Cours de Pirogues
Monday we woke up and noticed a lot of activity on the beach across the street: dozens of locals were setting up their outrigger canoes. The races, which are part of a July festival called Haeve, began at 9 am with men’s singles. About 30 or 40 contestants lined up, paddled out to the reef, turned around and came back. Races with boats of six, younger men, followed. The owner of our pension competed in both single and six-man events, as did a man who rented us bicycles, coming in first in the six-man event.
After the races, we rode some sketchy bicycles (only the front brakes worked, and only some of the derailleurs; my seat seemed rusted in one position) to a site on the other side of the island occupied by Hotel Sofitel for about ten years, but which was abandoned about five years ago because it consistently lost money. It’s located next to a convenient snorkeling spot, where the lagoon went out about a kilometer and never got too deep to stand up in. There were a few rocks with small amounts of coral growing on them, and various tropical fish darting about. The water was even warmer than the Timberline pool (though still cooler than the hot tub). The current through the lagoon was so swift that you had to swim constantly to watch any particular piece of coral, or else stand up in the waist deep water which defeated the purpose of snorkeling; and if you let yourself drift past the boulders and corals it was like being on a tour bus and you never got to look at anything. The lagoon was nice but not spectacular. There were the usual suspects in terms of colorful tropical fish and iridescent blue-lipped clams and anenome drama and urchins, but they weren’t arranged so that they would form a desktop or a jigsaw puzzle. Most of the coral was of a nondescript brown bulbous sort.
As we left, we noticed that Ray’s back tire had lost all its air. I biked back to get help, and he started walking. As he came back, someone offered to pump it back up, but it didn’t take any air at all. So he kept walking and got a ride — meanwhile, I got the pension owner to go get him, and we passed him almost immediately after he’d gotten picked up. The bike renter was nice enough not to charge us for all the adventures.
We had dinner nearby at a waterside bar, eating what one hopes to eat on a French tropical island: local seafood with sauces made from local ingredients by French chefs. In this case it was mahi mahi with vanilla sauce, and lagoon fish meuniere. And three liters of water to rehydrate us after a long active day in the sun.