Feature > Adventure

The Tuamotus - Exploring Paradise: 10 weeks, 3,000 miles by sea kayak in the South Pacific.
By Jon Bowermaster . Photos by Peter McBride

A 13.5-mile crossing by sea kayak from Fakarava to the petite motu of Kiria—begun before sunrise, to take advantage of calm winds and clear night skies—delivers us to our most beautiful camp yet.

As we set tents and hammocks for the umpteenth time in the past ten weeks, the tide ebbs and flows through a wide hoa directly in front of the white sand spit; a squadron of frigate birds hovers elegantly above the coconut palms, floating on thermals, eyeing the surf for lunch; an army of sand crabs, rental homes on their backs, go about their various appointed duties, leaving long, thin trails in the otherwise unadulterated sand; a gently pounding surf is broken by the thin coral reef crest, creating a shallow aqua-blue lagoon.

Aaaah, Paradise!

I’ve been sleeping in a hammock beneath the coconut palms and waking up in perfect spirits. Something about the combination of a lazy breeze pushing me through the night and then finding myself staring up at an azure sky to watch the frigate birds soar and play. It is the perfect time to ponder the notion—as outsiders have done for two millennia—whether or not these most-isolated little islands in the heart of the Pacific Ocean are in fact Paradise on Earth. It is idyllic here, in many ways like a dream come true, and a scene I will miss on thousands of mornings to come.

I took a team of five, with kayaks, to French Polynesia last fall, in part to glimpse this particular paradise up close. The remote Tuamotu chain lies perfectly halfway between Australia and South America, 3,500 miles from each, and was given the nickname “the Dangerous Archipelago” by 18th-century explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville, thanks to the shallow, sharp reefs that surround the 78 atolls spread west-to-east over 1,000 miles. Hundreds of navigators before us, searching for their own paradise (or plunder, or new economy), ran aground here on this spiky, edge-of-the-world speed bump, no doubt cursing this place as something other than utopia. Magellan was the first Westerner to map the chain, spying eastern-most Pukapuka in 1521; 300 years later when the atolls finally succumbed to the French Protectorate, there was still a handful of cannibals living about. Life since has been mostly peaceful but for the French nuclear weapons testing on the atolls of Muroroa and Fangataufa, discontinued in 1997.

At the end of our first day of paddling, after an 18-mile crossing of Rangiroa’s interior lagoon, we arrive in the shallows on its southern side, skirting “micro-atolls” forming just below the see-through surface on the sandy bottom of the lagoon. Coral build-up, resembling giant wagon wheels, are studded with the snake-like, blue-green mouths of encrusted clams sparkling like jewels under a navy-blue sky.

Camp is set on a virgin, no-name beach, alongside a hoa—a pass running from the ocean into the lagoon, but not wide enough to allow traffic in and out. Access to the interior of these atolls comes, if it comes at all, through a single natural pass, maybe two. On the oceanside are prehistoric, sharply-barbed fossilized spikes, eight-foot tall feo lining the reef like two-million-year-old barbed wire. Walking, carefully, through the deadly coral, all I can imagine is the fearsome swim of the shipwrecked as they tried to negotiate their way to safety through this natural checkpoint. It would have been a bloodying swim, an ultimate test of desire for those seeking a perfect world.

Noble Savages

It was the English poet John Dryden who coined the phrase “Noble Savage,” but French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, in the 17th century, got famous for it. It was a time when many European thinkers were preoccupied with questions about what was basic to human nature. The argument was also being put forward that perhaps civilization of the Western kind was a crushing weight that produced deformities in humanity. There must be a simpler, nobler way of life—and a better, simpler, nobler man—went the argument.

Hand-in-hand was the desire of exploring Europeans of the time, especially those beginning to round the globe by sea, to find some kind of earthly paradise. And its perfect people. Columbus, when first sighting the Caribbean islands, was convinced he’d found it. Black Africans failed the explorers’ notion of perfect; Chinese, Persians, and others were disqualified for being “too civilized.” British explorer Samuel Wallis was the first white man to land in Tahiti, in 1767, and his sailors were the first to become “madly fond of the shore” here. Arriving six months later was Frenchman Philibert Commerson, who first publicly claimed he’d discovered the Noble Savage.

A naturalist aboard the ship Bougainville, Commerson was also the first to label the South Seas “utopia”. In the two-and-a-half centuries since, sailors from Fletcher Christian to James Cook, writers from Robert Louis Stevenson to Jack London, painters like Gauguin, novelists like Melville, and tourists by the tens of thousands have followed, all searching for the same: Heaven on Earth.

The results have been mixed. For a brief moment in the 18th century the Polynesian seemed to offer the white man a vision of what it might be like to go naked in the world once more. The idea of some sort of earthly paradise in the South Seas lived on into the 19th century. It was by its nature inextinguishable, irrepressible. But the image changed; those who continued to believe that savages could teach civilized men how to live were more and more regarded as maladjusted.

The Noble Savage was of course a fiction. Still, ask a Westerner today—anyone—to paint a picture in words of Paradise. A high percentile will include in that tableau island beaches, azure skies and seas, coconut palms. Those things are still the foundation of utopian dreams and they do exist here in Polynesia, as they have for a million-odd years.

