#13 - 50 Shades of Blue

There must be at least 50 shades of blue.  And we’ve seen them all on this cruise.  

Just when you think the South Pacific waters couldn’t be more spectacular, you arrive at yet another island encircled by even more dazzling shades of blue and green.  Out at sea where the ocean floor is over a mile deep, you look down into a vast expanse of endless midnight blue.  As the shore line approaches, the colors lighten to a royal blue and then something along the lines of azure.  The waters become more shallow and a beautiful shade of sapphire appears.  Then the greens start to mingle into the blues and you’re looking at aquamarine and turquoise.  In the most shallow waters the sunlight dances off the sand and reefs producing what I can only describe as electric green.  Oh, and according to Jeff, no description of blue can be complete without “Dodger Blue”.  He’s still devastated that his team lost to the Red Sox in the World Series.  

After we left the stunning waters off of Bora Bora and Tahiti, we sailed on to Ra’iatea.  Don’t worry, I can’t pronounce it either.

It is a commune of French Polynesia and an overseas territory of France.  They are part of the Leeward Islands which are part of the Society Islands and sit out here somewhere in the Central South Pacific Ocean.  I’m just glad Captain Tim knows where we are and where we are going.  

Ra’iatea, first inhabited over 1000 years ago, is believed to be the starting point for migrations from French Polynesia to New Zealand and Hawaii, and the center of Polynesian civilization.

The island itself has few beaches, but the reef is dotted with motu - secluded white sand, palm-fringed, blue-lagoon islets. It is the site of one of the world’s rarest flowers, the tiara apetahi.  

This flower only grows in one place - here.  It has never been successfully cultivated anywhere else than on the slopes of Mount Temehani, to the continued bafflement of botanists.  

The islands are full of legends and here’s the one that is told for this flower.  

Once there was a young girl of incomparable beauty, called Tiaitau.  She became the lover of King Tamatoa. And when he and his warriors rowed away on their canoes to war, he asked her to wait for his return.  She told him she would climb the sacred mountain, Temehani, to watch over the sea until he came back.  She said that she would put a coconut in the chasm called Apo’o hihi ura.

The coconut would journey through the earth and drift from island to island, following her lover.  Whenever he was thirsty, she told him, the coconut would be there, and when he put a hole in it and drank from it, tasting its sweet water on his lips, he would be kissing Tiaitau.

Tiaitau watched for the return of her lover from the top of Mount Temehai, but when she saw the flash of sunlight on his abandoned oar in the waves, and his empty canoe bobbing on the ocean, she plunged her arm in the ground in despair and broke it off, so that her arm would grow up as a plant and flower.  If her lover did eventually return, he would smell her scent on the wind, and he could grasp the white flower which represented her hand.

Then she threw herself in the chasm of Apo’o hihi ura because she couldn’t bear to wait and be told for certain that her king, whom she adored so much, was dead.

The flower that grew where Tiaitau had planted her arm would never leave the sacred mountain, just as Tiaitau had never left it, and would never grow anywhere but there.