Taiohae, a small village located on Nuku Hiva, the largest island in the Marquises (a.k.a. Marquesas) islands, and the archipelago's capital, was the cruise ship's last port of call.
Like many other tourists onboard the ship, the exotic locales of French Polynesia drew me like a magnet. We had our far more famous predecessors.
There was Paul Gauguin, the post-impressionist French painter. He drew inspiration for his art while living in Martinique, a French Caribbean island. Then he moved to Tahiti and finally the Marquises islands, where he lived until he died.
There was the Belgian singer, Jacques Brel. He also found inspiration in the Marquises. He wrote the majority of the songs of his last album, aptly entitled 'Les Marquises', where he spent the last years of his life. Although he died in France, he was buried on Hiva Oa island, a few yards away from the grave of Paul Gauguin.
The islands of French Polynesia seem like paradise to foreigners. Bora Bora, Raiatea, Mo'orea, Ringirao all have unique and enchanting attributes.
Tahiti was not so impressive. Its capital, Papeete, has lost its exotic soul and natural beauty to the hustle and bustle of an over-commercialized modern city.
In comparison to Tahiti, the Marquises stood at the other pole. Aided by their isolation even from the other parts of French Polynesia, sparsely populated, and resisting commercialization, these islands, scattered like emeralds across a turquoise sea, are the last bastions of natural Polynesia.
But there was more to these lush tropical islands than their natural beauty. There was also the beauty of its siren.
I reminisce.
I heard her call when the ship anchored offshore, her song accompanied by the beat of Marquesan drums.
I followed that sound. I boarded a tender that took me to the island pier. Several Marquesan men were beating their large native drums while locals offered tours of the island or made cars available for rent.
I heard her. Then I saw her, the siren, singing a melodic Polynesian song on a hot tropical day. She stood on one of the pier's pylons. Her small feet clung onto its rocky hardness. Her voice ululated in a language we tourists could not understood, and probably never would.
I stopped and I stared.
She did not notice me. I was just another tourist, another foreigner from some place she could only dream about visiting, a place with cold winters and vast expanses of land, a place with lakes that that had islands bigger than Tahiti, the biggest island in French Polynesia a place that was exotic to her as hers was to me.
I looked at her closely, enchanted by her beauty.
She was petite and thin. She was the absolute antithesis of the Polynesian concept of beauty before the Europeans came. In old pre-European Polynesia, a beautiful woman was huge, fleshy, big-breasted, with loads of love handles. No waterbeds were needed when a man had a woman like that had an ocean of flesh.
No, this little cutie, this little sweetie was downright ugly by earlier Polynesian standards.
