When you hate everyone so much that you need to get as far away from them as
you can, when you don’t even want to be on the same continent as anyone
else, you’ll find that this cosy little planet of ours does not offer many
destinations to choose from.
Plenty of places exist that are isolated and inhospitable. And the
existentialists’ solution of losing yourself in the crowd is available to
all. But the truly determined isolationist is not, in fact, confronted by
many options.
This was the problem facing Paul Gauguin, the misanthropic French painter and
genius, when he looked around his world in 1901 and decided he wanted out.
The problem was, Gauguin already was out. Since 1891, he had been living in
Tahiti, far enough away from civilisation, you would have thought, to pacify
most misanthropists.
But not him. He needed to be further still. He needed to be as far away from
another landmass as it is geographically possible to be on earth. He wanted
to be on the Marquesas Islands.
In those days, the Marquesas enjoyed an enviably fierce reputation. The world
at large may have entered the 20th century, but on the Marquesas, it was
said, people still ate other people.
Covered from toe to topknot in aggressive tattoos, the men ran barefoot up and
down mountains, and hunted you down with their bare hands. When they had
finished eating your heart, they threw you over to the women, who ate your
legs.
All this appealed to Gauguin, who had learnt to hate civilisation in
Copenhagen, where his wife’s family came from, and where he had had a stab
at respectability by giving up painting and trying his hand at selling
tarpaulins. It didn’t work out, so the family washed its hands of him.
First, he slunk off to Brittany.
Then to Tahiti. Then, finally, to Atuona, the capital of Hiva Oa, the most
mountainous and jungle-clad of the Marquesas, where he died from a
syphilitic heart attack in 1903.
I should probably admit here that I am a Gauguin groupie. Not only do I love
his art more wholeheartedly than any other painter’s, I will start fights in
pubs with people who dare to besmirch his name by repeating that baloney
about him deserting his wife and kids, and fleeing to Tahiti in order to
have sex with underage native girls. That is not how it happened. And it
isn’t only now that Gauguin divides opinion. He was doing it then, too.
When he arrived in Atuona, the missionaries hated him because he boycotted the
church. But the locals liked him because he was at least as wild as they
were. They called him Koke, which rhymes with okay. Nowadays, of course,
they love him even more, because he supplies the only tangible reason there
is to come to the Marquesas.
GAUGUIN BUILT a house in Atuona, which he called the Maison du Jouir – the
House of Pleasure – on the front of which he carved a large pair of busty
Marquesan nudes specifically to annoy the nuns who ran the school next door.
In the yard outside, he dug himself a well, and would cool his wine in it by
ingeniously dangling it from his window on a homemade fishing rod.
The Maison du Jouir has now been recreated in broad brushstrokes on the exact
same spot on which it used to stand, in a colourful Marquesan garden where a
new Gauguin museum is also located. The museum tells his story somewhat
hilariously, with roomfuls of dodgy reproductions.
Quality-wise, it’s not a great museum. Location-wise, it’s perfect. After
buying yourself a beer and toasting Gauguin’s wickedness in the trading
store across the road – which was also here when he was here – the thing to
do next is to climb the steep hill that leads out of Atuona to the cemetery
where he lies buried. His grave looks absurdly plain and modest, but it’s a
big improvement on the pauper’s pit into which he was actually thrown in
1903 by the Catholic authorities.
I have made my way here on three separate occasions now – 10,000 miles out,
10,000 miles back – and each time I get here, it moves me more. The
resemblance of the landscape to the paintings seems more acute. The
frangipani in the trees smells more fragrant.
My reason for coming this time was that I had managed to track down Gauguin’s
grandson, who lives on the other side of Hiva Oa, in the coastal village of
Puamau. Handily, Puamau is also where the most spectacular group of beefy
stone gods in Polynesia happens to be clustered, in an ancient tiki complex
on the edge of the jungle.
Gauguin included the largest of these tikis, the statue known as Takaii, which
is 8ft tall, in various pictures, though he never actually saw the real
thing. By the time he got to the Marquesas, his legs were too weak, and
covered in too many syphilitic sores, for him to make the journey.
Even today, it’s a fair old stumble in a 4WD from Atuona to Puamau, puffing up
precipices and sliding round bends. When we finally arrived, Alfred
Tipahaehae (pronounced Tipa-hey-hey) was sitting on the porch of his
bright-green bungalow, happily cleaning his harpoon.
