Praying for Tutae Moa

By Cindy Sawyer

The only real problem with going to Tahiti is that eventually you have to come home. I had been home for two days now, still under its blissful spell. But I’m sitting at dinner. My 3-year-old daughter has just finished smearing yogurt in her hair for the third time today. My 6-year-old son decided to write his memoirs on his bunk bed. A huge pile of laundry threatens to blockade the garage door. Bills await. Chinch bugs have decided our lawn makes a great Vegas-style buffet. The pool pump has gone on the fritz. My husband is caught in traffic. And no one has touched the meatloaf that took me two hours to prepare.

I close my eyes and mumble, “Pure tutae moa” under my breath. I’m praying for chicken manure.

As a way to wish someone well or invoke a special favor from God, Tahitians pray for chicken manure. It all started a few years back. It seems that missionaries who came to the area had boasted that their god was the one true god and had the power to answer prayers. So the chiefs from all around Polynesia gathered on the sacred island of Raiatea, at a sacred marae (stone temple) called the Taputapuatea marae, to test this theory. If the missionaries’ god answered their prayers, then the chiefs would accept the visitors’ story and convert. If not, they would break out the breadfruit and vanilla extract, have the missionaries for dinner, and continue their worship of their traditional god (of war), Oro.

The big night arrived. Long canoe outriggers from faraway islands lined the shore. The other chiefs gathered in a tight and hungry circle. The missionaries laid into a fervent prayer and watched the words rise up to the wide, star-filled firmament, acutely aware of the impending banquet, when some would say a miracle happened. A chicken that had been resting on a branch in the tree lifted its tail and let fly a whopper. The chicken droppings landed ignominiously smack on the head of the big chief. After a wide-eyed pause, the big chief declared it a sign from the missionaries’ God. Oro was relegated to legend. And from that point on, the good Christian people of Tahiti have been praying for chicken manure.

But I’m just praying to go back to Tahiti, soon — like, tonight.

Intoxication
My husband and I arrived late the night our adventure began in Papeete on the island of Tahiti. A full moon, with all of its possibilities, shone in the night sky over the outline of nearby Moorea. Fragrant wisps of frangipani rode the sea breezes, and the alluring dreaminess that has afflicted travelers and sailors for centuries wrapped around us like a magical enchantment. That was how it began.

Ty Sawyer / Sport Diver

Tahiti is, in a word, well, there is no real word. It’s idyllic. It’s everything you’d imagine, and then some. Which is why most of Tahiti’s visitors are honeymooners, living that temporary blissful existence for a few days or weeks before returning to real life. But having been married for more than 11 years, I can attest that no one is immune to the intoxicating effects of Tahiti and the surrounding islands.

You will hear many people say that if you travel to Tahiti you should pass through the main island and head on to Bora Bora, Moorea or one of the other Society Islands. Don’t listen to them. While the main city of Papeete on Tahiti will certainly remind you of any busy city in Europe, the rest of this island remains as alluring, charming and exotic as your imagination can envisage. Whispers of ancient legends roam the mountains and jungle-choked valleys, and the diving is cloaked in the same electric blue waters that embrace the rest of French Polynesia.

Let me just state for the record that I am a new diver. I went to Tahiti with a total of five dives under my belt, two of which took place in a lake in Florida where the visibility was about 3 inches and speedboats passed dangerously close to our dive flag every 30 seconds or so. I’d watched my instructors drool shamelessly when I said I was going to Tahiti, but until the sun pushed back the moon over Moorea, and we were headed to one of Tahiti’s most photogenic dives, the Catalina Flying Boat, I didn’t totally understand their Pavlovian response.

Inside the lagoon and within splashing distance of the international airport runway, this World War II-vintage wreck has been on the seafloor at about 60 feet since it was scuttled in 1964. I did my first-ever back flip off a dive boat, and turned stunned, floating in at least 80 feet of viz and staring at the most unbelievable array of marine life I’d ever encountered. OK, I hadn’t really encountered any marine life in my brief career as a mucky lake diver, but this was a metropolis of movement and color.

I must have looked a bit amazed, and perhaps a little bit stupid, thinking, “Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out …” because the ever-gallant Bernard Begliomini from PADI 5-Star TOPdive, who was our host for the day, gently motioned for me to follow him, and we descended together into a world I secretly believed, until that moment, only existed in magazines.

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Surprisingly, we passed right over the flying boat as Bernard pointed off into the distance. About 100 feet from the plane rested an old cargo ship called a geolette. As we swam closer, I could see why Bernard was anxious to start the dive here. The 100-foot cargo ship, with its wooden ribs poking up from the sand, looked like a giant skeleton. Bernard stopped to point out tiny nudibranchs and clownfish. Knowing I was new to all this, he took special care to show me all the amazing creatures he clearly, even after half a lifetime of diving, has not grown weary of: moray eels, a stonefish and an unusual (I was told later) green and yellow leaffish that actually danced and moved a bit for us. A bunch of fish I couldn’t identify but thought were cool (my husband told me later they were schools of Moorish idols, oval butterflyfish and squirrelfish) weaved in and out of the ships shadows, lit by ghostly sunbeams filtering through the open slots between the ribs. After circumnavigating the geolette, we passed by the ship’s propeller, which had a halo of some other fish (later identified as yellow butterflyfish) rising and twirling around it like fall leaves caught in a wind.

We retraced our path to the flying boat. It looked as if it had come in for a landing and just happened to end up on the seafloor, and even more than the cargo ship it seemed possessed of a ghostly presence. Completely intact with one wing resting in the sand, you could enter the fuselage (if you weren’t a brand-new diver) through a cargo door, make your way to the cockpit and get a pilot’s-eye view of the ocean. An open hatch allowed an easy exit. Sergeant majors (I knew what those were) guarded the plane, and fierce little damselfish (I recognized those, too) protected their homesteads under the wings with a respectable vigilance. Swimming away from the plane, I could feel the thrill of diving begin to work its way through my veins. I never wanted to be out of the ocean again. Not exactly realistic, I know, but pure tutae moa anyway.

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