Everyone should visit Tahiti and French Polynesia. I don’t say that lightly and I don’t get a dime for saying so. I believe this very strongly. Everyone should visit Tahiti and French Polynesia.
I am not a beach person. In fact, I have to be careful in the sun because of sensitive skin. So, this is not a commercial for Polynesian beaches, rum drinks, or grass skirts.
This is an invitation to visit with your planet, and to see it living and breathing. Here, the awesome forces of Nature that shape this globe are on view if you open your eyes to them. Here, you can almost begin to comprehend what can be done on a timeline measured in millions of years.
What these unimaginable forces have done is create a spectacular paradise. Yet, that is secondary to the spectacle of the creation itself. Let me tell you what I mean.
The key to this adventure is the word, “atoll”. What is an “atoll” and why does it matter? I have heard this word for much of my life. Yet, I never really knew what it meant. I just thought it was another word for “island”, sort of like “street”, “road”, and “lane” have similar meanings.
An atoll is a ring of tiny coral reef islands barely sticking up out of the water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Some have been made famous, like Johnson Atoll, as uninhabited nuclear weapons testing sites. That won’t concern us here. What does concern us is why these tiny island rings, with their protected lagoons, exist in the middle of the vast, churning, turbulent Pacific.
It’s a fascinating story, first surmised by Charles Darwin, that introduces you to Mother Earth in a very surprising way.
The other Tahitian mystery, pondered for centuries by students of Mankind, is how these islands and their far-flung Pacific siblings came to be populated in the first place, long before Europeans “discovered” them.
There have been many theories, with some of the incorrect ones being better known than the correct ones. It has taken modern science of the very recent kind to confirm the ancient knowledge passed along through the oral traditions of the Polynesian people.
What does it take to navigate open water covering almost half the planet? An intimate knowledge of how the planet and its related natural phenomena all harmonize in this inexplicably glorious thing called “Life”.
This is more than just a day at the beach. So, grab a rum drink, and read on…
