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Zealandia
16 janvier 2020

South Pacific

   

Most people live on a lonely island,

Lost in the middle of a foggy sea.

Most people long for another island,

One where they know they will like to be.

 

Do you play that game: What book(s) / film(s) changed your life ?

Well, one of mine was the musical South Pacific which I saw at the impressionable age of 9. It tells the story of a naïve girl, out of her depth in a complicated tropical environment, who falls in love with an older Frenchman and wonders if she should take the plunge... Sounds familiar?!

 

Also in the film, set on a Pacific base during WW2, a young GI is lured to a secret, forbidden island where there lives a Polynesian beauty ready to introduce him to the apparent simplicity of love as lived by the islanders. (He is saved by the memories of his wholesome American girlfriend waiting at home.)

 

All of that has just come back to me when we crossed over the straits from Tahiti to the looming vertical walls of the island of Moorea, a dark, craggy volcanic mass shrouded in cloud and covered in grossly luxuriant vegetation, where almost obscene flowers give off their famous heady perfumes and strange fruits dangle in front of your eyes. All surrounded by a turquoise cristal clear lagoon, its paradisiac calm interrupted a few hundred yards off by the heaving Pacific pounding onto the coral reef. Aah !

 

The Tahiti base was in fact planned for Bora Bora which had deeper waters and could provide a long runway on the atoll. It was never used in fact, and is ow the playground of the ultra rich.

However New Caledonia did become a base but I believe the local ladies were not quite so welcoming !

 

(On a similar theme, on the plane I saw the excellent Anthony Hopkins version of Mutiny on the Bounty which happened locally.)

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Zealandia
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Zealandia est un continent immergé sous 1000m d'océan Pacifique à l'est de l'Australie, dont seules deux pointes émergent : la Nouvelle-Zélande et la Nouvelle Calédonie. Partis de Tarbes le 1er dé-cembre 2019, nous serons de retour le 27 janvier 2020.

Zealandia 2

  01 décembre 19 : Tarbes-Paris
  02-04 décembre : Dubaï
  04-07 décembre : Delhi
  08-16 décembre : Australia (Cairns->Brisbane)
  16 déc.-08 janv.  : New-Zealand
  08-11 janvier       : Nouvelle-Calédonie
  11-15 janvier       : Polynésie Française
  15-25 janvier       : USA
  27 janvier 2020   : Paris-Tarbes

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