Back to Bora-Bora

Wow. It’s not yet 9 on a sparkling Friday morning, and two new tourists have just landed at Bora-Bora. They are tired, and perhaps they are hallucinating.

Having flown eight hours through the night to Tahiti, then 45 minutes from Tahiti to this pebble of an outlying island, the American tourists step from a small plane to the runway, and from the runway to the tiny terminal. They spot their luggage (BOB, says the airport acronym on the tags), and from the scuffed floors of the waiting area, they behold possibly the most seductive vista available from any airport waiting room on Earth: those green island peaks, rising ragged and abruptly from the tranquil blue lagoon. Around the peaks, above the palm groves, nestle pink-tinged clouds. It just doesn’t look real.

These tourists have come from Southern California, where every palm tree is a sort of lie and the cultivation of false paradises is a common profession. Accordingly, they have armed themselves with tools of skepticism. To inform their explorations, they have guidebooks that warn of galloping commercialism, irresponsible hoteliers and proliferating litter. And next to the guidebooks, for leisurely perusal under the shade of a parasol, they have “Tales of the South Pacific,” the collection of island musings and war stories, half a century old this year, that put Polynesia on the map for millions of Americans.

Now the tourists are whisked across the water toward the green peaks. This is the only way to reach Bora-Bora proper from its airport, which sits across a reef-encircled lagoon on a satellite island, or motu. As the 40-foot motorboat proceeds, they glimpse fleeting details along the shore: a congregation of pilings that will hold the latest batch of lavish over-water bungalows, the white plume of a backyard trash fire, the small fishing boats tied up near a beach. Bora-Bora has a population of fewer than 7,000 on 14 square miles. Its single main road traces a 20-mile circle around the island’s perimeter.

At the front desk of their hotel, the tourists hand over a credit card and wander through the restaurant to a view table under a thatched roof. Here they gaze sleepily upon the greenery, sand, a few idle outrigger canoes, the waters of the lagoon and, beyond them, a sudden rainbow. Its arc is marked with the most luminous purple band they’ve ever seen. Any second, it seems, the score to this picture will swell and a hundred syrupy voices will chime in with three syllables: “Bali-Ha’i . . . . “

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Soon after Japan’s bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy began staking out positions in the South Pacific, sending thousands of unlikely persons bearing implausible missions to scores of unlikely little islands. One of those persons, a reservist assigned to serve as a naval historian specializing in aircraft, was an East Coast academic with itchy feet, name of James A. Michener.

Michener served in the South Pacific from 1942 to 1946. He might not have written a book at all, the author has said, if it weren’t for a routine inter-island flight that went wrong and led to a near-fatal landing at the Allies’ Tontouta air base in the New Hebrides. The scare led Michener to confront his untested ambition to write fiction.

Drawing on all he had seen and heard in visits to 49 islands, in spare hours Michener started typing by lantern light in a tent on Espiritu Santo, the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) island where he was based. Eventually he had 18 stories about Americans in Polynesia. Some focused on the lives of bored and scared Navy men and women. Some examined the traditional life that their arrival disrupted. Some were straight accounts of battles against the Japanese.

“I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific,” the manuscript began. “The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands.”

As soon as Michener’s “Tales of the South Pacific” was published in 1947, it slipped as smoothly and quickly into American popular culture as a swimmer into a warm lagoon. In 1948, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1949, composers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II adapted it into a musical and sent it to Broadway. Early in the show’s five-year run, Michener followed his first book with “Return to Paradise,” a collection of essays and short stories that elaborated on his affection for the islands. One passage starts this way:

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On the horizon there was a speck that became a tall, blunt mountain with cliffs dropping sheer into the sea. About the base of the mountain, narrow fingers of land shot off, forming magnificent bays, while about the whole was thrown a coral ring of absolute perfection, dotted with small motus on which palms grew. The lagoon thus subtended was a crystal blue, the beaches were a dazzling white, and ever on the outer reef the spray leaped mountainously in the air. That was Bora Bora from aloft. When you stepped upon it the dream expanded.

