May 27, 2007 On Sunday morning we decided to go to church. The tourist guides all said that Polynesians are deeply religious people and everyone goes to church. Dean Richard, our guide, said that was true in his grandparent’s day, but nowadays it was socially acceptable to not attend church. The tourist guides all said the singing was amazing and worth a visit on a Sunday morning.

The Catholic Cathedral we had visited the night before had very high wooden ceilings, rock walls, and lots of statues and crucifixes. The church could have held at least a couple hundred people and there were maybe 40 at the Saturday night service. Everyone sat attentively. The service was in Marquesan. The singing was really beautiful, as promised. The priest and alter boy were dressed in white robes. Since we wandered in out and while the service was going on, we had no contact with the church goers.

The protestant church was a plain building with virtually no adornment, not even a cross. It could probably seat about 60. We arrived a bit early and sat down. Only one person welcomed us. He asked a woman to sit with us. She did and said hello, but when she realized we didn’t speak French, all attempts at conversation ended. There were about 40 people at the service, a lot of them kids. Most of the women dressed in nicer skirts and wore hats. Most of the men had Hawaiian print shirts and slacks, including the minister. There were a few dressed in t-shirts and shorts. There were 6 guys with guitars seated in the pews that played the music. They were videotaping the service with two cameras. The cameras were passed around to someone, they would tape for a while, then pass the camera on to the next person. The singing was good, but definitely better at the Catholic service. The little kids got up and wandered around. Babies were passed around the room. The adults were easily sidetracked. The service was in Marquesan. There were a lot of group readings with songs in between. The minister had been talking for 40 minutes when we left. We had to leave early to go see the officials and check out. It looked like there was a loaf of bread and giant cup of wine on the pulpit for communion later in the service.

With 1700 people in the town of Taiohae and only a handful of people at the church services, it is clear that religion is not as big a deal as the tourist guide claims it to be, at least in the town of Taiohae.

We left the church at 10:30 and started down the main drag. A guy drove past us, guzzling a beer with one hand and driving with the other. It gives a new meaning to “Sunday driver”.

Anyway, as we were walking, there was a group of 8 teenagers sitting under a tree at the shoreline. They beckoned us to come to them. Turns out our drunk guy from the night before was amongst the teens and that he remembered our conversation. We were sure he would have blacked it out. Anyway, the kids were all drunk and wanted us to hang out and party with them. These were the first genuinely welcoming locals we had met outside the tourist industry. Others were always polite and even helpful when they saw we needed help (like when they got our dinghy after it floated away), but not super welcoming. We thanked them for the invitation and explained that the officials we needed to see closed at 11:00 am on Sundays and that we needed to go. Whheeww. Lord only knows what scary things those kids were drinking.

On a side note, we knew the local schools are taught in French. Dean Richard had told us that they taught two hours a week of Marquesan in school, and in middle school they started teaching English. These kids spoke really good English, so I am sure they got more than two hours a week of English.

A couple hundred yards down the road a man who looked like a homeless guy beckoned us over to him. He offered us sandwiches and talked animatedly while pointing to the mountain. We have no clue what he said. He was also genuinely welcoming. Then a boy in a football (soccer) uniform came out and walked with us for a bit, chatting with us as best we could in Christi’s broken French. We found it interesting that suddenly today all the people who saw us on the street wanted to chat when no one had stopped to chat all week. Our Sunday morning was quite the interesting cultural experience in a lot of ways. We got both our coldest and warmest reception from the locals in just a couple of hours. We saw both extremes of the spectrum as far as ways to spend your Sunday morning.

We visited the officials and headed back to the boat. It took us two hours to get the boat ready to go. We headed to Anaho Bay at the north end of the island (Taiohae is at the south end of the island), which is supposed to be nice. As we were getting ready, we discovered the main water tank was empty. This was odd, because the water gauge said we had plenty. We made water the entire ride, dropped anchor before sunset, and called it an early night. We would look into the faulty gauge later.