A Toast (and Another) to Beating the High Cost of Tahiti : To Dine and Drink for Nearly Nothing, Author Uses Package Plans and Visits ‘Juice Factories’

French Polynesia may be the land of $8 mai tais and $50 mahi mahi dinners, but if you learn five key phrases you can eat huge gourmet meals for less than back-home prices. And you can drink for nothing.

The phrases: Tahitian buffet. Distillery tour. Motu picnic. Pineapple factory. Demi-pension.

Demi-pension is a magic word in Tahiti and her neighbor islands. In every major hotel, you’ll see signs saying the French equivalent of “Polynesian Buffet $55. No charge to guests on demi-pension.” This is simply French for Modified American Plan.

“Tahiti is the only place in the world where I recommend that you take the meal plan,” says Linda Brahinsky of New Age Travel in Sherman Oaks. “You cut your food costs in half, and the best restaurants in the islands are in the hotels anyway.”

(Tahiti travel packages, including breakfast, supper and possibly boat excursions and a car for eight hours, run $40-$50 extra a day.)

I’ve recently returned from 11 days in Tahiti, Bora Bora and Moorea. My wife and I bought a package with a meal plan for the first time in 20 years of foreign travel together. Using the Tahitian demi-pension meal plan, we spent less than $200 beyond our original $2,485 per-person package cost. How well did we eat? My wife gained a pound every three days.

We stayed at the Maeva Beach in Tahiti, the Marara in Bora Bora and the Ia Ora in Moorea, and among the dishes we ate on the plan were: giant prawns in walnut sauce, veal baked with fresh vanilla and peppers, poisson cru a la Tahitienne marinated in coconut milk and lime juice, lobster in sea urchin butter, mahi mahi in ginger sauce, veal Wellington, tournedos Rossini, grilled freshly-caught bonito, lamb kebabs with tabboulleh , filet of dorado Veronique, chicken Florentine and paper-wrapped paru fish. We had every imaginable kind of curry and pasta, fresh tropical fruits with every meal, and the finest French pastry for dessert. Had we wanted unadorned broiled fish and fresh vegetables, they were always there.

Under the usual Tahitian demi-pension meal plan, all your breakfasts and half your suppers are served buffet-style in the hotel. Sold separately, the typical breakfast buffets at luxury hotels such as those in the Sofitel chain are about $15, and the suppers run from $45 to $60, depending on the theme. For example, the customary “Tahitian night” feast, or tamaaraa , is the most expensive, consisting of 60 or 70 beautifully displayed dishes, festooned with flowers. While a suckling pig baked in an earthen oven is the centerpiece on Tahitian night, a stunning spread of seafood and French dishes takes up table after table.

Lunch is a delicious dilemma. In an island chain where cheeseburgers start at $11, lunch can quickly wipe you out. It is not included in most meal plans. After a typical breakfast of a mushroom omelet, potato pancakes, yogurt, papaya, grapefruit, flaky chocolate butter rolls, passion fruit juice and coconut slices, such as we had at the Ia Ora on Moorea and the Marara on Bora Bora, you may not need much of a lunch. So you follow the Tahitian Plan: Grab a few brioches and croissants with containers of apricot jam on your way out of the breakfast buffet. Americans sneak this into their purses or snorkel bags, but French visitors proudly carry it out on plates. The hostess smiles and wishes them a good day. This is just one of the creative ways of closing the lunch gap.

The most pleasant free lunch I had in French Polynesia this July was included in Moorea at no extra charge in our Islands in the Sun package, put together by the French ACCOR firm that owns the Sofitel hotel chain. The brochure called it a “lagoon excursion.” Our twentyish Tahitian hostess, Ivana, called it a “motu picnic.” A motu is a small island off the coast of a larger island.

We set sail from the water sports pier at Temae on a beautiful Sunday morning, with the sun streaming down on a coral-ringed turquoise lagoon. As we watched schools of dolphin fish swimming at the bottom of the clear water, Ivana passed out wine and soft drinks. The wine was Carlo Rossi, pink and in a jug, but we could have all we wanted. Ivana took off her bathing suit top. Some of us were too busy reading her derriere tattoo to notice.

When we reached deep water, we jumped overboard to swim in the 80-degree lagoon. On one side, jagged mountains rose with their heads in puffy white clouds. On the other, our palm-fringed motu awaited us.

When we landed, our chef dug in the anchor, and we wine-soaked wretches went snorkeling and shelling. Ivana got our picnic going. She washed chunks of bonito in sea water and handed them to the chef. He chopped them up with carrots, onions and coconut milk, squeezed limes over the preparation and let it all marinate for a few minutes. Ivana said this “cooked” the fish, since it was raw.

