Talking points…

Prompted by various travel stories while sitting around a patio table in Florida this May; as my contribution I recalled visiting a leper colony in Tahiti. Sounds a little far fetched, I know, but it’s true and I also told three other anecdotes from that trip: 1. Visiting the Paul Gauguin Museum in which there are no Gauguin paintings because they would never survive the heat/humidity. 2. Dropping into the famous Quinn’s Bar which turned out to be an extremely rowdy, low-down, and probably dangerous, joint of which my only memory is the bizarre toilet “facility” in the back alley. 3. Being the only passenger on a small boat, at night, going from Papeete to Moorea, lying prone on the small front deck and suddenly being surrounded, on both sides, by wave after wave of dozens of phosphorescent flying fish keeping pace with the speed of the boat.

I have no souvenirs of the museum, the bar or the flying fish but I do have a spear point I bought directly from the leper who carved it. It was never intended to be used as a weapon but was, and is, purely decorative. Upon returning home (from Florida, not Tahiti) I rescued this spear point from storage (carefully wrapped and kept dry since moving into my current abode in 1993) and hung it on the wall in my bedroom. When I say I have no other souvenirs from Tahiti, one thing seeps into my mind. Soon after returning to the U.S. I came down with hepatitis and it has occurred to me that perhaps I did pick up something from Quinn’s.