'Ia orana i te matahiti api!

Happy New Year, and apologies for being blog silent for the past month. My trip to Maupiti was followed by the arrival of my friend Craig from the United States, a trip to Rangiroa in the Tuamotus, an unusual Christmas, a trip to Bora Bora and Huahine (in the Societies) over New Year's, and then an unexpected, once-in-a-lifetime chance to travel to Mehetia, a tiny, active volcano 100 km east of Tahiti. I'll start with Maupiti first.

Maupiti was probably the most random experience I have had since I got here. Maupiti is a high island, about an hour west of here by plane; it is the oldest high island in the Society archipelago, at 4.5 million years. It is tiny, however; for those of you have been to Mo'orea, it is about half the size of the base of Mt. Rotui, and only 380 m tall, and consequently, it has been extremely impacted by human activities and invasive plants. Essentially, the only native plants that remain are those that respond well to disturbance (mine, Glochidion, was thankfully one of these, and I found lots of caterpillars of many different genera of moths on it), and many characteristic Pacific island plants, such as Metrosideros and Dicranopteris ferns, are absent. If you ignore this, however, it's a truly beautiful little island, with a calm turquoise lagoon surrounded by motu. In addition, Glochidion grows on the motu here (one of only two islands in French Polynesia where it does so), which means that I had a day where I got to do fieldwork at sea level along the lagoon shore, exactly the image people have when I tell them I do fieldwork in French Polynesia. Inevitably, it rained that day.

There are only about a thousand people on Maupiti. They have seen what has happened to neighboring Bora Bora and have resisted the construction of any hotels on their island. Maupiti is a place where local people of all ages still speak Tahitian to each other, instead of French. One afternoon, after walking back from the field, a family whose house I walked past invited me to join them for lunch--this is apparently a Tahitian tradition, but it has died out on Tahiti and Mo'orea.

I stayed at a pension (guesthouse) run by a Tahitian woman in her late thirties. There were two other guests at the pension; one was a 31-year old French woman with dreadlocks who had just moved to Polynesia after living in Australia and New Zealand for a number of years. She spoke very good English and was very talkative, and had a strange fascination with the sexual hygiene habits of various nationalities ("is it true that in California, women bleach their...") and the worst of American reality TV. I made sure to point out to her my admiration of Baudelaire and French existentialist literature. The second guest was the island's correspondent for La Dépêche de Tahiti (one of the two "national" newspapers in French Polynesia), a French woman in her 50's, who decided I was the most interesting thing to have happened on the island that week and followed me into the field one day so she could write a story about me and my research (this article appeared last week; sadly, there is no online version of this newspaper).

I spent two afternoons after fieldwork drinking beer with and trying to learn Tahitian from the extended family of the pension owner, who were great people, although, in retrospect, on small islands like this, it's easy to see how people (like the boyfriend of the pension owner) become alcoholics. I made an effort to explain insect-plant interactions using the cultivation of cannabis as a starting point (it is wind-pollinated, so it doesn't rely on insects; ever wonder what those little yellow squiggly lines in the leaves are? they're leaf-mining fly larvae!), which I'm not sure I should ever try to do if I'm teaching at a public university. While I was hanging out, an American guy with a really long beard dropped by to meet me. He was from Davis, California, and had married a woman from Maupiti, but speaking neither French nor Tahitian, was clearly kind of lonely. When he asked me if I preferred Zachary's or Blondie's, it was a real blast of Berkeley nostalgia.

I had never traveled alone in the field before, and I found it was really rewarding; I met more local people than I would have as part of a group. That said, being not very high and not very big, Maupiti is the kind of island where it is relatively safe to go into the field alone.

Check out the photos here.