Moorea, Tahiti’s near-neighbour to the northwest, is third-largest of the Society Islands. The ferry from Pape’ete gets you there in half an hour, which makes it something of a suburb: many people who work in the capital live here.
My visit is all too brief, a single full day that I opt to spend on the water rather than hiking the island’s highlands. As it turns out, I don’t cavort with the whales: out with Maui Ciucci of Corallina Tours on his boat, I’m busy fiddling with f-stops on my camera when the humpbacks, mother and calf, breach nearby.
Later, within the shallow blue-green of Moorea’s encircling reef, I swim with blacktip sharks. Or rather, I splash in chest-deep water while the sharks show no interest in my presence.
There are lonelier, farther-flung islands in these waters — Pitcairn, for example, where Bounty’s mutineers washed up, 2,000 kilometres to the southeast — but Fakarava, my last stop in Polynesia, feels conspicuously remote and exempt, perhaps, from the constraints of calendars and clocks. The second-largest island of the Tuamotu archipelago, Fakarava is a 60-kilometre sill of coral enclosing a lagoon vivid with aquatic colour and incident. Now part of a UNESCO biosphere reserve, it saw its first European visitor in 1820 when the Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen sailed in and dubbed it Wittgenstein. The name didn’t take.
For most of the hour-long flight east from Pape’ete, it’s only ocean stretched below, midnight blue now, and calm as carpet. When the first of the Tuamotus appear, they look like bleached, lonely bones.
“So narrow, so barren, so beset with sea,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote when he stayed on Fakarava in 1888. It’s true that after the fertile, lofty mountainscapes of the Society Islands, Fakarava, almost level with the Pacific enclosing it, does at first present a flat, blanched austerity. Walking the long shifting coral beach at Passe Garuae or riding a bike along Fakarava’s single ribbon of paved road, you feel its exposure to sun, wind and ocean.
But Fakarava is greener than it first appears, festooned, even, in places, with frangipani and heliotrope. A towering sandalwood tree presides over the centre of Rotoava, Fakarava’s main village, like a benevolent, all-seeing elder.
To get my bearings, I enlist a local guide, Enoha, who makes do with just the one name. An affable, 50-something painter who also sculpts driftwood and whalebone, he tours me from one end of the atoll to the other, stopping to comment on everything from pre-European settlement, modern-day airport lore, soldierbushes, ironwood trees, a fruit called soursop and the various uses for the leaves and bark of the breadfruit tree (a powerful antioxidant and an excellent glue for patching canoes, respectively).