Lean, tall, handsome, he was; you’d assume, from the fine look of him, in his
early fifties, but he’s actually 66. A shy smile. A flash of golden teeth.
He doesn’t look anything like Gauguin, but neither does he resemble anyone
else in the Marquesas. I shook his hand as if here were my oldest friend,
and we sat down at his table to hear his story.
His grandmother, Vaeoho, was one of the boarders in the school run by the
nuns. She was 13 when she had Alfred’s mother. In those days, this was the
usual age for a Marquesan woman to have her first child, but the nuns wanted
to take her baby away, so she fled from Atuona to Hekeani, then to Puamau.
Alfred’s mother only told him that Gauguin was his grandfather when he, too,
was 13, and the boys at school began teasing him about Koke. One night, some
men turned up at the house and took away the picture his grandfather had
painted of his grandmother. Then thieves broke in and stole the only
photograph they had of Vaeoho. Now there’s nothing left. I ask if I can take
a picture of Alfred with my own two daughters, but he refuses.
He’s superstitious about the number three. I can only photograph one daughter
at a time. ALL THIS is spectacularly moving. It brings tears to my eyes and
plunges me into a magnificent sadness. But, no matter how much I adore
Gauguin, it would obviously be nuts to come all the way to French Polynesia
just to cry for him. So my habit on these occasions is to combine a trip to
the Marquesas with a jolly beach experience on one of the other 118 islands
that make up this boundless archipelago.
This time, I plumped for Moorea, just off the coast of Tahiti itself, because
it appears in the backgrounds of some of Gauguin’s most enticing pictures
and because its waters are some of the bluest I have flown over.
We stayed at the Moorea Pearl Resort, in an overwater bungalow that we shared
with a bright-blue moray eel – the eel lived in a rock below, and stuck its
head out sneakily whenever a tasty fish swam by, while we lived in the
bungalow proper, in the outrageous airy comfort that these resorts are so
practised at supplying.
Moorea was where Captain Cook dropped anchor when he arrived in Tahiti. You
know what the bottom of a bottle looks like after someone has broken it over
your head in a Glasgow pub fight?
Well, that’s roughly the shape of Moorea. It’s a tall and jagged ring of
rocks. Confusingly, the particularly pointy Cook’s Bay is not where Cook
actually landed. He landed in the even lovelier Opunohu Bay, where they
filmed Mutiny on the Bounty.
The hotel fixed up a couple of adventures for us: one Jeeped us to the top of
the island’s highest mountain, while the other boated us past its longest
stretches of white sand, on a hilarious expedition led by an extremely salty
local sea dog called Sike, pronounced, most appropriately, Sicky.
“See there,” said Sike, pointing to the fabulously well-appointed dolphin pool
at the Hotel InterContinental, “that’s where you pay $200 to stroke a
dolphin. When I pay $200, I want to stroke a woman, not a dolphin.”
Sicky managed successfully to appal my children with a rude thing he did with
a sea cucumber. But he also took us somewhere I will never forget, and nor
will they. It was a beautiful motu, a tiny island floating in a few
feet of warm emerald water, around which we were encouraged to cavort with
the local stingrays.
The manner of Steve Irwin’s death was fresh enough in my mind to keep me
petrified at first, as these floating pancakes slipped backwards and
forwards between my legs. But so blue was the water, so limpid the setting,
that I simply could not hang on to my suspicions. By the end of the
afternoon, I was tickling the stingrays under their tummies, and they, I
swear, were grinning back.
Travel details: Bridge & Wickers (020 7483 6555, www.bridgeandwickers.co.uk)
can tailor-make trips throughout the South Pacific. Expect to pay from
£2,830pp for a 10-night package, including flights from Heathrow to Tahiti
(Papeete) with Air New Zealand, interisland flights from Papeete to Moorea
and Hiva Oa, all transfers, five nights in an overwater bungalow at the
Moorea Pearl Resort and five nights at Hiva Oa Hanakee Pearl Lodge. Or try
All Ways Pacific (01494 432747, www.all-ways.co.uk)
or Audley Travel (01993 838000, www.audleytravel.co.uk).
For more information on Tahiti & Her Islands visit www.tahiti-tourisme.co.uk