Ivana slapped down loaves of French bread on a naked picnic table and poured more Carlo Rossi for everyone. Our captain opened bottles of Hinano beer with a spoon. Although Capt. William Bligh of the HMS Bounty introduced the pineapple to Tahiti in 1789, no one has introduced the bottle opener.

Ivana passed out fresh pineapple slices and grapefruit wedges, and large portions of poisson cru . We tore up the loaves of French bread and chowed down. It was all quite unsanitary, but we were having too much fun to care.

As we lurched to the beach to lie down and sleep it off, my wife took a plastic bottle out of our snorkel bag and slathered the contents over her face and shoulders. She asked me to rub some on her back.

“OK, honey,” I said, “but this is shampoo.”

For another kind of happy hour, this one with no packages or other strings attached, ride your bike to Distillerie Moorea, the only pineapple juice factory in the South Pacific. It exports its juice to Europe. Six miles west of Moorea’s airport, look for the sign on the coast road just beyond Cook’s Bay. The overwhelming fragrance will tell you when you’re close.

But we haven’t come all this way for free pineapple, or free juice, as wonderful as it is. We’ve come for the limitless samples of great fruit liqueurs. In the midst of lush greenery, shadowed by soaring mountains, we walk past red and violet flowers to an outdoor tasting hut. Now bear in mind, this is not the Napa Valley or even the Ethel M chocolate factory in Las Vegas. There is absolutely no pressure to buy. In fact, it’s difficult to do so. If you’re using a credit card, as most foreigners do, you’ll have to wander around the factory to find an assistant manager.

When we reached the tasting hut, a beaming young multilingual hostess poured my wife and me two glasses of knockout coconut liqueur. We then attempted to buy a bottle, for $22. Uh-uh. The hostess would not let us. We were unclear on the concept. The hostess forced us to taste ginger, passion fruit and pineapple liqueurs as well as orange and pineapple brandies. Then she took us on the factory tour--all but the distillery, the door to which was marked tabu , a Tahitian word. Only after the tour were we permitted to buy our coconut liqueur.

Possibly a wilder free-drink visit awaits you on the island of Tahiti. The Ava Tea tropical fruit liqueur distillery is not a tourist landmark like the pineapple factory. Twelve miles south of Papeete, on the west coast Tahiti Nui highway, it’s on the road back to the hotel district from one of Tahiti’s main tourist attractions, the Gauguin Museum. It’s not in the guidebooks, it’s nothing to look at, it hasn’t been around for long, and it’s definitely worth a detour.

As you enter Ava Tea, you turn right and a bartender greets you with a not-too-steady gaze. When my wife and I arrived late one afternoon during our second day in Papeete after a visit to the museum, the barman told us to help ourselves. Four of his friends helped him to find a leaning spot.

We poured ourselves these liqueurs, in abundance: ginger, passion fruit, pineapple, banana, coconut, coconut/vanilla and litchi.

Remaining for us to sample at our next happy hour were guava, orange, mango and grapefruit liqueurs. Ava Tea maintains a truly laid-back tasting operation. To actually buy any liqueur, you have to walk down the hall to a sales counter.

So how do they make a living at Ava Tea? They sell black pearl jewelry, lots of it, American Express cheerfully accepted. Like the girls in the bar at closing time, the pearls look a lot prettier after you’ve had a few belts.

My wife and I know nothing about jewelry (we squander all our money on pleasure), but we overheard the one sober lady in the crowd say, “The pearls aren’t the best I’ve seen, but the designs are original and the prices are excellent.”

As we left Ava Tea, a huge man carrying a beer bottle welcomed us to his country. “I am part French,” he said, “part Tahitian, and 90% Hinano.”

GUIDEBOOK

Budget South Pacific

Packages offering meal plans: Islands in the Sun, an Orange County firm created by Califor- nian Ted Cook and under French control, (800) 854-3413; Tahiti Nui, the largest Tahiti-based travel packager, (800) 359-4359; Tahiti Vacations, owned by Air Tahiti, (800) 553-3477.

Motu picnics: Sofitel Ia Ora, Moorea. In Moorea, dial 52-86-72. Ask for Ivana.

Sofitel Marara, Bora Bora. In Bora Bora, dial 67-70-46. Ask for Veronique.

Distillery tours: Moorea Distillerie, Moorea. Open 8 a.m.-4 p.m., weekdays only. In Moorea, call 56-11-33.

Ava Tea, Tahiti. Coast road kilometer marker 26.8, Paea district. Flexible hours. In Tahiti, call 53-32-43.