I took off as the sun rose into the great expanse of the South Pacific. This was the second longest leg of the trip. There was one island along the flight path about half way that had a dirt strip airport. It didn’t have any services but at least it was level and dry land if something happened along the way.
I saw the Cook Islands as I flew along, but the engine was humming and all the gauges were centered right where they should be. I was flying the GPS line which could take me right to the airport in Tahiti. As part of my training, I had flown a cross country route using the magnetic compass. Even on little legs of a hundred miles, the magnetic compass was woefully inaccurate. I couldn’t imagine how flyers could have found their way around the ocean just using a compass. Now I understood those stories about WWII when whole squads of planes would never find the opposing task force. It wouldn’t take much deviation at the end of a four hour flight to be so far away you couldn’t see an island yet alone ships. I could see how some added clouds and flights wouldn’t be able to find Iceland and would go down in the middle of the Atlantic.
Following the GPS, I was constantly making little corrections for wind and bumps that the magnetic compass wouldn’t have registered. Maybe the conspiracy people are right and Amelia Earhart was shot down, but flying along out here, I could see how easy it would have been to be just a little off course and miss the island. By the time she would have been sure and she wouldn’t know which way she was off, there wouldn’t have been enough gas to get back on track. The sound of engines running out of gas would have been the last thing she heard.
I was watching the GPS count down the distance to Tahiti. It seemed to crawl by even though I was making 350 knots with a tail wind which gave me a ground track of 360 knots. Finally the mountains of Tahiti started to rise out of the sea. The airport is on the east side of the island so the tower brought me straight in on runway 4. Like a lot of these volcanic islands there isn’t much flat land, so the runway is right on the ocean with the ends jutting out into the sea.
I normally wouldn’t care as I said earlier. The problem was that there was a crosswind this day and a strong one. The Mustang as a tail dragger wasn’t the best crosswind landing plane in the world. Two miles out, I lowered the gear and locked the tail wheel in place. That would prevent the tail from turning once it was on the ground and it would help keep the plane straight as I slowed on the runway. I would have to unlock it to taxi. In crosswind conditions you have to trade off full flaps to get slow and get that tail wheel down quickly and no flaps to catch that cross wind and get tossed around like a kite. I chose full flaps so the approach was bouncy and I had to cross control like crazy but the wheel was down quickly and helped keep me straight on the runway.
I was able to crab until I was about a hundred feet on final. Then I had to cross control the plane, ailerons into the wind and opposite rudder. What that does is straighten the axis of the plane down the runway, lower one wing into the wind to help keep the plane aligned with the runway. It’s like a turn where you don’t turn. First time I did it I thought I was going to crash; it takes some getting used to. You touch on one wheel first, get it going straight then get the second wheel down and get the tail wheel down to help steer. Once I got slow, I unlocked the tail wheel and turned off the runway. The tower taxied me past the terminal way off to the East.
I parked the plane and had it serviced while I was there. Then I walked over to the terminal and got a shuttle to the hotel in Papeete, the capital of Tahiti. Tahiti is French, both in language and cuisine. I just don’t speak French. But like all tourist destinations, most people that dealt with tourists spoke English. I checked into the Royal Tahitian. I read about the night life in Papeete and it sounded quite something. One area was known for Mahus, men dressed as women. When I lived in Honolulu a guy had to be careful picking up women on Hotel Street because some of those women weren’t. I remember my friend Darryl, who was from a small redneck town in Northern Florida, picked up a chick and went back to her place. They were making out on the couch and Darryl got all hot. She bent over and gave him a bj. He felt like he should return the favor so he reached over and ran his hand up under her skirt only to find an outie instead of an innie. He ran out of the place and ran back downtown to get a bus. When he told us about it the next day I could see he was still shook up. The rest of us started laughing and rolling on the floor. But from then on we were sure careful picking up chicks. I made sure she didn’t need to shave her cheeks, just her legs.
That afternoon, I sat around the pool admiring the view. I had dinner at the hotel before heading into the nightlife district. I did a little pubbing, then walked around. I could tell I was near the Mahu district when this ‘woman’ in a pink jumpsuit walked by. I noticed something bumping against the front of her jumpsuit right where her male junk would be. Come on girl, at least tie it down. I went into one of the clubs and two ‘girls’ tried to pick me up. The one girl had a voice deeper than mine. The other could have been a girl, she was actually cute. She was also Asian and didn’t need to shave. But she didn’t have the right shape of hips to ass and the chin was all wrong. It was subtle, but definitely wrong.
I left that place since it was not going to be my thing and went to a club I had read about. The floor show was good and the girls were girls. I asked a few women to dance but there were never any vibes. I went back to the hotel and hit the sack.
The next morning, I went out to the Gauguin Museum. Paul Gauguin fled from his house in France that he was sharing with the crazy Van Gogh in Arles and hopped a ship to Tahiti, the most exotic place he could think of. It was there that his art fully developed and reached the style we now think of as Gauguin. It was unique; there wasn’t anyone painting like Gauguin although there would be soon. His painting took on a simplicity, large flat areas of exotic vibrant color, and an appreciation of the native culture along with a mysticism that marked all of his best paintings. All of these elements found their way into the art that followed whether directly on the Nabis or through Cezanne to much of the painting of the Twentieth Century.
The museum had a few of his paintings on loan from other museums and journals, books, and things he used while in Tahiti. I had lunch at the Gauguin restaurant across the street. One thing about the French: wherever they went, just as in Africa, they left behind a legacy of fine cooking if the people weren’t too ignorant to keep it alive, like Algeria where they have reverted to their goat herding ways.
I took a shuttle back to the hotel and decided to go to one of those black sand beaches they were advertising. A black sand beach is visually stunning. It just looks wrong, but there it is. What they don’t tell you about black sand is it isn’t sand. It is little bits of lava, lava that is related to obsidian, in other words, glass… Walking on a black sand beach is a little like walking on crushed glass. It isn’t a lot of fun. I did go snorkeling and that was fun. The clear waters of the tropics make it incredible and the bright colors of the coral reef and fish make it a wonderland. Every island where I snorkeled was different, with different fish all brightly colored and strangely shaped. I suspect you could snorkel at every island in the pacific and never get tired of it.
A day and a half had restored my energy and I checked out early and got a taxi down to the airport, ready to go as soon as the sun was up.
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Copyright Rod O'Steele © 2009, 2011