TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1:

A rooster needing his clock reset begins crowing a couple hours before dawn. His exuberance inspires others of his kind. I quickly tune them out and go back to sleep. At dawn about 500 roosters announce the sunny day and there is no tuning them all out.

Breakfast is brewed coffee, exotic fresh fruits, French bread and an omelet that covers a large plate. We eat outside on the deck, watching multi-colored fish swim through the abstract patterns in the coral below.

We’ve already lapsed into our “haphazard travelers” mode, deciding to take an island tour too late. It’s filled, so we’ll make up the day as we go along. Island tour tomorrow.

I write journal notes outside our bungalow, while a chicken drinks water from half a coconut shell a few feet away. When Tara tosses the chicken a cookie, many Myna birds descend to play “get the cookie” with the chicken. My early-morning entertainment.

This is truly paradise; a light breeze and perfect temperature, huge rustling palms. A large catamaran twists in calm water 50 yards off shore. Birds chatter in the trees and turquoise water gently laps the shoreline. The temperature this time of year varies from 70 to 86 degrees. Other times of year the temperature can vary from 72 to 87 degrees. Okay. Their spring, the rainy season, is about to begin. Summer is very humid I’m told. I decide that by accident, we’ve come to Moorea at the perfect time of year.

Cheyenne talks me into accompanying her to the sandy beach on one side of the hotel complex. The beach must be man made for I’ve seen no other sand on Cook’s Bay or this side of the island. The kids and I sunbathe while Tara remains in the bungalow doing an hour kick-boxing workout, accompanied by 60 marine-style push ups. As a result of this regime, she’s never been in better physical shape.

I do a yoga workout on a towel on the sand and I figure we’ll walk several miles today. My regular walks and biking in Malibu provide a good suntan base, but the children are white. I help cover them both with sun-block and oil.

We’ve been away from home for less than two days, and I’m amused by some of my conditioned reactions. A dozen times a day, I reach for the cell phone on my hip to assure it’s there (which it isn’t.) I’m also inclined to go sit down at the hotel computer/web-connection, but so far have managed not to. We let Cheyenne go online for 15 minutes yesterday and she was immediately instant-messaging with several Malibu friends at the same time.

Tara joins us for topless sunbathing on the beach just as clouds drift over the mountains to block the sun. Some American males drinking on the restaurant deck are delighted. In the water, Tara and Cheyenne do a meditation to the Tahitian Gods and collect pieces of coral as an offering for a meditation they’ll do later.

Chey is our little witch child. Her primary interest is the occult. At home, she has created a huge book of spells, processes and wisdom. Last week, in the Hypnotist Training Seminar, she handled the back-table sales. During the week, she participated in the psychic experiments and demonstrated her rapidly developing psychic abilities. On October 24th, she’ll accompany me to a medical/dental hypnosis convention in Detroit to handle the table and support me in a two-day, past-life regression training. Tara would normally be there, but she needs to catch up on her Abenda channeling commitments. And a day after returning home from Detroit, we leave for a weekend seminar in Scottsdale. Two days after that we’re off to the Healing Arts Festival in London, England.

At lunch time, we decide to hike to Pao Pao, a few miles down the road at the bottom of the Bay. On the way, we stop at Club Bali Hai for lunch beneath a thatch-covered restaurant at the waters edge. The resort hotel appears nearly deserted. In the gift shop, we find Monoi Tiare soap. In another shop we purchase Noni, an island elixir/cure-all Shauna says we must drink in daily doses.

The town of Pao Pao has a couple grocery stores, snack stands and an island school. We’re sitting at a snack stand at 3:30 PM when several school buses pull out to take the children home. The local paper says, 77,300 children started school this fall in the French Polynesian islands. It’s hard to imagine the islands can support such a large student population at graduation time. We wonder if many have to leave to find careers. But if you grew up here in paradise, how could you leave?

At a beach used by the Polynesian people.

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS: The island people are very friendly, always smiling and waving at us. Many ride bicycles carrying their babies in their arms. Obviously easy going and trilingual, we notice they speak the Polynesian language to each other.

Land Rovers, especially the Defender model, is the vehicle of choice on this island. That’s probably only significant to me as a LR owner. I purchased my first in 1972.

All French tourists smoke.

Mormon men on their missions wear white shirts and neckties and ride bicycles around the island trying to convert the locals. The Seventh Day Adventists and Catholics also appear to be strongly entrenched.

On the hike back to our hotel, I decide to explore the green growth that covers the mountain side. Ever adventurous, Cheyenne starts to accompany me. We don’t get far. The tightly clustered trees and vine-like growth is almost impassable. And it is nearly dark beneath the overgrowth. So much for climbing the mountain.

The hotel dinner includes an appetizer. Hunter and I choose Sashimi. Tara and Cheyenne order nachos.

“Mistake,” Hunter and I say in unison. Never order Mexican food outside the American southwest or Mexico.

The nachos arrive in a side dish -- a thin layer of crumbled hamburger beneath a layer of kidney beans and covered with cold shredded white cheese. There isn’t a corn chip to be seen and obviously they don’t know about pinto beans.

“Maybe we’re supposed to use the French bread for tortilla chips,” Cheyenne says. I think she’s right. The words “gastronomic sedition” jump into my mind, but I don’t linger there for long. (Later, a couple tells us of ordering guacamole and chips at another hotel. They received a scoop of guac and four tortilla chips.)

Hunter thinks we could open a Taco Bell franchise on the island and do very well.

Greg, the hotel owner, comes by to check on us. I ask him about hurricanes.

“Cyclones,” he says. “The last was in 1993, but this place just sways with the storms and survives.”

I’m reminded of the Zen goal of being like a willow. When the snow comes and weighs down the limbs, rigid trees break beneath the weight. The willow simply bends with the weight surviving the storms (of life). I need to be a willow with aggressive French people.

I ask Greg about graduating students. He explains that upon graduation, those who pass qualification tests can travel free to France and enjoy government-endowed living and a university education.

Other interesting facts that surface during our conversation: There is no income tax in French Polynesia.  The abundant chickens belong to everyone and there are thousands in the mountains, because there are no natural predators to keep their numbers down. Anyone is free to kill and eat a chicken.

Within two months after 9/11, Club Med and two large hotels closed and a major cruise line bankrupted. Nothing can be grown or produced in enough quantity for export. Although they boast about pineapple production, the people here use 30 percent more pineapple juice than they can produce.

So the relative abundance of the island doesn’t make sense.

I ask our host about this and he explains that the French government pays millions and millions of francs a year to the island people to support the economy. “It’s a ghost economy -- not real.”

Greg provides lodging for four French policemen on the hotel property. This allows him to promote how safe it is here. The men are rotated to the islands from France for a minimum of two years and a maximum of six. One of the men can’t keep his eyes off Tara, so we know she’s safe.

I naturally try to figure out how things work in a society. Over the week, I learn that every foot of Moorea is owned by someone, but true ownership gets very confusing. The land may have been handed down through dozens of generations, so there can be a large number of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins that hold claim to a particular piece of property. But since there is no property tax, no one bothers to keep it legal.

Evidently the government is wanting to clear this up, which sounds to me like the first step for establishing property tax, and/or a move for confiscation if valid claims cannot be established.

A high percentage of the Polynesian people do not work. They have no mortgage and very few expenses. Fish are easily gathered from the sea, chicken is free, coconuts and other exotic fruits fall from the trees. Up in the hills, we see pineapples growing wild beside the road.

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of Dick’s Moorea Journal

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