I believe world civilization can be built only upon the common basis of international living...The ideal life...to live in an English cottage, with American heating, and have a Japanese wife, a French mistress, and a Chinese cook.
- Lin Yutang -
Gambier
About playing sport..
I have never been very athletic. Sports has never played a big part in my life. I did try. I joined the local soccer team when I was about ten years old. I lasted only one training session. I was a quiet kid. I was a little intimidated by all the machoism. I wanted to be like the other boys and I had faith in the coach - an adult man - to inspire me to enjoy the fun of soccer. Not so. The coach was yelling at us like Hitler for the whole time. "This is awful", I thought. "Like joining the military or something". I never returned. (It never affected my ability to score, so never mind.)
The three-day passage from Pitcairn to Gambier was hardly an effort. Another nice timing with a bit of luck. Thank you Jupiter.
Despite the memory of that Hitler-style yelling coach, I recently regained my interest in sports. It was one early morning in the Gambiers when my chosen sport finally came to me. I was lying in bed, slowly waking up, still trying to hold on to the wicked dreams I'd had: The submarine and a military inquest that I was part of, the tiny rivers that I sailed Aliisa in and how it turned into a land vehicle and so on. The Lebanese folk festival with acrobatic women flying around a fire place. You know, the usual stuff. The amazing life I live when I'm not awake. Not always that different from the life awake. Certainly just as real. To me.
The sport? Yeah, Sport sleeping. I decided to become a professional sportsleepsman. With enough training, I should be able to become a world champion in Sleep Triathlon. (18 hour Sleep Marathon, 21 days of Power Naps followed by 12 hours of Dream Surfing). A typical warm-up session would be perhaps a hundred curl ups, 20 minutes of snooze aerobics followed by a long siesta. This is not just about farting around in the bed, this is a serious sport. I'm glad to have my wife Annina as my personal trainer. She'll be teaching me the art of the marathon to start with. We will also be training in the visually beautiful Synchronised Sleeping. My early morning program may also include snorekling and nightmare wrestling.
Warming up for a good performance...
My aim is to become professional. I'm in the process of drafting a letter to DreamWorks, hoping that they would be my main sponsor. I need proper sleeping gear and enough financial support to hire a personal coach. One that softly whispers and gently caresses me into a good performance. Sport is good!
I'm glad I got that out of the way. It would be nice to continue on the subject of dreams and sleeping, but maybe some other time. We have a serious subject to tackle: French Polynesia. There's a lot of Polyfrogs there. Thanks Steven for the word, I love it. I mean no offence, of course. I've traveled enough to be well past any national or tribal stereotypes. It's just a great word: Polyfrogs.
It seems to be the inevitable outcome for man never to be entirely free: everywhere princes head towards despotism, and the people towards servitude.
- Jean Paul Marat (1743-1793)-
French revolutionary politician and journalist.
The show must go on...
I was sad to leave Pitcairn. Three and a half days turned out to be quite a bonding session. Perhaps more for me than for the locals. Visiting Pitcairn is great therapy but one is not supposed to fall in love with the therapist. Not if you're a traveling man. It's easy to say that we HAD to go. Of course we didn't have to go, we chose to go. Had I been alone I may have waited for a calm moment to drive Aliisa against the landing and have the island's crane pull her up for 6 months. Maybe I wouldn't have. But the thought crossed my mind many times and we spoke a lot about what it would be like to stay longer - given the permission from the island. But as always the show must go on. While we may not travel with the certainty and predictability of a normal society, we do our best to travel with the certainty and predictability of at least a French society. (Sometimes we simply go on strike.)
Aliisa on a lee-shore, protected by numerous shallow reefs in the front. Rikitea was the first time we saw more than a few cruising yachts for nearly 6 months. Most had arrived via the southern route, Patagonia and Magellan Straits.
No other nation but France would be better suited to claim governance to some of the most beautiful tropical islands and atolls in the South Pacific and Caribbean. Style, love of beauty, good food and hedonism are not the only things that go along nicely with a tropical paradise. You see, things not working at all and basic services being shut down is a great lesson in patience. After all, we wanted to run away from the rat-race, away from the hustle and bustle of the overly efficient world. We want to experience freedom and learn to embrace the calming effects of a un-hurried life. French islands are great for that because they often go on strike, giving us that wonderful lesson in patience, teaching us to calm down and relax a bit. And regardless of the extent of the striking and the tropical laid-back "inefficiency" of services, you can bet your life on having fresh baguettes available every morning at 0600 AM, even in the smallest village.
