Like the Zen master said to the hot dog vendor, “Make me one, with everything”

February 2 to 4, 2007

I arrived in Rarotonga on Friday, which is curious since I left Fiji on Saturday. Something to do with the International Date Line. It seems that tomorrow in the Cooks is yesterday in Fiji, while Fiji’s tomorrow is our next Saturday, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty deaths. (I must warn you, by the way, that an even deeper analysis of the Date Line is on my list of fascinating future blog topics, along with IMF policy in the South Pacific and the 20 uses Fiji islanders make of the cocoanut. There may still be time for you to have this blog filtered as spam before those posts hit.)

I wasn’t able to send out my post backlog on the flight over. A lot of airports I’ve encountered don’t have true wi fi connections for my PC – just kiosks which don’t let me upload what I have written. I do have a lead on a wifi connection at the hotel next door, so hopefully this will reach you this PM.

Rarotonga is a great island, worthy of its exotically cool name. It is oval shaped with dramatic saw toothed volcanic peaks in the center surrounded by a flat and fertile plain and lovely beaches. The perimeter road around the island is about 38 kilometers and I have rented a scooter and tootled around it a couple of times. It is a great way to see the island. They drive on the wrong side of the road, so I follow suit to humor them, most of the time. (Yes Kathy, I do have a helmet.)

The conventional wisdom is that Rarotonga is like Tahiti was, before it got overdeveloped, overpriced, dirty and crime ridden. And there are no French! (That could be the slogan of the tourist board.) I’ve not been there, but nobody seems to have much good to say about Tahiti, though in fairness the food has got to be better. Unfortunately I won’t have time to get to Aitutaki as previously planned. That is one of the outer Cook islands, a spectacular atoll compared to Tahiti’s Bora Bora of 30 years ago (and there are no French!). I’m only here till tomorrow (my tomorrow, not Fiji’s, which won’t come for several weeks).

Today is Sunday, and I was advised by many who should know to attend an island church service – a kind of cross between gospel and South Seas hula, inspiring, devout and not be missed. Not one to put the sacred before the profane, I signed up instead for a two tank scuba dive. I was sure I would forget to bring my newly minted PADI certification card and they wouldn’t let me dive. I set it aside carefully to be sure I’d bring it when they picked me up early this morning. When we reached the dive site at the other end of the island I proudly pulled presented my card and then realized I forgot my prescription dive mask. Those of you who know me well will know that, among my many imperfections, perhaps the most imperfect is my vision. (A close second would be my attention to detail when woken early in the AM, and –no- I am not accepting other nominations.) Without a prescription dive mask I would be a hazard to myself and all life aquatic. I’d be more likely to attempt buddy breathing with a moray eel than to find the surface at the end of a dive. I had to abort.

There I was, stuck at the other end of the island without my trusty scooter and no apparent way to return to my hotel. Rarotonga is well served by buses running around the perimeter, but there were differing opinions as to whether they run on Sunday in clockwise or (aren’t foreigners cute) anti-clockwise directions, or at all. Very little does run in the Cooks on a Sunday. Ultimately, a bus did come and I had a pleasant ride back about the island, as well as the opportunity to take what may be a prize-winning series of photos which I title “photos taken from bus after forgetting prescription dive mask like an idiot”. Plus I got a chance to go to a church service and become possessed of the Holy Spirit or at least get some face time with the big guy and give him a fighting chance to recognize me on judgment day.

Which brings me to my point (I always do seem to have a point, though my readers are often comotose by the time I get there) and the subject of my sermon this morning – “where can we find paradise?” You see, waiting at the shady bus stop on the side of road, for the bus that might never come, to take me back to the hotel from which I started, I was entirely happy. There was no place I wanted more to be and I didn’t particularly care if the bus ever arrived. I came to the South Seas hoping to find paradise on just the right blue lagoon, resting on sugar sand, under the perfect palm tree. As a crass American, I immediately think of paradise in terms of a place or thing. I love the landscape painting of the Italian Renaissance where the painters conjure up visions of earthly paradise in the Tuscan landscapes. Hanging on my walls back home are prints by Thomas McKnight who does more or less the same thing with the pools, gardens and mansions of places like Palm Springs, the Hamptons, Bermuda and the Greek islands. The illusion is always that if you can find, buy or rent just the right place and things you can be captured in the moment of peace and contentment of the painting.

Of course that doesn’t work. You travel 12,000 miles to get there, stretch out in the hammock, and find you have a nagging itch under your left shoulder blade. Or you need to go to the bathroom. Or you are too hot or too cold. Or, worst of all, you are just bored. What now? The truth is that paradise isn’t a place and doesn’t come from a thing. It can only be found inside you. The closest I got to it in my south sea travels turned out to be a shady bus stop.

If I knew anything more about Zen then I have garnered from 50 years worth of fortune cookies I could probably equate this to concepts like nirvana, which I gather is a state of lack of wants. And, next time I am strategically canned with some weeks of severance I am definitely overdue time with a Zen master in Nepal. But in the meantime, I’ll just leave you with a platitude I found in a particularly good cookie – “Life isn’t a destination. It’s a journey.”

“Ah master Walkabout!” I hear you say, “I think I finally understand your teachings. And when life deals you lemons, make lemonade!”

Not even close, you platitudinous chowderhead. Once again you have missed the point. You are working from a rancid cookie. Your fruit-laden aphorism falls a Pacific’s-width wide of the mark. My pearls find naught but swine. When life deals you lemons, screw lemonade -- be the lemon. Expressed yet another way, if you ever go looking for your heart’s desire, look no further than your own backyard. Unless your backyard is covered in snow. In that case, head South immediately.

Your faithful correspondent,

Walkabout Dave