The Unicycle Diaries 5: An Imperfect Grasp of the French

A fragment taken from my travel diaries written in French Polynesia, in October 2005...

Passage at patisserie this morning:

"Comment dis 'receipt' a français?"

Blank look.

"The bill... l'edition?"

Glimmer of understanding.

"Ah! Le ticket!"

Hands receipt over.

Vaguely remembered schoolboy French is a dangerous thing (especially if, like me, you never actually studied it at school). A receipt in English is a recipe in French, a French 'ticket' is our receipt, an English ticket is a 'bilet', and our billet is... oh, never mind.

Overnight, the previously perfectly sunny weather gave a hint of the coming wet season, pouring down in the wee small hours. We later went swimming in a steady light shower, experimenting with the waterproof casing of Narrelle's camera by taking pics of the hotel from the sea.

Preconceptions of paradise

The aquamarine shade of the ocean is so distinctive and somehow instantly relaxing; it makes me wonder whether it's a case of chicken and egg. Is aqua an instinctively relaxing colour, or have we been brainwashed by decades of travel brochures and tropical movies into finding it so?

It's the same with the holiday destination; we're attracted by what we know about it, what's entered our consciousness through media coverage and fiction. Polynesia immediately conjures up images of Bligh and Mutiny on the Bounty, along with an 18th century focus on free love and sensuous women.

Add to that Paul Gauguin's paintings and the tropical cliches like palm trees and pineapples, and you have a simple compelling picture. But how valuable is it? Westerners know a fair bit about Japan and nearly nothing about neighbouring Korea, yet presumably both of them have just as much to offer the traveller.

Pacific pacification

Either way, there's something extraordinarily relaxing about Mo'orea. It has the air of a quiet beachside town par excellence; akin to holiday locations on the Red Sea or the quieter islands of Fiji. The medium-priced hotels here have the best of both worlds - comfort and informality.

At night there's nothing much to do, no TV in the room and nothing but the stars and the quietly undulating surf to watch. To anyone living and working in a city nowadays, that's all it takes to qualify as paradise.

We combined breakfast with experiments involving French, and some clever deductive work by the patisserie proprietor ("You are Australian? Your chapeau is like Crocodile Dundee"). Yes, that's the choice you make when you consider the hot sun of the Pacific: risk sunstroke or risk constant identification as an Aussie on vacation.

The local shops are refreshingly un-mall-like, with wooden verandahs enclosing a green quadrangle. There's a bank, newsagency, Internet access and  a little supermarket selling fresh baguettes, limited vegetables, and some local fruit such as pineapple and grapefruit.

Even supermarket prices are breathtaking in French Polynesia, but it's cheaper than eating out all the time. For 20 cents you can even buy a sac de pain, a long narrow plastic bag for putting your baguette in - does your supermarket at home offer that?

The French connection

Back at the hotel we met Michael, a stocky tattooed Tahitian who will take us for a tour of Mo'orea on Wednesday. Turning our back on the obvious attractions of the sea (local aquatic activities include swimming with sharks and stingrays), we want to turn inland and see more of the interior landscape and local culture.

After setting up the tour, we chatted for a while about French Polynesia. He's dismissive of the push for independence, basically on economic grounds; Tahiti and its neighbours have become deeply reliant on imports and French spending over the years, especially while French nuclear testing was operating in the area.

I suggested the French would have to compensate the territory either way if the testing proves to have dangerous long-term consequences, as are already hinted at in scientific investigations of damage on Moruroa.

But Michael had done well out of Tahiti's French connection, living in Paris and travelling across Europe and Asia. He's the modern face of a once-remote people who are now connected to the world, like it or not. The advantages of this connectedness no doubt help maintain this region's vestiges of colonialism, decades after it became a dirty word and vanished elsewhere.

Propping up le bar

At night I sat in the bar for a while, reading the Wodehouse biography and half-hoping to strike up a conversation with someone. But it was one of those nights when there were no English speakers around.

Coco said hello when I arrived and I had a brief chat with him and two gorgeous Tahitian women exuding Parisian chic in strapless tops; but conversation would be too hard to sustain with our limited grasp of each other's languages, so I took a seat inside and ordered a Hinano beer.

