January 2014

Hello everyone,

Season greetings from Rikitea

No, Rikitea is not the title of a song , an improbable French success of the sixties , but the name of the main village of the island of Mangareva , the largest island of the tiny Gambier archipelago, located at the far end of Polynesia French : eastward of here , there Pitcairn ( the island of the Bounty mutineers ), further east, Easter Island , and then nothing until the shores of South America. This is one of the most isolated places in the world .
I visited this island for the first time on board my schooner Om in 1977, at the time it was a backup for the nuclear testing that took place at Mururoa . I returned in 1986 aboard my second sailboat, Voyage , and in 2002 aboard Banana Split, and several times since then. During my last visit , St. Michael's Cathedral , built under the guidance of the authoritarian father Laval , creator here of a small theocracy whose remains are found in each island in the shape of a church or chapel, had suffered the ravages of time and three years ago, it was renovated in full ; the first care of the designer responsible for directing the work was to scrape the many successive layers of paint, which allowed her to see that the blue ornaments that characterized the facade was not the original color : the brick color chosen today corresponds to the reality of the time, it was obtained with the means at hand , from local clay ; the stones that make up the building are blocks of coral that the Mangarevan people fetched off from the distantreef , and brought on rafts.

Today the island has the privilege of being one of the few places in France where unemployment does not exist: in the Gambier in particular, the culture of the black pearl of Tahiti provides employment for anyone who's willing to work hard , and beautiful cars, speedboats and jet-skis are not uncommon, especially in this Christmas season when many families settle for a few days on the motu, the islets scattered on the reef , and usually inhabited only by birds , such as the neautiful fairy tern...

Fifteen wandering yachts choose to spend here the few months that the cyclone season in the South Pacific last. The lagoon is full of fish , the Mangarevan gardens overflow with lychees, avocados, papayas or bananas (of course never pick anything without the express permission of the owners !) . Lychees in particular are a very seasonal supplement to the income of the pearl : this month at least twenty tons of litchis have been exported by air cargo or by the two schooners that serve the archipelago, the Nuku Hau and Taporo .

It is here that Francette and I greet the new year before returning to the vast expanses of the Pacific, celebrating with the fruits of the island, but also with some products from Europe, including a precious Condrieu and, in memory uf my Italian years, a little white truffle of Alba , a folly , but the advent of a new year deserves such a sacrifice.