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TAHITI: Legendary Tahiti, isle of love, has long been the vision of "la Nouvelle Cythère," the earthly paradise. Explorers Wallis, Bougainville, and Cook all told of a land of spellbinding beauty and enchantment, where the climate was delightful, hazardous insects and diseases unknown, and the islanders, especially the women, among the handsomest ever seen. Rousseau's "noble savage" had been found! A few years later, Fletcher Christian and Captain
Bligh acted out their drama of sin and retribution here.
The list of famous authors who traveled to Tahiti and wrote
about the island reads like a high-school literature course:
Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Pierre Loti, Rupert Brooke, Jack London, W. Somerset Maugham, Charles
Nordhoff and James Norman Hall (the Americans who wrote
Mutiny on the Bounty), among others. Exotic images of
uninhibited dancers, fragrant flowers, and pagan gods fill the pages. Here, at least, life was meant to be enjoyed.
The most unlikely PR man of them all was a once-obscure
French painter named Paul Gauguin, who transformed the
primitive color of Tahiti and the Marquesas into powerful
visual images seen around the world. When WW II shook
the Pacific from Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal, rather than bloodcurdling banzais and saturation bombings, French
Polynesia got a U.S. serviceman named James A. Michener,
who added Bora Bora to the legend. Marlon Brando arrived in
1961 on one of the first jets to land on Tahiti and his Bounty
film attracted thousands of other travelers and adventurers to
also make the trip.
SUZANNE ROBBINS
Elegante Honeymoons
Boca Express Travel/Amex
8177 Glades Rd., Ste. 14
Boca Raton, Fl. 33433
1-561-482-0030
1(888)888-3103