Craig and Amy on the Aranui: Life in Paradise

"I shut my eyes in order to see"...Paul Gauguin

Paul Gauguin came to the Marquesas Islands and finally found his paradise. Yes, he was a pederast, a syphilitic, a drunk and a dope addict. But he was able to capture the magic of these islands. You look at his paintings and there are no French bureaucrats, no sailing ships, no modern buildings, nothing to indicate that this place was anything but a lost world full of bright colors and beautiful island girls.

Of course, in reality it was anything but. In the prior century before Gauguin arrived, the white man brought his diseases, his religion and his shame and inflicted them all on the islanders. The local population went from about 80,000 in the 1770s, to less then 2,000 by 1903. An entire culture was wiped out and the Marquesans didn't have a King Kalakaua to resurrect the culture until a Breton priest, named Herve-Maria Le Cleac'ch, arrived in the 1950s and helped bring back the art, the dance and the language. He knew what the French could do to a culture, as his Brittany was destroyed by the French many centuries before.

So now most Marquesans speak their own language, as well as French. There are many dancers, even though most of the traditional dances have been lost to time. And the most beautiful art in Polynesia comes from the Marquesas. They are some of the best wood and bone carvers anywhere. The art of the tattoo has been restored and I can personally testify to that on my right leg. Most Marquesans under the age of 50, so it seems, have tattoos somewhere on their body, even though the Catholic church, which is very strong here, doesn't really approve.

Life is better now, thanks in no small part to the heavy subsides paid to the copra makers from the French government. This is why you see so many Marquesans driving $40,000 pickup trucks. Well, it's the least the French can do after destroying an entire culture.

So life goes on on these tiny islands, the farthest from any continent in the world. Robert Louis Stevenson, when sailing here in the 1880s, wrote...

"And then the sun crested the horizon and there lay the Marquesas: like the pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church they stood there, in the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit sign-board of a world of wonders"

Nobody has ever said it better.

And here are just some of the scenes we saw over 10 days...

Kids with a pet chicken