The Keys To A Reefbound Realm

Until now the trouble with Tahiti and Bora-Bora—and Fiji, Samoa, New Caledonia and the rest of the islands that stretch across the Tropic of Capricorn—has been that they were so far away from the American mainland, so difficult or expensive to get to, that the handful of tourists who journeyed into the true depths of the South Pacific tended to be the rich, the retired or the renegade. Such visitors have made little effort to get past the deck chair of a steamer, the beach of a hotel or the stool of a bar. For that matter, there have been few facilities to take a sports-minded tourist, no matter what his age or the size of his wallet, where the sport was—no sport-fishing boats, no charter yachts, no scuba school.

The jet surge to the Pacific is changing all that. To offset the complaint that tourist hordes are destroying paradise, there should also be rejoicing that prices are dropping, younger people are finding it possible to travel there and the likes of Bora-Bora's Erwin Christian have enough customers to develop the best thing the Pacific has to offer the tourist—its water sports.

GETTING THERE: In 1961 the first jet flew into Papeete, Tahiti, and there were 8,563 visitors during the year. During 1967 there were seven flights a week from the U.S. alone, and 23,000 tourists. While the first-class fare is still $1,022.40, last summer a new 23-day excursion rate made it possible to fly to Papeete from Los Angeles for $520 round trip, $234 less than the regular tourist fare. UTA flies from Los Angeles at 11:45 p.m. Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, reaching Papeete 8� hours later, at 6:10 a.m. local time, as the tropical sky turns lemon yellow behind the palm trees. Pan American flies nonstop from Los Angeles at midnight on Saturdays, from San Francisco via Honolulu on Thursdays, and from Los Angeles via Honolulu and Pago Pago on Tuesdays. Qantas flies from Acapulco to Tahiti on Saturdays. From Papeete there are daily feeder flights to Raiatea and Bora-Bora. To reach Moorea you take a boat, the fishing cruiser Keke II, for the hour-and-a-half crossing.

STAYING THERE: The best hotels in French Polynesia are, without exception, American owned and managed. In Papeete on the main island of Tahiti , the place to stay is the Hotel Tahiti. It has a pool and a pier, but no beach. This lack is made up for by the charm of the thatched-roof bungalows, which cost from $23 for a double per day. The same management owns the Tahiti Village, nine miles out of town on a white-sand beach, with Moorea soaring above the spindrift on the horizon. In October 1968 Pan American will open the 200-room Tahara'a Inter-Continental, a hillside resort near Papeete, the largest in the islands.

Papeete has the most complete organization in the South Seas for skin divers. Young Jean Pelissier has a real James Bond collection of underwater gear. His company has done all the underwater work around the atoll where the French are working on their hydrogen bomb, and, now that he has finished his chores for De Gaulle, he has gone into the tourist business. He has compressors, tanks, instructors, boats, rafts, rescue gear, cameras, lights and is able to take beginners or whole movie crews underwater.

Bora-Bora has one distinguished hotel, the Hotel Bora-Bora, also American owned. Its main building and dining room sit on a point of land with a dazzling view of white sand and lagoon. The guest bungalows are spread through tropical gardens. The bar is first-rate and it has the best hotel restaurant in the Pacific. Prices are $35 for a single, $48 for a double per day American plan. Erwin Christian's water-sports complex makes the hotel even more attractive. Christian's glass-bottom-boat tours cost $4 per person; trips to the reef are $3. Water skiing is $5 per half hour.

Moorea is considerably better known than Bora-Bora, partly because it is nearer to Tahiti. It sits right out there beyond the lagoon, and it has received much publicity, thanks to three Californians who became permanent beach bums and founded the Bali Hai Hotel in 1963. The beach bums—Jay Carlisle, Muk McCallum and Hugh Kelley—are now pushing 40, and the Bali Hai has clipped grass lawns right down to the raked sand beach, excellent salad grown on the hotel's plantation, the prettiest waitresses in the islands and a general air of complete American don't-give-a-damn relaxation. The thatched bungalows have king-size American baths. Prices are $15 for a single, $18 for a double per night. There is a second Bali Hai at Raiatea, a nearby island, where Muk, Jay and Hugh are converting a rather ordinary waterfront bungalow colony into something special. They are building six cottages out over the reef, each with Plexiglas panels in the floor above a floodlit reef for fish watching in bed.

Moorea has another claim to fame, the Club M�dit�rran�e (SI, July 1, 1963). There are 150 double bungalows with baths on a mile-and-a-half stretch of beach and coconut grove. Two weeks at the club, with skin-diving instruction, horses, a fleet of sailboats, water skiing, all meals and wine included, costs $599 round trip Los Angeles- Papeete. This year 80% of the guests were American. The Club M�dit�rran�e has 29 summer villages around the world, 10 ski villages and 500,000 members. Membership is $5 per year. Club M�dit�rran�e International has offices at 530 West Sixth Street, Los Angeles 90014 and at 516 Fifth Avenue, New York 10036. There is a dependency of the club, if 300 people is a crowd for you. On the beautiful island of Tahaa, near Raiatea, the club has a colony of 13 waterside bungalows—without private baths—in a lush tropical setting.

Next stop for the jetter across the South Pacific is American Samoa . The new Pago Pago Inter-Continental, which opened in 1965, is one of the major hotels of the Pacific. Rooms are from $15 a single per day, European plan. It is built in handsome simulation of the native bure, or domed thatched-hut, architecture, on a jutting point of land beside the beautiful fjordlike harbor. While full of local charm, it is typically Inter-Continental in its amenities. A visitor contemplating out loud whether a martini would be a good bet was asked by the bartender, "Straight up or on the rocks, olive or twist?" At the same time, one is unable to buy even a razor in the tiny commissaries of the tin-roof town of Pago Pago, which has changed little, if at all, since Sadie Thompson fled there from Honolulu. There is closed-circuit television in all of the schools—but no road around the island. The chief tourist destination on an island of great natural beauty is the Chicken of the Sea tuna cannery. There is promise of excellent deep-sea fishing outside of Pago Pago's deep harbor—Leonard Yandall talks of snapper and jack by the boatload, marlin and sail-fish cruising 10 miles offshore as if this were a fisherman's nirvana. He has even invested in his belief: he has two 29-foot Luhrs fishing cruisers. Each has a single 160-hp Perkins diesel and is outfitted for parties of four or six sport fishermen. But Yandall has as yet had a hard go of it, averaging only one booking a week. He charges $20 per hour.

Fiji is to Australia and New Zealand what the Caribbean is to the U.S. In the past few months two new hotels have opened on Fiji that should attract the American tourist as well. One of them, the Fijian, on a small island connected, to the mainland by a causeway, is only 45 minutes by car from the Nadi jet strip. This is a 108-room complex designed by Pete Wimberly of Honolulu. Double rooms are from $18. It sits on a coconut plantation, with a nine-hole golf course, miles of white beach, a harbor inside a barrier reef and the beginnings of a serious water-sports endeavor. Harry Duttfield, managing director of Axminster Carpets, Ltd., was so excited by the sport fishing he had with Graham Wallace, the dean of Fiji's fishermen, that he has brought two Axminster-carpeted 45-foot fishing cruisers with Simrod fish detectors, twin diesels, Tycoon rods and Fin-Nor reels to work out of the new Fijian. They will take four fishermen for $130 a day to what Duttfield is calling Marlin Alley, 25 miles off the coast.