Not for the first time, I felt frustrated by my lack of the local lingo; but there was something pleasingly exotic about sitting with a beer, reading about the quintessential English humorist, while listening to the gentle flow of French around me. As has been frequently noted, it really is a beautiful language to listen to.

The Unicycle Diaries is a random series of excerpts from my travel diaries. For previous instalments, click on the Unicycle Diaries Topic tag below, then scroll down.

Trouble in Paradise

No journey is perfect. Travellers go abroad knowing that, sometimes, flights will be delayed, baggage misplaced, hotel rooms disappointing and meals underwhelming.

And yet, they still travel, knowing that the occasional bungle and hardship is all part of the experience, along with the freedom and moments of sheer inspiration.

And, let's face it, those travel problems provide great fodder for travel anecdotes and even travel articles. Here are a few of my own travel glitches and awkward moments which have made good stories at a later date...

Poland, 1994: “We have here the homicide.” These aren't words you want to hear while you’re living overseas, in this case Kraków. Nor do you want to glance over the shoulder of the man who’s just spoken them, to see a pile of bloody surgical gloves and the body of your naked dead landlord in the living room. Of course, this is a moment of true horror. But as a writer, there's also part of me that's hovering, detached, thinking “What material!”.

French Polynesia, 2005: We've arrived in French Polynesia in search of its legendary tropical tranquillity, but discover that our hotel has closed for renovation - without telling us. From travellers in search of paradise, we've become lowly vagabonds in search of a room – any room – on the tropical island of Mo'orea. But it is a very beautiful place to trudge through with a backpack on.

And... the prices are a shock. Mo'orea is a major producer of pineapples, so I order a fresh pineapple juice from the bar of my eventual hotel. How much could it possibly cost? And it’d have to be cheaper than the imported stuff in a bottle, right? A few days, and a few juices later, I finally ask. It’s 700 Pacific Francs - about $9.50. Ouch.

New Zealand, 2005: Then there's our dodgy Balkan-born taxi driver in Auckland, who greets us with this line: “I am best driver in Auckland two years in row - this is honest truth”. Followed by dodgy detours, hair-raining turns, much passenger map reading, and a comical attempt to overcharge.

Chile, 2005: Walking through the night-time streets of Barrio Bellavista, a district of Chile’s capital, Santiago, my Narrelle and I are accosted by a smooth-talking man claiming to be a poet, supplementing his high university fees by selling photocopied examples of his work in Spanish and English to passers-by. We chat, I give him $5 for the poem; then the next day I encounter a completely different 'poet' selling the same poem.

Chile, 2005: We’re on the third day of a cruise through the glaciers and fiords of southern Chile, and have left the comfortable confines of the ship to ride on a small excursion boat among the ice. Without warning, the pilot sails up to an iceberg and rams into its flank. We're a bit concerned at the collision, but we watch him extract a large chunk with the aid of an ice-pick. A few minutes later we’re milling around, clinking glasses as we toast each other - with 12 year old Scotch containing 50,000 year old ice. So the minor stress was worth it.

Poland, 2006: Having left the minibus at the turn-off from the road to Białowieża, a small village near Poland’s border with Belarus, I’m trudging along a road caked with thick snow. It’s the middle of the day, but the sky is a strange muted grey and the bare spindly trees look like extras from The Blair Witch Project. And I know there are wolves in these woods. And I know the European Bison Reserve must be just a kilometre or so ahead. But my hindbrain isn’t so sure this is a good idea...

Poland, 2008: I've departed the city of Przemyśl in the country's southeast, on a bus across the snowy mountains to the town of Sanok. One of the passengers, a recently released prisoner returning home, decides I should buy him beer from one of the small towns we stop at along the way. He keeps demanding beer, and I kept saying "Dlaczego?" (Why?).

Then he casually threatens violence, but his English-speaking friend says not to worry about it, as he isn't serious. I'm not taking that chance, thanks. When the bus pulls into Sanok bus station at sunset, I zip through the terminal building, then cross a pedestrian bridge to the train station while my new best friends are still assembling their luggage.