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In the American imagination, a new Polynesia was launched. Soon rattan was turning up in fashionable Wisconsin rumpus rooms, and Hawaiian shirts (from another newly popular corner of Polynesia that would soon get its own Michener treatment) in California closets. Luaus were staged in suburban backyards. Mai tais were mixed, ukuleles strummed, hula lessons undertaken. Polynesia was big. And the most beautiful island in all Polynesia, Michener said then and still maintains, is Bora-Bora.

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The trade winds have just nudged a cloud aside, and the sun is spilling garishly into Room 128 at the Hotel Bora Bora. A red hibiscus blossom, left by the maid on the four-poster, mosquito-netted bed, fully blazes in the late afternoon sun.

Just outside the French doors, circling around stilts that hold this wooden room above the waters of the lagoon, several hundred fish of several thousand colors await crumbs from a baguette that lies on the deck chair.

The American couple--that is, my wife and myself--are in repose. In the last 72 hours, we have encountered sharks, horses and far more flowers and fishes than we could ever name. Now we are finally doing what many tourists do exclusively in Bora-Bora: conducting a lazy, distracted conversation, and just . . . sort of . . . soaking . . . it in. We wander from the question of what we might do tonight to what we might do tomorrow, then double back to the recollection of 3-year-old Ned, who blew us kisses when we’d finished our pizza and started to pedal our bikes away from his parents’ restaurant, the Blue Lagoon. We resolve to eat early; we end up eating late.

Where, exactly, have we been? Eating. Biking. Snorkeling. Sipping fresh pineapple juice. Loitering on the pier of Vaitape, Bora-Bora’s main town, as local men moored their roughly painted boats and dragged their catches to the scales in the annual fishing competition. Chatting with the Chinese man who, no fool, had set up his candy store across the street from an elementary school. Strolling down the two-lane road and nodding to the other couples (mostly French) booked into island hotels.

In these wanderings, a handful of images recurred: children on bikes and canoes; hats woven of palm fronds; roofs thatched of pandanus plants; half-wild coconut groves; meandering roosters; and, at every turn, the sea in a new hue.

To eat, there were plenty of crepes and pizzas. Our first meal on Bora-Bora, delivered with a bright yellow flower garnish, was banana crepes. Later came pizzas: pizza with pineapple, of course. Pizza with fresh tuna (not bad). Pizza with multiple cheeses (the French are in charge, after all). And always afterward, there was the soul-gladdening likelihood of vanilla ice cream. They grow the vanilla on these islands. To transplant an old line from Mark Twain, the difference between French Polynesian vanilla and American vanilla is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

For a sociable night out, we went to Bloody Mary’s, a big fish house and bar with a sand floor. All the Americans go there, pausing on the way in to read the strange list of celebrity guests inscribed on wooden signs at the entrance. Present: Ringo Starr. Absent: James Michener. For a quiet, romantic night out we went to the Bamboo House, just a few doors down the street from Bloody Mary’s.

Between meals, we snacked on baguettes, which sell for 40 cents each. (A loaf of Wonder Bread fetches $3.50. A mai tai in a cafe with an ocean view, $6-$7. A gallon of gasoline, about $4. And if you dare break bread in a hotel dining room, as I did for lunch, you may well pay $13.50 for a Bora-Bora Burger.)

One day I went off seeking sharks and rays with a shirtless boatman named Dino. Once he had steered our outrigger to a familiar feeding spot, Dino shooed half a dozen of us tourists into the water.

While we waited, our hands on a guide rope, Dino’s partner, Gaston, stepped about 15 feet away in the shallow lagoon and started tossing chunks of bait into the water. First came small fish, then larger ones, then seven sharks, each about four feet long. Never drawing closer than about six feet off, we watched them vie for the meat, then drift away again. (Unlike their larger relatives--some of which are lured by bolder feeding expeditions in the deep water outside Bora-Bora’s protective reef--the small, gray lagoon sharks pose little or no threat to humans.)

At the next stop, we were surrounded by darting and swooping manta rays, more than a dozen. They brushed against us, took bait from our hands and accepted stroking. The guide explained that they’re harmless, as long as you don’t step on their tails. (Some manta rays have stingers, some don’t.) I dove down a few feet and got the otherworldly sensation of having one 4-foot-long ray gliding beneath me, another above, and a third coming straight for me, then veering aside.