The entire South Pacific—70 million square miles—was discovered and first explored by men in small double canoes not much bigger than our kayaks. Known as tipairua or pahi, they were manned by four to 20 men. Utilizing paddles and sails they came from thousands of miles away—from south China, then Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, and New Zealand—2,000 years ago. Using stars to navigate, currents and tides to guide them when the skies were clouded, they covered vast stretches of open ocean between sightings of land. Rarely did they have any idea what lay over the next curve of the earth. Tahiti was found this way, the Marquesas, the Tuamotus, then Hawaii, and Easter Island, centuries before white man arrived by wooden ship. These remote islands were the very last place on earth to bear the weight of man.

Red and yellow, orange and blue, our small flotilla stands out against the intense indigo ocean, the green lushness of the palms, the bright white of the cumulus and bleached sand. Sails are struck off the motu of Paati, on the south side of Rangiroa. Known worldwide as Polynesian triangles, hung on bungeed-corded poles, they are instantly filled to the max by a 15-mile-an-hour trailing wind.

Mesmerized into near-hallucinatory state by the red tip of the bow plowing through the blue of the sea, I think about what it must have been like for those early navigators. In big seas they would batten down all—families, flocks, barrels of vegetables, boxes of seedlings—and ride it out. Garlands of feathers hung from the top of the mast indicating the wind’s direction and strength. Becalmed and beclouded, the best of them could dip a hand into the sea and, using just the feel of the current, steer toward what they hoped would be utopia of their own.

In front of me a flock of brown gents plunges to the surface for food, chattering. Schools of silvery, finger-sized flying fish skip over the bow. Just beneath the crystal-clear surface swims a parade of colorful parrot and butterfly fish, manta and sting rays, great, ugly eels and sharks, always sharks. A trio of dolphins breaks the surface and porpoise alongside for a quarter-of-a-mile. Propelled by strong winds the boat bounds up and down through wind-whipped whitecaps. It is a rare north wind, the kind that generally precedes hurricanes, which, if arriving now, would be very, very early in the season.


Not long for this world

There is a strong possibility that the 78 coral reef atolls (actually 77 thin circles of coral rubble, sand, and rock plus one small lump of a remaining volcano, Makatea) that make up the Tuamotus are not long for this world.

Remnants of a once-magnificent chain of towering volcanoes spread over 1,000 miles, these living, breathing, still-growing reefs—and the lagoons they mostly protect—will very likely disappear in the next 50 to 100 years, thanks to their inability to keep pace with a warming—thus rising—ocean.

Frank is a Canadian-born Irishman from Southern California. Nobody’s fool, he first visited the South Pacific as a UC Berkeley graduate student and has barely left during the past 15 years. A marine biologist who went on to administer UC-B’s field station on Moorea, he found himself a Paumotuan wife (at happy hour!), got himself an elaborate tattoo, had kids, and assimilated to island life.

Walking along the narrow reef crest near another no-name motu, he bends and pulls a stunningly large pencil urchin from a shallow tidal pool. Holding it high in the air, he admires its size and maturity and gently places it back. Wearing a giant straw hat to protect his Celtic skin, stepping gently so as not to slice sandaled feet to ribbons on the sharp coral, he dodges the fast-moving surf tumbling in off the ocean.

“You know, my children are seeing these atolls for the first time in their lives.… It struck me this morning that they may not last their lifetime,” he says.

The coral we are walking on is one million years old. For the moment the crest of the reef is protecting the atolls, the lagoons, and the people from the rising seas, increased waves, and storms. “If the seas heat up as much as some think they will in the next 50 years—just one or two degrees—waves and storms will override these reefs and ‘take out’ all life here,” he says.

One common mistake is assuming that if the seas warm due to man’s increased dependence on—and abuse of—fossil fuels, that the greatest danger is that the seas will literally rise like water in a bathtub. That is certainly a possibility. Here in the South Pacific it’s anticipated they could rise by two to four feet in the next 50 years. The potential for disaster is clear and present in a place where populations—as few as five (Tauere), as many as 1,000 (Rangiroa)—live just a few feet above sea level. A bigger concern is that warm seas will bring more storms and bigger winds and will end life as it is today on these fragile rubble-heaps.

In somewhat typical island fashion this potential coming calamity is mostly lost on locals. In Avatoru a school bus driver and amateur javelin-thrower was building himself a new home just 45 feet from the lagoon edge. Cement pylons supported heavy I-beams raised three feet above the ground, allowing for rising seas to—hopefully—race beneath his new home.

Asked about the weather, he responds in perfect Polynesian form: “Today was not very good.” What about tomorrow? No reply. It’s a beauty of the Polynesians, like many island people around the globe. Living a simple, isolated life, they don’t like to look much beyond right now. The “future” is too far off.

“Global warming?” the bus driver ponders, scratching his head. “No, don’t know what that is, never heard of it.”

“They live day-to-day,” says Frank, “but the reality is they won’t stand a chance. If tropical storms and hurricanes increase, things here will change very, very quickly.”


