far from the Tahitian capital of Papeete to find sights you will not soon
forget. As soon as you step onto this otherworldly agglomeration of
archipelagos and atolls you will feel, to paraphrase what French painter
Gauguin wrote circa 1901, civilization falling away from you.
In the Marlon Brando film Mutiny On the Bounty, his character
Fletcher Christian does not go ashore after stoking the eponymous
uprising. Depressed and facing the gallows back in England—never
mind incontrovertible Royal Navy career suicide—he lets his sailors
return to the many fruits of the nearby Polynesian archipelago while he
drinks himself into a stupor back on the HMS Bounty.
In real life Brando had a much different reaction to French Poly-
nesia: he became fascinated to the point of obsession. While filming
1962’s Mutiny, the famously reclusive actor preferred the company of
local fishermen to his fellow thespians, and on one excursion they