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I went partying for the first time last night. This is the first time I’ve seen bora at night. And stepping out onto the dock already made the whole soirée worth it. Mt. Otematu looks even more imposing at night, silhouetted against the starry sky, with a thin cloud hanging onto its peaks. I thought the lagoon was calm during the day, but at night it feels like the whole earth’s stopped moving. There’s not a sound. No waves, no fish, no people, no engine hums, no TV sounds- nothing.

The other’s arrived and we got on the boat. Another great experience- watching the lights of the hotel get smaller as we made our way to the island. I went out with my Stanley and heimata- both cooks, a waitress and my 2 roommates.

We arrived to the main island and got into stanley’s huge pickup. Riding in the open air staring at the full moon and the shoreline dotted with lights is really a great feeling. Time stops, you forget everything, you’re just along for the ride. We stopped at a warehouse by the waterside where the others went to watch boxing, the rest of us sat in the pickup and had a few drinks.

At around 1:30 we went to le récif- the island’s only nightclub. And it really is a club a-la-bora. It reminded me a bit of apocalypse mixed with phuc tan.



So we danced there for a while, and the music was way better than that stuff they play in swissland. Then when that closed we drove on to le ‘deps’ a big car park on the other side of the island. We get there and there’s about a hundred people gathered around two cars which were hooked up to massive speakers. I swear, those things were bigger than the cars themselves. Anyways, they blared their music, competing to be the loudest, and we danced into the sunrise.

Pseudonym

The great thing about working in and living on a hotel, is that its completely self sufficient, so you have anything you’d want a few meters from you. Hungry? Go visit the kitchen. Need towels or soap? Housekeeping. Cutlery? The restaurant. Well, today I wanted a kayak.

Kayaks are very practical pieces of plastic… in fact, I was thinking about getting one so that I wouldn’t have to wait for the shuttle to go to town. HA. 20 minutes into the rowing and my arms fell off into the abyss. Which in my case was about 20cm deep. So scratch the idea of going all the way to town. I picked up my arms and went on my way, going around the motu to my beach instead.



To give you an idea of where things are here’s a photo of bora from the air. Its taken with a fisheye lens, so my motu isn’t quite that big, and the main island is bigger than it looks.

Insanity em retirei

I was thinking about buying a bike to get around the island more easily. Bikes are very practical pieces of metal. Dominique offered me his so that I could go around the island on my day off. I thought, ‘Oh, how nice of him’. Then I met the chef and told him I was borrowing dominique’s bike…and he laughed at me. Apparently, Dominique’s been trying to get chef to use his bike for quite some time now…

Me: Huh?

Slightly confused, I made my way to the bike anyways. It was a nice bike. I was happy. White and blue. I was happy. So I set out merrily on my way… I’d decided to go to Matira- supposedly the best beach on Bora, which is exactly halfway around the island. 10 minutes in I noticed that the chain was rusted together with the gears… so I couldn’t shift. It’s just stuck in the lowest gear possible; causing me to make 6 times the effort than I normally would to pedal… No matter, I was happy. It was the perfect day to go biking… there was complete cloud cover, but no rain in sight. So anyways, I bike past the church, past the dock, past Vaitape and into unknown territory… and then I noticed that instead of having a normal bicycle seat, mine was a rock. A plastic rock. Aren’t these bike makers smart… I pedal for a while longer and my butt goes numb.

So I get to matira… and I’ve got to say that the water’s beautiful… there’s a great shade of turquoise for as far as the eye can see…and you’re supposed to be able to walk all the way to the reef from matira. The beach was disappointing though, It was maybe 2 meters wide, that’s it. Nothing great, my own beach is waay nicer. So I bike a bit past matira and I find Club Med. Right behind the club there’s a muddy trail going out to a lookout point, so I tie up my bike and go take a look. Clambering up the hill makes you feel like a real explorer… there’s only a few steps that mark the way, and if you look back, you have no idea where you came from, its just thick jungle on all sides. A few minutes up and you get to a lookout on top of a hill, and its got a great view. On one side you see the beach and the extension of the reef, and on the other there’s a big bay and the town. It looked something like this:



Let’s just pretend that I took this photo and that this is Bora… I’ll take photos next time. Actually… it does look a lot like Bora… I think it’s the intercon here.