USA, 2009: On my first visit to the USA, I kill time between flights one day in Los Angeles by walking from Hermosa Beach to Redondo Beach, trying to reset my body clock with lots of exposure to sunlight. I decide to catch a taxi back, and out of habit sit in the front passenger seat, Australian-style. I get the distinct impression from the look of surprise on the driver's face that I'm expected to sit in the back, and there's an awkward moment in the air... but he lets it slide and we have a good conversation re Australia versus California on our way to the hotel.

COMPETITION! Now it's your turn... share your most awkward or difficult travel moment, and you'll go into the draw for a copy of Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?, a book I reviewed in 2008. Just email a short description of your travel story (a single paragraph is fine) to me at tim@iwriter.com.au.

Note that by entering, you grant me the right to use your anecdote for free, perpetually and non-exclusively, in a future blog post about awkward travel experiences (but you will be credited!).

Unfortunately entry is only open to Australian residents - sorry about that. But if you'd like to send in a paragraph about your difficult travel experiences to be used in a future post anyway, please do.

That's it! The competition ends at midnight on Thursday 14 January 2010, so enter now!

The Unicycle Diaries 2: Transit of Tahiti

Taken from my travel diaries written in French Polynesia...

Travelling eastward across the Pacific and the International Dateline is like starring in your own personal version of Groundhog Day; only with the added variety of radically different scenery as each day is repeated.

We spent Saturday 29th October and the Sunday morning in Auckland, then spent Saturday evening all over again in Tahiti, and now Sunday 30th on the neighbouring island of Mo’orea.

When we finally get past this weekend to Monday 31st, it’ll be a relief. Not that you should really be watching the calendar when you’re on holiday.

Our flight arrived at the capital Papeete at an impractical hour (as many flights into Tahiti do) on Saturday night, but in the end there was enough time to walk to the waterfront and have a meal.

The Saturday night collection of food vans and fold-up tables was fun, exuding casual charm. Patrons order from a surprisingly diverse range of dishes including Tahitian fish like mahi mahi, French standards like steak frites, and displaced Chinese food like "chow men".

Because we’re only here for a few days, we hadn’t applied our minds to speaking French, but were suddenly faced with linguistic limitations. My French stems almost entirely from literary references in Agatha Christie, PG Wodehouse, Sherlock Holmes and films like Amelie, while Narrelle’s is sourced from imperfectly-remembered schoolgirl lessons.

As a result, we’ve been committing blunders like asking for a receipt (‘recipe’ in French) instead of the correct word. Fortunately the French speakers of Tahiti take a more sympathetic view of Anglos mangling their language than their compatriots in Paris. Funny to think that after visiting that city 15 years ago, the next time we’d enter French territory would be so far away from Europe.

Here’s something strange I’ve noticed: the soundtrack to every overseas experience is in English, no matter how exotic the locale. On the Papeete waterfront, we could hear ABBA drifting from a nearby cruise ship; on a ferry’s radio, a Jamaican guy was singing “I need some nookie tonight”; and as I sit typing in the hotel bar, the background music is alternating between French numbers and English covers.

Before leaving Tahiti we went out early to visit the Marche, the city markets. The building is one of those practical open-but-covered structures you see in the Pacific, a vast mostly timber shed housing numerous stalls. Locals crowd in, buying and selling handcrafts, fish, flowers and fruit, including the more interesting varieties of bananas you never see in the West.

There are some beautiful but huge wooden masks that would never fit in the luggage, and some suspiciously sexual statuettes - you could imagine them selling by the truckload to sniggering tourists mindful of the old Tahiti stereotype regarding free love.

And now we’re on the neighbouring island of Mo’orea. The catamaran ride from Tahiti only takes 30 minutes, and the two islands are visible the whole time. While both are volcanic outcrops, Moorea's eastern approach is far more dramatic, a sharp protrusion of jagged peaks covered with greenery. I felt like chanting "Kong, Kong!" as we approached, but that’s a story for another day...

Note: As this article is based on personal experience from some years ago, the author takes no responsibility for readers' reliance on the information within.