Rangiroa

My friend Craig arrived for the holidays a few days after I got back from Maupiti. We took it easy, driving around the island, going snorkeling at 'Opunohu Beach, visiting the waterfalls at Afareaitu on the east side of the island, trying various stinky French cheeses and drinking Hinano on my balcony while looking out at the waves crashing on the reef. Then, because Craig had wanted to dive, we flew to Rangiroa.

Rangiroa is in the Tuamotu Archipelago, a galaxy of atolls that spreads across most of the center of French Polynesia. Way back in the mid-Tertiary, several tens of millions of years ago, this was an archipelago of high islands smack in the remote Pacific, inhabited by a flora and fauna about which we can only guess today. Today they are atolls, only a few meters above sea level, inhabited by a homogenous and not terribly diverse terrestrial biota, and under severe threat from global warming. Tourists come to the Tuamotus, however, to dive. Rangiroa is the world's second-largest atoll, and the enormous lagoon it encloses is inhabited by sharks, manta rays, turtles, and many many other fishes. Here is one of the world's largest aggregations of hammerhead sharks and manta rays, and one of the few places in French Polynesia where whale sharks (the world's largest fish) are seen.

As mentioned before, I cannot dive, or at least I haven't been to see a dive doctor yet about my asthma. But while Craig dived, I snorkeled. On the lagoon side, there are enormous coral heads growing out of the sandy bottom, giant clams 30 cm long (other species in the west Pacific get notoriously bigger, but ours, Tridacna maxima, only reaches that size), schools of unicornfishes, parrotfishes, butterflyfishes, and stingrays. I snorkeled once with a guide through Tiputa Pass, from the ocean outside the pass into the lagoon. As we started, I saw four bottlenose dolphins, and barracuda; as I let the current carry me through, the bottom became visible as it rose up to meet me. Soon I was in a veritable city of fishes, surrounded by schools of hundreds of unicornfishes and fusiliers, gazing down at fat parrotfishes half a meter long and black, white, and yellow Moorish idols (a bad common name on all counts). I saw a humphead wrasse (a bloated-looking green fish the size of a very small person, which the French more evocatively call a "Napoléon"), a fat moray eel over two meters long, and several small blacktip sharks. If I hadn't been so distracted by the riotous abundance of fishes, I might have been more worried about the fact that I was completely at the mercy of the current.

The next day I snorkeled in the ocean outside another pass, as a group of divers, Craig included, dove amongst silvertip and grey reef sharks, some over two and a half meters long. Unfortunately, I had eaten some rather questionable street food the night before, and it was very choppy at the surface, and I discovered that indeed, it is possible to get seasick from snorkeling.

Just like the Marquesas and the Australs, the Tuamotus are culturally distinct from the Society Islands. Here, the indigenous language is Pa'umotu, although on the less isolated atolls with immigrants from the Society Islands (such as Rangiroa), Tahitian is widely spoken as well. Craig and I went to a Christmas concert and service, bringing together the six Christian churches on the island, in which the songs were variously in Pa'umotu, Tahitian, and French, and in between songs, the various denominations made proselytizing pitches in Tahitian, and occasionally French. (The Seventh-Day Adventists were very slick, with a young man speaking in Tahitian and a young woman at his side translating into perfect French.) The best singers were a Protestant group of elderly men and women, which sang traditional Tahitian church hymns without accompaniment. It was transcendent.

People were very friendly on Rangiroa, and Craig and I both really enjoyed talking to our pension owner, who was very proud to tell us all about the history of the Tuamotus, his Pa'umotu heritage, and the time he met Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë. Interestingly, he was very nostalgic for the era of direct French control, on the grounds that less-populated archipelagos, like the Tuamotus, had lost the political power they once held. He much preferred town hall meetings with the governor sent from France, and elections only for local mayors, to the current parliamentary arrangement in which Polynesians vote for representatives who sit in the Assemblée de la Polynésie française in Papeete and elect a President (essentially a prime minister). This, he argued, leads to Tahiti (160,000 people out of the 260,000 in the territory) dominating the political landscape to the detriment of the Tuamotus (15,000 people) or the Marquesas (9,000 people). It was surprising to hear this, yet at the same time it was eerily familiar. We all know that colonialism often benefits some minority indigenous ethnic groups at the expense of others. Thankfully, in French Polynesia, the end (or modification) of that system has not led to ethnic strife in the way that it has elsewhere.

Although I'm not sure I would recommend Rangiroa to people who do not or cannot scuba dive, I greatly enjoyed my time there. It was very relaxing to visit an island without my study organisms so I didn't have to feel guilty about not doing fieldwork! I was glad to see the Tuamotus now. I expect that before the end of this century, as sea levels rise, the Pa'umotu will loose their homeland, and be forced to resettle elsewhere in French Polynesia.