So, I got down from the hill, ate a hamburger… and noticed that I’d turned an interesting shade of red… no matter…I’d soon be back home anyways. I sat around a bit then walked around the beach and decided to go back. And then all hell broke loose.

First, I had to take a break from pedaling every 10 minutes so that my butt wouldn’t fall off. Then a freak monsoon came out of nowhere and completely drenched me for about 30 min. Following the torrential rains came gale force winds aimed directly at me, rendering all my pedaling futile and causing me to move backwards more than I did forwards. Butt break. Then my right pedal fell off. Butt break. Then my left pedal cracked. Then I turned from tan-rouge to an extra-crispy-fried-blood red and got eaten alive by a crazed flock of rancid chickens. Butt break.

Beware of what you wish for.

I received my two girl roommates today… they were already assembled. They’re from the hotel school in Tahiti. They shall be known as Her #1 and Her #2 to protect their identities…and cuz I don’t know their real names. So far I’ve only talked to #1. I came back from eating, I open the door, and this is how our first conversation went:

Her # 1: Do you have a paoahdfnskgs?
Me: a what?
Her: a paoahdfnskgs.
Me: whats a paoahdfnskgs?
Her: you don’t know what a paoahdfnskgs is?
Me: I don’t speak French.
Her: you use it to clean the floor.
*Alex produces a broom*
Her: No, that’s a broom.
Me: huh?

I don’t know why she’d need a paoahdfnskgs in the first place… cuz my house is perfectly clean… in fact, I was proud of myself for spending the whole night (15 min.) yesterday to clean up. And then… get this…then, in the middle of another conversation I ask her what she’s gonna do today… and she says: “Well, seeing the state that the house is in, I’m probably gonna have to stay in and clean all day” FINE. Make it sound like my house is a friggin warzone… so she’s probably there thinking how much of a slob I am, while I’m there wondering how you say spatula in French.

But hey… I get free housekeeping… and she is good.

Baking powder social club

Imagine a 200 meter long metal tube. Now imagine a huge atom bomb inside that tube. Now imagine being the guy responsible for lowering this 200 meter long atom bomb down a 1000 meter hole. Now smack yourself on the forehead. Cuz that’s exactly what Papi’s job was.

Papi is a cook. His name is Angia, but everyone calls him papi cuz he’s the oldest guy around. Anyways, 8 years ago he was the crane operator for the French pacific nuclear tests. First he was a cook at the nuclear facility… then they posted the crane job and he decided to go for it. He’s lowered more than 40 of these tubes in 2 years. What happens is that he slowly descends these things waaay down under an island somewhere in Polynesia, then they all evacuated from the facility….and, BOOM. Then he goes back and does it all over again. Can anyone say ‘dangerous radiation exposure?’ well, so far he seems perfectly fine and normal.

Ben & Jerry

The greatest thing happened today… I dunno if you remember the photo with the random black cat that I posted a while ago… well, that cat came back, so I fed it and I let it in the house for a bit. Then, about 30 min later this cat comes back with something in its mouth… it looked like a little wet black ball… I looked closer and it was a kitten! At first I thought it was dead cuz the big cat was holding it from its throat and it wasn’t moving, but then I went outside, and I saw this:

www.ImageShack.us"

(youve gotta click on the thumbnail cuz my imagehosting is being an ass)

www.ImageShack.us"

So I took them both inside, fed the random cat some more and dried the kitten, and let them back out. 30 minutes later the mom comes dragging another furball to my porch. By now it was time I went to work, so I quickly fed the mom some more and set off. I came back at 5pm and there were three kittens-and the mom was at the door for more food. 10pm…and one more was added. I was beginning to wonder where the inexhaustible baby supply was coming from… the next morning I woke up and there were 5. They’re the cutest things imaginable. I’d say they’re no more than 2 or 3 weeks old… just little balls of fur running around everywhere. I put out a drawer and a bucket… and I guess they’ve found a new home.

Primus is COOL

I’m delirious today. For many a reason. First of all I got a letter!! (ok, so it was from my bank…) and then I started working in the hot section of the kitchen.. aand I found a pan to beat!!!