Hinano
A white tern, some four decades ago, delivered the announcement of Hinano’s birth.

Her mother, living on the tiny atoll of Nukutavake, was pregnant, and unwed. To avoid undue scrutiny, when the time came Hinano’s great-grandfather paddled his granddaughter across the open ocean in a canoe to the nearby, nearly deserted atoll of Vairaatea, where the birthing took place beneath blowing palms. With no formal way to make the birth public—thus official—grandpa wrote the date and the name of his new princess on a piece of paper ripped from a sugar sack. Snaring a bird, he wrapped the note in paper money and tied the small bundle to its wing with a strand peeled from a coconut husk. The announcement was found weeks later and official registry of the birth recorded.

“Then, when I was four, my great-grandfather insisted my mother take me away from the Tuamotus, to Tahiti, so that I could get a good education,” Hinano explains. “There were no schools here at the time and that’s what he wanted for me, more than anything. As well as a husband outside of my extended family.”

The result is a most self-sufficient, modern-day woman. Dark-eyed and dark-haired, she laughs infectiously while telling her story, all the while plaiting and weaving—palm fronds into plates, baskets, and serving platters, pinwheels and whistles for her five children, white tiaras into coronas she wears each morning on the beach. During this day she will catch and clean parrot and surgeonfish, construct an under-the-sand oven, and use dried coral as fire-starter. She opens coconuts with a machete in five practiced whacks and grates the meat into salads of manioc, breadfruit, and poi. Kneeling in the shallows, atop a micro-atoll, with a sharp knife she digs clams out of the rock, sharing them raw, drenched under squeezed lime. She is a modern-day siren—after dinner she will dance, for us, for herself, a passion and occupation she enjoyed before becoming an educator, a mother, a historian, and a television personality in her adopted home of Tahiti.

Just as the natural world is at risk here, Hinano and a smattering of other island-born are making an effort to protect and save what remains of the Paumotuan language and culture. The future is not particularly bright; the blend of influential cultures from the outside—Polynesian, French, American—have already made a large dent in a way of life that goes back centuries.

“Whenever I come back to the atolls…everything my great-grandfather and other relatives taught me comes immediately back,” says Hinano, weaving palm fronds into a basket. “It is very special here—the ocean, the air, everything feels different, my body is charged. I feel like I belong here.

“But care needs to be taken, to preserve the life, the environment, the culture here. The Paumotuan language is already lost, in part due to a rush to learn French and English. In fact, a generation—my generation—was punished in the French schools here for speaking Paumotuan.

“Some regulation must be put in place—to protect the fishing, to insure the long-term health of the lagoon. Which is hard because the mentality of the people who have never left is stuck between the old world and the new. That is the biggest problem in paradise now. No one is sure if, or where, they belong.”

Creating Paradise

James Norman Hall co-authored a handful of books that introduced the notion of “South Pacific as Paradise” to millions. Mutiny on the Bounty is the best-known, as well as its siblings Men Against the Sea, Pitcairn’s Island, and Hurricane, among others. A biography of the writer—and his writing partner Charles Nordhoff—is called simply In Search of Paradise.

“Grandfather came in February 1920 for the Atlantic Monthly,” Hall’s grandson Jamie says, looking from his house on a Tahitian hillside out over Bounty Bay. “His assignment was to write a tourist’s guide to the islands, for Americans. He, and Nordhoff, had been pilots during World War I and they were definitely in search of paradise. And they definitely found it. Of course they stayed.”

Jamie lives on family property and serves as curator of the James Norman Hall Museum, an old family house just across from the beach where Captain Bligh, Christian Fletcher, and the rest of the Bounty’s crew first came ashore. Fifty years old and married to a Fijian, Jamie understands perfectly his grandfather’s role in “creating” a modern-day image of paradise. And the responsibility therein. He also has some insights into the historical characters the “Mutiny” books made infamous. (“It’s simple, really. They had made girlfriends here and most were pregnant when Bligh insisted they leave. The men wanted to stay, start families, not go back to England where it was cold and gray and they had not jobs. And where there were no vahinis. They wanted to stay in the islands. Who could blame them?”)

“When Grandfather and Nordhoff arrived here there was just a simple hotel in Papeete, with fantastic room service and fantastic food. The weather was perfect and they met a mélange of interesting people—British, French, German, and Tahitians. No traffic. No television. No telephone. No radio. No noise. No pollution. It truly was…paradise.

“If they could see Tahiti today, they’d turn around and go straight back to heaven. They would not regard it as paradise any longer—too many people, too much noise, and too much pollution. Where might they go instead? To the outer islands, to where you’ve just been, to the Tuamotus. If there is a paradise today, that’s where you will find it. That’s where Grandfather would live today, I’m sure. Right smack in the middle of them!”

Stone Ridge resident Jon Bowermaster has chronicled numerous adventures (his own and others’) for many popular magazines, including National Geographic. His explorations include dogsled travels in the Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland, and the Northwest Territories and kayaking expeditions on several continents.
Bowermaster is the author of several books, including The Adventures and Misadventures of Peter Beard in Africa and Over the Top of the World, with Will Steger.