Many native islanders, including Dino and Gaston, wear brightly colored cloth wraps known as pareos, which also rank as the leading tourist souvenir. And, like the tourists, the islanders spend a lot of time hanging out at the beach. Within a few hours, however, we had deduced a sure-fire method to distinguish beach-going island women from their French and German counterparts: The island women were the ones we never saw topless.

We also learned that the name Bora-Bora apparently grew out of the Polynesian term pora pora, or first-born. (This took on some uncomfortable irony when, by several accounts, the 4,000-plus American troops stationed here during the war left behind more than 100 Polynesian-American babies.) And we saw, at quite close quarters, how dramatically the business of housing strangers on Bora-Bora has changed since the Quonset huts of 55 years ago.

These days, the island economy is dominated by about half a dozen exclusive hotels that routinely charge $400 and more per night for a bungalow over the water. The priciest and most remote of these is the 4-year-old Bora Bora Lagoon Resort (brochure rates begin around $550), which sits on its own motu, 50 of its 80 units suspended over the lagoon’s waters.

But the first choice of the richest Americans has long been the Hotel Bora Bora, which claimed the best spot on the island, at Matira Point, when it became the first fancy hotel to open here, 35 years ago. Because it sits on a point, the hotel can place most of its rooms within a few steps of the water and arrange its dining room so that just about every table has an ocean view. The beach is private and quiet, the snorkels, masks and fins complimentary to guests. Managed by the elite international hotel chain AmanResorts, the Hotel Bora Bora’s 55 rooms each fetch $395 and up, and the room many say is the hotel’s best, which sits over deep water at the quiet end of a row of bungalows, goes for $700. It gets steady business from honeymooners.

That would be room number 128, in which we now repose. Determined to answer the burning question of whether a room over water could possibly be worth $305 more than one of the nearby garden bungalows--or $682 more than one of the campsites down the street--we have booked it for a single night.

The lapping lagoon water, the splashing fish, the private deck, the floors, walls and ceiling of rich, smooth imported wood, the fruit-scented soap in the roomy bathroom, the free floppy slippers, the red hibiscus . . . . It beats camping. In fact, of the roughly 200 hotel rooms I’ve slept in over the past five years, it is the most pleasant. Worth $700? Lemme get back to you on that.

My wife, Mary Frances, takes up the baguette and dedicates herself to feeding fish and contriving reasons to repeat out loud the name of her favorite newfound fish, the Moorish idol. It features broad vertical strips of yellow and black and a long, sweeping, pointed dorsal fin that makes me think of a 1959 Cadillac.

I sip from a cool drink and--like a few thousand other Americans around the world at any given moment, probably--fold open my Michener book.

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By the time Michener reached Polynesia in 1942, two centuries of explorers, exporters, missionaries, writers and artists had had their way with the islands already. Europeans had made their first sustained contact with Polynesia in the 18th century, and in 1880, France had formally established colonial control over the island groups still known as French Polynesia. Before Michener set eyes on them, the islands and their inhabitants had inspired Herman Melville, Paul Gauguin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London and W. Somerset Maugham, among others.

Like those before him, Michener was struck forcefully by the landscape and island culture. Unlike them, he had a front-row seat for the collision between that culture and the best and worst of Middle America.

The stories Michener wrote, drawing on this material, are as miniature and personal as most of his three dozen later books are sprawling and research-driven. But like the later books, the South Pacific stories decry racial prejudice and suggest a commitment to cultural curiosity--sentiments that aren’t surprising given Michener’s private history.

Born in 1907 in New York, Michener was given up by parents whose identities he never learned. He took his last name from foster parents Edwin and Mabel Michener, a farmer and laundress, both Quakers, in rural Pennsylvania. He spent much of his childhood in the Bucks County poorhouse. Yet by 34, he had won an athletic scholarship to Swarthmore College, graduated with straight As, hitchhiked through more than 40 states, toured Europe on a fellowship, undertaken graduate studies in Scotland and Colorado, won an associate professorship of history at Colorado State College of Education and served a term as visiting professor at Harvard.

He loved literature and he loved the social sciences, but couldn’t find a way to reconcile the two. Then the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, and he couldn’t reconcile his pacifism with his sense of patriotism, either. So the professor enlisted.

