough, and because of the steepness of the descent it doubles back on itself several times. At the bottom of the valley the heat is overpowering. Parched, leaden-legged, I trudge up the road, and ten minutes later reach the clearing.

  The coarse grass shows signs of being recently attacked by a weedeater. Stepping up on to the site of the ancient marae, I see that it is a low platform of blackened, closely fitted river stones. In traditional Tahitian society the marae was the centre of community and ceremonial activities. Here the primary gods, Tane, Tu, Oro and Ta’aroa, were worshipped, and here too a family’s lineage was inscribed in stone, delineating its specific rank in the social hierarchy. The marae was also a memorial whose raised stones and posts recalled deceased chiefs and ancestral lines. Here at Farehape, with the bush cleared away, I can see that the several marae are perfectly intact: the platforms of neatly fitting stones, and the rectangular, low-walled enclosures with their upright genealogical markers, stand out starkly in the clearing. A noticeboard informs me that some of the stone stages were platforms where the Tahitian élite carried out their archery contests. Clearly, the Papenoo valley was once an area of vigorous social, religious and sporting activity. But why here, in this remote place? And, if it was such a significant settlement, why did the people abandon it?

  I notice signs of human activity at the far end of the terrace. A group of people is doing some sort of work on one of the stone platforms. Strolling down to investigate, I see that most are young Tahitians in shorts and singlets. Young men mainly, but also a couple of young women. They grin and greet me: ‘Bonjour M’sieur,’ ‘Bonjour,’ ‘Bonjour.’

  A square about two metres by two metres and half a metre deep has been cut into the marae floor. Strings have been pegged across the small, neat excavation. In the background a platform of bamboo has been set up. There are plans and notebooks on it. I would love to know exactly what is going on here, but how to ask? My French is not archaeologically refined. Then I notice that one man seems to be directing operations. He is European, tall, athletic, deeply tanned, about thirty, and wearing a long loose mauve singlet, shorts and a back-to-front baseball cap.

  ‘Ah, bonjour M’sieur,’ I say as I approach. ‘Je m’appelle Graeme. Je suis un écrivain de la Nouvelle Zélande. Q’est ce que vous faites ici, s’il vous plait?’

  His face breaks into a grin, and he extends his hand. ‘Hi. I’m Mark Eddowes, from New Zealand. I’m carrying out research here for Otago University.’

  It turns out that Mark has been working in French Polynesia for years, excavating archaeological sites from the Marquesas to the Australs. He’s fluent in Tahitian and French, has a traditional Tahitian tattoo on one leg, and here in Papenoo is supervising this group of Tahitian archaeology students. He also goes on cruise ships through the islands, lecturing to the passengers on the ethnology of Polynesia, on which he is now a world authority. As we wander over the site Mark explains that this part of the Papenoo valley was once home to thousands of people, as were most of the inland valleys in Tahiti. ‘There are hundreds of marae throughout the interior. There’s even one on the top of Orohena, the highest peak on the island.’

  The valleys’ fertile volcanic soils supported crops of taro, sweet potatoes and plaintains. The people lived in thatched fares built on stone foundations – paepae – surrounded by the marae. ‘Tahitian society was strongly lithic,’ Mark goes on. ‘This area was a source of stone for tools as well as building. We’ve been excavating the floors of various fares, and we’ve found stone implements and the remnants of hearths. It was cooler up here at certain times of the year, so they needed fires for heating as well as cooking, and to keep the mosquitoes away, probably.’ The inland valleys remained densely populated until the European missionaries arrived, from 1797 onwards. ‘After the Tahitians were converted to Christianity,’ Mark tells me, ‘the people moved down to the coasts because the churches, mission schools and ports were built there. The interior of the island was largely abandoned.’

  Mark is an enthusiast, a personable man who has immersed himself in this reconstruction of Tahiti’s pre-European past. I suggest that it’s good to see the young people joining in. He agrees: ‘Most of them are very good students.’ He pauses and shouts a directive to two young men who are erecting a shade tarpaulin over the excavation site. ‘The main problem is stopping them smoking dope. Sometimes they go into the bush to cut a pole, and they come back so stoned they forget what the pole was for.’ Marijuana growing and smoking is rife in Tahiti.

  On the way back, burning with the midday heat, I pause at a place where twin rivulets pour down between boulders into a small, deep pool. I strip off and slip into the
mountain water. It is wonderfully cool, clean, revitalising. Opening my eyes under water, I swim up to where it pours, foaming and bubbling, between the boulders. It is like swimming in champagne. Vintage champagne.

  In the evening I dine alone in the large, plush dining room of the relais. It’s half dark and eerily silent. The young Tahitian waitress serves me the entrée, then vanishes. The prawn terrine, smothered in a rich, brown Roquefort sauce, is a minor work of art. Its pièce de résistance is the front end of the shell of a small crayfish, presumably the former owner of the curved tail which crowns the terrine. The carapace is about three centimetres long, a beautifully moulded, smooth, ginger-brown shell. It has a long, flat snout, a pair of very long, severally jointed front legs with elongated pincers, long thin whiskers and a cluster of secondary legs under its body. Its on-stalks eyes seem to express astonishment at finding itself on my plate. The whole complicated arrangement of legs, eyes, feelers and claws reminds me of a Swiss Army knife with all its bits and pieces extended. It is a freshwater prawn – une crevette.

  When Noel calls into the dining room I express admiration for the crevette’s beauty and flavour. He tells me that the creatures live in the river and that Michel, one of the workers, caught this one last night. Then Noel has an idea. ‘Would you like to go to catch some crevettes tonight with the chef, Christian?’ Mais oui.

  Michel is a huge Tahitian with a bald head like a cannonball and a gentle, considerate manner. He lends me the pic – the many-barbed bamboo spear – he uses to spear the prawns. Last night, he says, he speared a whole bagful. The chef, Christian, lends me a torch, and the pair of us head off down the steep, rocky road to the river.

  Christian is about twenty-five. He comes from Strasbourg and likes living in the mountains because of the tranquillity and the outdoor life. ‘No cars, no noise. The only sound here is the river.’ At the bottom of the hill we come to the river. Although the moon is full and the sky is light, at ground level it is dark. The river bed is filled with the shadowy shapes of boulders and the sheen of moonlit pools.