Tour with Teuai on Tahiti
24 November 2018
Olof was our first guest on board. He had a week off between changing workplace and flew in from LAX. Olof is not much of a sailor but we did a fair amount of exploring of Tahiti Nui (the big island) and Tahiti Iti (the small island).
Half day tour with Teuai a very inspired guide. He is sorry to see so many of his landsmen lost in western civilization and not finding their way back to their roots.
He described some old traditions that have been lost after Christianity took over and banned traditional culture. As everywhere in the colonial world Western man brought disease, syphilis, measles, small pox etc and the natives died like flies. There were 200 000 inhabitants on Tahiti before the missionaries arrived 1700 and after the time it became French 1842 they were 40 000. The Tahitians thought that they were being punished by their gods, and the missionaries took advantage of the situation and told them that the Christian god was more powerful. Most of the population was converted but the few that continued to worship the old gods were hunted down and killed. All tikis were burned. Old traditions, tattoo, dance, songs were all forbidden and forgotten until 1981 when tattoos became legal again.
When a baby is born they bury the placenta under a tree, and the umbilical cord that falls off later they put in a shell and throw in the ocean. That way the baby will be safe and at home both on land and at sea.
Teuai showed us the nuts they eat and burn for light as well as use the ashes for making Tata ao – that is the sound the stick makes when you punch in the tattoo. Teuai got his first tattoo when he was 14 in 1981. It was legal again but his mom threw him out of the house for going back to heathen culture. He demonstrated how they used to hit a rock against a special kind of hollow tree to communicate with each other – the sound echoed through the jungle.
Teuai stopped at a sacred place and let us give an offering while he spoke to the gods. Nov 21 is the new year here in Tahiti and marks a time that you can harvest fruit and cut down trees – the former 6 months (May to Nov) you give mother earth a rest to recuperate and reproduce. There were a lot of offerings already.
At lunch time we stopped at a water hole and Teuai produced a wonderful meal. Avocado from his garden, bananas and pineapple, he ground up a coconut and squeezed out the milk over a mixture of taro root cooked in bamboo in an earth oven for several hours. It was a fantastic treat and very special. The whole tour took place in an open air jeep and the scenery was fantastic with jungle and waterfalls all around.