Eventually, he came up with the characters in “South Pacific,” who wrestle with the question of how to make peace with an alien culture in an apparent paradise. There’s Nellie Forbush, the Arkansas-bred nurse who confronts her own racism and Puritanism in coming to terms with her beloved French planter and his part-Polynesian children from previous alliances; Luther Billis, a blue-collar enlisted man who steeps himself in island customs; Joe Cable, a Marine smitten with a beautiful young island girl (but reluctant to marry her); and Bloody Mary, the girl’s ugly and shrewd but good-hearted mother, who sees a gold mine in doing business with sailors.

If you read enough of “Tales of the South Pacific,” and enough about it, you realize that despite all the superlatives later heaped on Bora-Bora by Michener and others, it was not the model for the magical island of Bali-Ha’i. In the book, the Broadway musical “South Pacific” and the 1958 movie with Mitzi Gaynor, Bali-Ha’i is the mist-shrouded neighbor island to a U.S. base, a mysterious paradise where the sailors have most of their encounters with the islanders. Some guidebooks say that Michener had Bora-Bora in mind when he described Bali-Ha’i; other sources say he wrote “Tales of the South Pacific” while stationed on Bora-Bora. Not so.

Michener, now 90 and living in Austin, Texas, says he copied down the words Bali-Ha’i from a sign in a little village on an island off Espiritu Santo. That island, which Michener assistant John Kings says was then known as Aoba, was mist-shrouded and only intermittently visible from Espiritu Santo--providing part of the inspiration for the imagined island Bali-Ha’i. Further inspiration, Michener says, came from about a dozen other islands. It was after he had completed the “South Pacific” manuscript, Michener says, that he was stationed on Bora-Bora and decided that its beauty outshone the region’s scores of other islands.

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After all these years and all this attention, it’s remarkable that Bora-Bora isn’t more like Waikiki. Impeded by development-resistant property laws, builders have managed to complete seven major hotels so far, none more than three stories high. All have incorporated local style and, often, local materials into their designs. One, a Club Med, has 150 rooms; none of the rest has more than 80.

The roadside is dotted here and there with smaller lodgings like the Hotel Matira or Vairupe Villas that ask $100-$200 for a bungalow, some with kitchen facilities, often just a few steps from the water’s edge. There are also a handful of rustic operations like the Village Pauline, the $18-a-person campsite, with communal bathrooms and kitchen facilities, just down the road from the Hotel Bora Bora.

But how long can this last? On the way back from our snorkeling session with the sting rays and sharks, as Dino steered the motorized canoe toward our end of the island, he nodded toward a motu construction site. A Meridien hotel. Due to open in ’98.

“We already have seven hotels,” said Dino, scowling. “And they’re never full. Too many new hotels.”

Though Bora-Bora started receiving regular commercial flights in the early 1960s (on the big airfield left behind by U.S. troops), the high cost of air fare and the exclusionary policies of French officials kept American traffic to a minimum. For three decades, those officials were more interested in military work than in courting mass tourism.

Beginning in the early 1960s, the French government sponsored nuclear testing above and beneath the waters of French Polynesia, persisting despite international scorn and, in 1995, a startling outbreak of rioting on Tahiti. In 1996 the testing ended, which quieted protests but did away with thousands of well-paying government jobs and put French Polynesia’s economy on the rocks. Now everyone’s looking to tourism, either with high hopes or trepidation.

As Dino suggested, the hotels of Bora-Bora are far from full. Last year’s occupancy rate was roughly 55%--about what the hotels of downtown Los Angeles managed in the year after the 1992 riots. Yet at least two new hotels are going up, and regional officials aim to boost tourism to French Polynesia from the 165,000 travelers yearly to 300,000 in 2003. To aid in that cause, French and Polynesian leaders in the last year have invited in a bevy of new companies, including Pleasant Holidays, Outrigger Hotels and Runaway Tours, all of which helped build the Hawaiian islands into the mass tourism mecca they are today.

