Culture
Culture.
Seven short guides: navigation, language, marae, the arts, food, history and pearls. Read them before you go, or on the plane.
A Heiva performance, Leeward Islands
Eastern Polynesia was settled around a thousand years ago by people who crossed the largest ocean on Earth in double-hulled canoes, navigating by stars and swells and carrying pigs, dogs, taro and breadfruit. Everything in these seven guides follows from that.
Seven guides
The guides.
Culture
Navigation
How people found these islands without instruments, and the 1976 voyage that proved it could be done.
Culture
Language
Tahitian and its relatives: five vowels, a glottal stop, and the words worth learning.
Culture
Marae
What a marae is, how to read one, and how to visit one properly.
Culture
Arts
Drums, dance, tattoo and carving, their suppression and their revival.
Culture
Food
Poisson cru, the earth oven, the food trucks, and vanilla.
Culture
History
Settlement, contact, the Pomare kingdom, the colony, the nuclear tests and autonomy.
Culture
Pearls
How the black pearl is farmed, what the grading terms mean, and how to buy one.
Related
Related pages.
Explained
Tupaia's chart
A navigator from Raiatea drew a chart of more than seventy islands for Captain Cook in 1769.
Read the article
Society Islands
Raiatea
Taputapuātea, the World Heritage marae, and the base for most sailing charters.
Open the island guide
Marquesas
Hiva Oa
Gauguin's and Brel's graves at Atuona, and the tallest ancient tiki in French Polynesia at Puamau.
Open the island guide
Explained
The first overwater bungalow
Built on Raiatea in 1967 by three Californians whose hotel had no beach.
Read the article