Circumnavigation

So what was I doing the other night watching a 21 year old movie about a bunch of unruly sailors on a doomed quest to trade for breadfruit in the South Pacific as a cheap way to feed Jamaican slaves?

I'd recommend the movie on the eye candy factor alone. (Liam Neeson as a hulking early mutineer?)

I was watching The Bounty because it was filmed on the Tahitian Island of Moorea. An island I didn't know much about until this last August when I had a chance to go there.

I've a friend who I met years ago when we both worked together at an architectural firm in San Francisco, who has a thing about islands and the resources to travel to them. She and her husband fell in love with Moorea and bought a timeshare there over 20 years ago. It is one of those things that one is always secretly jealous of, but too polite to ever say a word about.

In an email to her after a particularly rough winter last year, I flippantly said that what I needed was a week alone on a beautiful beach somewhere… and a few hours later she sent me a response… well, if you were serious about that, we will let you have the timeshare week if you can get yourself there.

It was a test in a way. She wanted to see if I would fall in love with it as she had. Tahiti has that effect on certain people. It gets into you and never ever lets you go.

When I arrived, the friendly young man that picked me up at the tiny open air airport asked how many times I had visited. Everybody asks you that because if you have fallen in love, you go back…

From loud hip hop competing with island drumming just after sunset to the acrid smell of the open fires everyone uses to cook and burn trash, from the roar of cars on the one road that completely circles the island to the sound of children laughing everywhere… to the ever changing vistas of shadow on the Volcanic peaks, Moorea is simply heart stoppingly beautiful. The light is like nowhere else.

And yes, I'm going back next year.

Audrey