It was January. It was raining. It had been raining for weeks. Rain seeped in the sliding glass window in the bathroom, and leaked down through the plaster of the ceiling, and dripped off the sides of our umbrellas and onto us when we went outside. There had been 26 days of rain in San Francisco that month, a record. The city was as wet and nasty as a cat thrown in a pond.
Not only that, but the press of work had been heavier than usual. Those gray months seemed filled with the ringing of phones, the buzz of the fax machine, the thin anxiousness of deadlines, scurrying from one appointment to the next.
So when I had an opportunity to take a week aboard the Club Med 2, a five-masted sailing ship, plying between the waters around the islands of Tahiti, Huahine, Bora Bora and Rangiroa in French Polynesia, I decided it was time for my first cruise. When I found I could bring someone along, I decided that it was time for my friend Mary’s first cruise too.
She balked, saying how busy she was, how much work she had to do, so I read to her from the brochure: “days on board the Club Med 2 are filled with dazzling fun and general merriment.”
“That’s how I want my LIFE to be,” sighed Mary. She called her out-of-town cousins to tell them to come some other time.
When she said yes, though, I began to have doubts. Mary and I are 36 and 43, respectively, and not averse to general merriment, but a cruise? Weren’t cruises for the “overfed, nearly dead and newlywed”? My idea of a cruise is what the Minnow went on before Gilligan was marooned.
Like many in my generation, I hitchhiked around Europe in 1972, riding in freezing cabs with Greek truckdrivers, sleeping in the ditches of the Riviera and the cold kitchen floors of sympathetic French shopkeepers. I equate travel with discomfort–and discomfort is unknown aboard the Club Med 2 cruise ship, with its elaborate French meals, luxurious staterooms and the occasional foie gras buffet in the main bar.
I didn’t grow up knowing much about recreational adventures. I longed for summer camp, but there was no money for that. My parents’ idea of going on a vacation was to move. But my biggest problem is being damnably goal-oriented.
But it was Club Med, and, as would any kid deprived of summer camp, I’d loved the land villages. Surely the sea-going version would be the same–fabulous food, disco, games around the bar, fellow guests under 90. Deciding to go we packed our suitcases with books and papers to work on and flew down on a AOM French Airlines red-eye to Papeete. We arrived at five in the morning and went straight to the ship, a long, gleaming white affair with burnished teak decks, polished brass railings and seven billowing white sails backlit by the rising sun. It loomed above the low colorful roofs of downtown French Papeete like an image out of Fellini.
We spent the afternoon exploring the marketplace in Papeete–where vanilla beans, pareu cloth, plantains and a thousand other items are sold in open bins–then returned to the ship for a nap.
That night we gathered in the main bar with the other guests. Stewards had arranged flotillas of tropical drinks, each with its tiny umbrella, atop snow white tableclothes. Mary called it the “drinks showroom.”
After a stop by the drinks showroom, we went to one of two restaurants for five-course French dinners featuring dishes such as rib lamb with fresh thyme (noisette d’agneau au thym frais) and duck parmenter with celery puree. After dinner you could stroll on the deck, watch the evening show in the bar, visit the disco or the casino.
The islands were beautiful. I had not been here since 1985, when I came with a boyfriend who broke up with me on three separate islands. This time Mary and I, with other guests from the ship, explored the islands in “trucks,” the colorful open-air bus that serves for island transportation. We visited vanilla plantations and shrines, and crowded into the local Chinese groceries, paying outrageous prices for postcards and guidebooks. (Everything in Tahiti is imported.)
Admittedly, it wasn’t a lot like the Club Med land-based resorts I knew. The dinners were much fancier and, frankly, not as good as in the clubs on land, and the atmosphere was much stuffier, from the formal white-jacketed waiters to the sedate waltzes they played after dinner.
There wasn’t much to do in Polynesia, but then heaven, as David Byrne remarked, is a place where nothing ever happens.
I was reminded of this when we arrived at Bora Bora, an achingly beautiful island that rises right out of the brilliant blues of the sea like the velvety fin of a shark. The mayor at the little stucco city hall on Bora Bora (the same man I later spotted sweeping out the reception room) welcomed us with a long speech, while we stood there drinking Mai Tais and checking the time, worried about getting to see the island before the ship left.
Lori, a 26-year-old New Yorker, dropped her gold watch through the floor boards of the tiny city hall into the water below. As she peered through the crack, a crab grabbed it and began scuttling backward with it, and it occurred to me that even the marine life in Polynesia wants to remind us northeners we are too preoccupied with time.
For the Polynesians, life is a cruise. “We live day by day,” Maeve Salmon of the Tahitian Tourist Board told Mary and me one day when she stood with the dancers and others waiting to greet the ship. “The most important word we have is `Aitapea.’ “It means just live for today.”
She said few Tahitians have bank accounts. When they run out of money before the end of the month, they fish or pick coconuts.
We were reminded of Aitapea everytime we put in at a new island, and fresh leis of frangipani blossoms and bougainvillea were hung around our sweaty northern necks. Within an hour, these fragrant colliers de fleur would begin turning brown, but that has not prevented the Tahitiains from making them for generations.
Four or five days into the cruise, by which time we had seen Tahiti, Huahine, Bora Bora and were exploring the village of Tiputa on the remote island of Rangiroa, Mary and I felt we had learned a little something about Aitapea. I could dimly remember having some sort of job back in the states, but I couldn’t remember what it was, really. I had given not one thought to my dog, and barely remembered I had two teenage children.
So it was not life aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2, sailing majestically through green Atlantic waters, and we were not Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, leaning against the swirling mists in our trenchcoats. So not every hour of the day was filled with “general merriment.”
As I reminded Mary over our morning brioche and papaya on the top deck, while a smiling steward became practically suicidal when we absentmindedly poured our own coffee, it didn’t suck.
DETAILS ON TAHITI
Club Med 2 homeports in Papeete and departs Saturdays for 3-, 4- and 7-night cruises in French Polynesia . The 3- and 4-night itinerary includes Moorea, Huahine and Bora Bora. Passengers continue to Rangiroa for the 7-night trips.
Rates (per person, double occupancy) are $810-$1,005 for the 3-night cruise; $1,080-$1,340 for 4 nights and $1,890-$2,345 for 7 nights. Air fare is extra.
The sister ship, Club Med 1, will return from the Mediterranean for her Caribbean season from Nov. 11 until April 13. The 7-night cruises throughout the West Indies islands range from $1,890 to $2,165. Air fare is extra.
Both ships measure 617 feet in length and carry a maximum of 376 passengers.
For more information, contact a travel agent or Club Med, 800-CLUB-MED.