If the islands get those kinds of numbers, few visitors can count on afternoons like the one Mary Frances lucked into the day I was communing with the sharks and rays. Having signed up for a horseback ride, she met a motorized outrigger canoe at an appointed spot, then zipped across the blue lagoon. She was dropped on a largely empty motu, where a retired New Zealand racehorse was waiting. Mary Frances was the only customer.

She and her guide had a leisurely lope and chat along the beach. They walked the horses through the shallow water. They cantered on a crunchy coral beach. Mary Frances marveled at the responsiveness of the horse. Later, she extracted a little history from the guide. His name was Olivier; he had come to these islands from France years before and now he possessed a business address that would break an armchair traveler’s heart: Olivier Ringeard, proprietor, Reva Reva Ranch, Bora-Bora.

Near the end of the ride, Olivier took Mary Frances’ picture. Through a trick of the light, the animal seemed to be walking on water. Mary Frances, astride the beast, grinned like one who had been blessed. And over her shoulder, the small, tall island of Bora-Bora loomed in full verdure and improbability.

It’s impossible to tell exactly how the new campaign to boost tourism will work out, of course, but my imaginings of the island’s future lead me back to two moments. One is a scene from the film version of Michener’s “Tales of the South Pacific,” in which the shrewd Navy SeaBee Luther Billis (played by Ray Walston) goes into business weaving grass skirts for sale to Bloody Mary, who in turn sells them to American servicemen desperate for genuine Polynesian souvenirs to send back home.

The other moment came up one afternoon as I snooped around the Sofitel Marara Hotel, where rooms go for $290-$500 nightly. Heading down a walkway toward the over-water bungalows, I found myself face to face with a bellman who seemed to serve as a walking illustration of Bora-Bora the concept, and Bora-Bora the reality. He sported detailed traditional tattoos on his biceps and bare pectorals, a bright yellow pareo below. And on his hip, tucked into his pareo, he wore a beeper.

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Guidebook: Bora-Bora Basics

Telephone numbers and prices: French Polynesia’s country code is 689. Local numbers are six digits, and Bora-Bora has no city or island code. All prices are approximate and computed at a rate of 100 CFPs (French Polynesian francs) to the dollar. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night and generally exclude 8% lodging tax. (Package rates may be lower.) Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only. Tipping is not customary.

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Getting there: There are no direct flights from Los Angeles to Bora-Bora. You must fly to Papeete, Tahiti, and take a short flight on the local airline, Air Tahiti, to Bora-Bora. Air France, AOM French Airlines and Air New Zealand offer nonsop flights to Papeete.

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Where to stay: Hotel Bora Bora, telephone 60-44-60, fax 60-44-22. Serious luxury on a prime beach site. Rates: $395-$700. Hotel Matira, tel. 67-70-51, fax 67-77-02. Mid-range value beside lovely Matira Beach. Rates: $130-$315. Village Pauline, tel. 67-72-16, fax 67-78-14. Rustic, but tidy for budget travel; four rooms with shared bathrooms, two with bath, kitchenette. Rates: $60-$90. Vairupe Villas, tel. 67-62-66, fax 67-62-79. Ten pleasant garden bungalows, each with kitchen, across road from beach. Rate: $170. Bora Bora Lagoon Resort, tel. 60-40-00, fax 60-40-01. High luxury, remote location. Rates: $520-$863. Moana Beach Parkroyal, tel. 60-49-00, fax 60-49-99. Fifty-one luxury bungalows. Rates: $498-$638. Club Med, tel. 60-46-04, fax 60-46-10. Biggest lodging on island, with myriad water sports options. Rates: $1,330-$1,505 per person for seven-night stay. Sofitel Marara Bora Bora, tel. 67-70-46, fax 67-74-03. Sixty-four units. Rates: $290-$500.

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Where to eat: Bamboo House, tel. 67-76-24. Between Vaitape and Matira Beach. Quiet atmosphere, with seafood, French cuisine, pasta; $27-$52. Bloody Mary’s, tel. 67-72-86. Between Vaitape and Matira Beach. House specialty: fresh fish. Sandy floor, grass-shack decor. Closed Sundays; $32-$52.

For more information: Tahiti Tourisme, 300 Continental Blvd., El Segundo, Calif., 90245; tel. (310) 414-8484, fax (310) 414-8490.