When drummers are interviewed they often say that they started out by banging on pots and pans…and the rest is history. Well I always thought it was extremely stupid. First of all, pots sound like…uuh…pots. And how can hearing that inspire you to drum for a living? Secondly, I picked one up today and started playing the bongos on it… Oh man. It was beautiful. You have no idea how many different great sounds can come from one pan; how many different osmotic (sonoric’s a word isn’t it?) combinations you can make… It was beautiful. That pan plays a lot better than lots of djembes and bongos I’ve tried. If you smack the rim hard you get this high pitched-but controlled sound. Smack the rim and leave your hand there and it completely deadens the ring and you just get the thump. Same thing can be done to the center, the part between the two…then you can mute the ring halfway through the note, play with your whole hand or just a fingernail…smack it hard or soft…sooo many different things you can do with it. Oh, and it makes good pasta too… now how many people can say that about a bongo?

Pancakes a la plastic.

I made pancakes last night and I couldn’t find a spatula… but I did find a plastic thing that resembled a spatula… so I figured that if it looked like a spatula, it should probably act like a spatula…well, it turns out that plastic and extreme heat don’t mix very well. So I melted about half the spatula into my pancakes…but I did at least manage to flip them.

It turns out it was an ice-scraper- which, of course, is vital in these parts of the world.

TssS

Some black and white photos to compliment the mood in the RAIN.



Hmm... so its been raining for...Oh, FIVE DAYS STRAIGHT. FIVE. STRAIGHT. AHHHHH.



One of the 2 tahitian words that has found itself in the english language.

And the rain cometh.

Hmm. I had some photos. which are on my camera. which isnt with me. HA.

You can look up at the sky, survey the horizon for 360° and not see a single cloud in the sky. You can look back 5 minutes later and not be able to see even the slightest trace of blue. I was at the beach when those rain clouds just popped out of nowhere… and the downpour began, so I went swimming. And yes, Bora is beautiful even in the rain. Because the lagoon is so shallow the water’s always warm, so all you have to do to escape the rain is dive underwater. You hear this great pattering sound from underwater, and if you look across the sea with the water exactly at eye level there’s this thin layer of mist stretching out to infinity, which instantly disappears if you raise your head. And the pattering continues. And then its gone.

You can follow your rain out to sea… it looks like gray curtains have been drawn over a certain section of the ocean. You can watch it batter cargo ships and move on farther to sea until it disappears. And that was the beauty of the weather here… it changes so quickly that it didn’t matter if it rained, cuz the next moment it would be back to perfect. Until today.

Today the rain started for real. It started soft… then got harder, and harder, and harder… and just when you thought that it couldn’t rain any stronger, that the pounding on your roof, your porch and the banana trees couldn’t get any louder, well, it can, and it does. Usually downpours of this strength are gone within minutes… but not this one. This one went on… I watched from my living room… the ground got saturated, water started building up. I now understand why my house is on stilts.

I came back in the middle of work to get my keys and it was like a lake… I looked from my porch and all the earth was covered by at least a few inches of water, and the rain has finally stopped… for now.

Les famouses.

We had Sharon stone at Le Meridian the other week, now the guy from Alexander is here… Colin Farel. He’s probably hiding from all the people that want to kill him for those 3 hours of torture.

Island Life.

Island life is waay different from any other form of life anywhere else. Fist of all, you don’t get bored here. You get lazy. You can always go to the beach- swim, snorkel, read, walk, kayak, or just lay on the sand and admire the scenery. Then you can hike, around the island, up the 600m peaks, which is supposed to give you a great view of the lagoon (and which is definitely on my to-do list), you can explore the motu and the main island, visit marare (old worshipping grounds), the old WW2 cannons on the hills, bike around, fish, or take the daily shuttle to Moupiti (a smaller island like bora) or Taha’a and Raiatea (Ancient religious islands and stuff).



SO there’s no lack of things to do… there’s only a lack of motivation. Everything and everyone slows down when you’re at the beach. Pressing things suddenly don’t seem so stressful, schedules are just a rough guide, time is there for the taking. The beauty of it is you can do any of this stuff whenever you feel like it… feel like a quick swim? Walk down to the water… hungry for lunch? Go have a picnic (picnic, nadja…) on the beach. And there’s always time to do this stuff, so if one day you just wanna lay in bed and stare at the ceiling… fine. You’re not losing out on anything. The only thing I can’t really get to happen is have two goddesses feed me chocolate grapes while I’m laying in a bed of freshly picked pillows… but I’m working on that.