I could easily relate to France. I usually feel that the world revolves around me and that I am a super power. I think everything should be done to my standard. And I think my standard is the best in the world. I could easily be French. I love red wine, singing, laughing and having long conversations with dear friends about politics and ideologies. I love talking about ideas rather than events. I'd love to debate Jean Paul Sartre's philosophies over a croissant and a coffee, with Edith Piaf singing in the background. If I could only speak French!
I can speak Cat. Not fluently, but I get along.
As you have surely noticed by now, I have not much to say about Gambiers. Therefore I feel obliged to fill the page with all sorts of other dribbles from my mind. To end this sorry chapter and move on, I'll attempt a few paragraphs of "blogging". Yeah, I know. How very boring.
Rikitea
We had the benefit of a soft landing. (Yeah, water is softer than the tarmac on the runway of an international airport, walking barefoot on the grass is softer than the tiles in the arrival lounge...) Our first French-speaking landfall was the village of Rikitea in the Gambiers, the smallest of the five separate areas making up French Polynesia. As you may gather from the opening paragraph of this page, I was pretty dreamy and slow, taking life as it comes. That's pretty much all I could do.
It's not all lying in the sun. Filling the water tanks required several trips with the jerry cans. The toilet water intake had been leaking for months. I had to dismantle the entire toilet floor to clean up the mess. Changing oil and filters was another regular ritual interrupting my sports activities.
I speak no French - a problem that for a shy guy like me kills 90% of the fun in traveling. Rikitea was a sleepy little town. Much to my liking. Judging from its houses and gardens, it was relatively wealthy. The only road of the island was used almost exclusively by late model 4-wheel-drives. The economy here has for long been centered around pearl farming. For us money disappears like sand between the fingers. For the pearl farmers, each grain injected into the shell is money in the bank. Like in the Silicone Valley, sand has created a lot of wealth here too...
We needed fuel and the only way to buy it was by taking a 200 litre drum next to the supply ship during the few morning hours of it's visit. I don't own a empty 200 litre drum, but the ship crew encouraged me to pick one of the many lying around.
People were lovely. Some paid no attention to visitors but most would greet with a smile. Tourism is not big here but neither is a visitor something they haven't seen a million times before. There was a few street stalls selling pearls but no-one seemed to really care if we bought any or not. We ended up with two small ones for five bucks. Budget pearls for budget people. Our lack of language limited us to the usual pantomime and smiles, but I had no doubt about the real, genuine Polynesian warmth being very much alive here.
But the drums were not just lying around. The locals had lined them up for being filled. (Despite almost 100 vehicles, the island has no service station for fueling up.) The owner of the drum showed up too late. I got caught from stealing her drum, but the diesel flowing in it was mine.
... The lady sat patiently in her truck and waited for an hour while we siphoned the fuel back out into the jerry cans, making her drum available for her again.
Unfortunately the steady 15-20 knot South Pacific Trade winds were not to be found. Maybe they were just another dream of mine. The weather ranged from stinky-hot-dead-calm to blowing-a-gale-pissing-down. I spent the crappy days at home, buying 4 bucks per hour wifi time and surfing away, watching the anchor chain very carefully in the 40kn squalls. We walked up and down the village, once for 1/2 day, way up to the other side of the island, until my back started to hurt. I'm in such a poor shape. For some added exercise I accepted a job offer from a 106 ft private yacht Carl Linne. The work was fun, a bit of a novelty for me. Best of all, I was paid cash in hand. As a bonus, I got to work with some really cool people and enjoy a cold beer at the end of the day.
I didn't realise that all the shiny stainless steel wasn't shiny enough. I worked very hard at it but struggled to see the difference. As you can see, the cap rail varnishing definitely needs another coat too.
By reading this far down the page, you've earned yourself a little bonus. Here's an interesting snippet from a text describing the US politician Ron Paul:
"There are few people in public life who, through thick and thin, rain or shine, stick to their principles. Ron Paul is one of those few."
Sounds very positive. But doesn't it also mean:
There are few people so stubborn and pig-headed in public life who, through thick and thin, rain or shine, refuse to widen their perception and see another point of view. Ron Paul is one of those few?
(I'm not really into US politics, but I'm interested in language and in the way it is being used to convey an idea. I can smell dead language and wank-words from a mile away.)
The large amount of 4WD's started to make sense as soon as we ventured a few kilometers away from the main village
Next.... Tuamotus
