Added: 07/28/2005 |
Do you want to know how to play the guitar without spilling your daiquiri.You are on a tiny, deserted coral island - or motu - in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, watching, bewitched, as the FW Murnau film, shot entirely in Bora Bora some 10 miles to the east, is projected on to a piece of sailcloth tied between two coconut trees. The evening is just one of the gems laid on by Bora Bora Cruises, whose yacht, the Tu Moana, your floating home for the week, lies twinkling at anchor some half a mile offshore.
If the sensual experience of watching Tabu in situ somewhat blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, it is only the continuation of a theme. After a 160-mile, 30-minute flight from Tahiti to Bora Bora the plane began to descend, the island hives into view: a heart-stopping, pupil-dilating moment; a perfect Morse-code ring of motes, mop-topped with palms, separating the cobalt of the ocean from the variegated aquamarines and baby blues of the lagoon beyond.
And all this is at the lagoon's heart, a tombstone of a volcano, its pastry-cutter peak snagging a wisp of cloud, at the volcano's base, the main island, just five miles long and two miles wide, carpeted with African tulips and coconut groves. Fantasy island in all its glory.
Heralded by ukulele players and garlanded at the traditional welcome with shells and tiare, a delicate gardenia that is French Polynesia's national flower you are met by the
cruise director, in a Bora Bora Cruises T-shirt. After a melon kebab and a glass of fizz, he ushers you into a speedboat and whisks you across the lagoon, accompanied by hundreds of flying fish, to the Tu Moana.
Now, having established the Elysian credentials of Bora Bora, you get a 70-metre, £10 million, 37-cabin gin palace, complete with two football-team sized Jacuzzis, a library, a fully equipped gym, a bar, a restaurant.
Bora Bora Cruises was founded in the late 1990s by Mehiti Degage, a Tahitian businesswoman. Because of the narrowness of the gaps in the coral rings that access the lagoons, and the shallowness of the lagoons themselves, large ships cannot cruise these waters. So Degage commissioned two shallow-keel luxury yachts, had them fitted out to the standards of the finest boutique hotels, and adorned the decks, guest spaces and corridors with exquisite original Polynesian art and furniture from top Italian design houses. In the cabins, there are bathrooms by Philippe Starck, toiletries perfumed with tiare, bed throws by Kenzo and flat-screen plasma televisions and DVD players. In the galley is a world-class chef, creating superb French haute cuisine fused with traditional Polynesian dishes, while the ultra-contemporary dining room is staffed by permanently sunny French waiters, recruited from V Ships, the Monaco company that supplies personnel to the planet's most upmarket hotels.
Next morning, the tourists are picked up off the yacht's stern platform by local fisherman Mata in his pirogue to feed the stingrays. With his mother-of-pearl necklace, grass skirt and laurel wreath of banana leaves, Mata looks straight out of Central Casting (South Pacific branch) as he steered the boat with his toes and regaled us on the ukulele. At the feeding site, he jumps in, armed only with a bucket of dead fish, and beckons to join him. Wearing masks and snorkels, they look into the blue, attended by emperor angelfish and butterfly fish, and waited. First, one faint flickering shadow, then another, then all around dozens of enormous stingrays, perhaps five feet across, flapping, gliding, nudging against us, their skin the pallor and texture of forest mushrooms, swishing their tails coquettishly like contented cats.
Instead of taking back to the mother ship, Mata drops you off on another deserted motu. Well, deserted apart from a band of Polynesian ukulele players and the entire crew of the Tu Moana, who had spent the morning transforming it into an alfresco dining room.
There you can drink cocktails and local Hinanu beer and feasted on camargue fish fresh from the lagoon, pumpkin marinated in the milk of coconuts plucked from the motu's trees and breadfruit and taro root, baked slowly in an ahimoa, a traditional Polynesian cooking pit dug into the ground. On the tables, centrepieces of moss and driftwood and banana leaves, the chairs like mini-thrones, each adorned with a giant palm frond.
The giant banyan trees that stand sentinel have the skulls of ancient ancestors buried in the roots, and how it was from here, during the reign of King Hiro, that Polynesians departed in dug-out canoes the size of bathtubs to sail the 4,000 miles to New Zealand. And no Jacuzzi. Imagine!
For the hedonist, the Tu Moana can be treated simply as a giant floating fridge, the perfect place to lie back on your designer teak steamer, drenched in tropical sun, daiquiri in one hand, salmon roulade in the other, and watch in a soporific stupor as paradise drifts by. But there are plenty of excursions for the culturally and actively inclined, too. At the island of Ra'iatea, you are taken ashore to visit the Marae Taputapuatea, French Polynesia's most sacred temple, dedicated to Oro, the god of war, and once the site of human sacrifices.
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