SeriesTravel by proxy – Smell the scent of frangipani trees, put your hand on the bark of a mape, this tree as if it came out of a fairy tale, get lost in the colors of the Papeete market … For Johnny’s lyricist or Céline Dion, who has lived in Tahiti for fifty-five years, the Polynesian island is a feast for the senses.
It is an old tree, stunted, gnarled, twisted but still strong. When he passed in front, a teenager, Patrice Guirao stopped each time to look at him and the house he was protecting. Today he can see it from his window. When success allowed him, he took it up here, in a truck, on the side of the hill, in front of the house, which he too had moved to rebuild it on his land. How can we better anchor ourselves in a land than by reinventing it?
His name is little known but his words are on a lot of lips: lyricist Art Mengo (his brother-in-law …), Johnny Hallyday, Céline Dion, Natasha St-Pier, and author of musicals The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra and The sun King, Patrice Guirao, born in Algeria, arrived at the age of 12 in Tahiti, with his parents. He hasn’t left him since. Inventor of the first Tahitian private detective, Al Dorsey, in a series of successful detective novels published by Au vent des îles then in the collection “Police points”, he still likes to walk around, abandoning his car as soon as he can. to go on foot.
“Tahiti, for me, is a feast for the senses. Everywhere I go, I satisfy them. This is how I like to see my walks on the island: a long walk on the road of the senses. There are places where the gaze no longer knows where to look because it is so greedy for the delicacies that are offered to it. “ His long walks take him to the heights of an island whose lagoons we know more than the mountain, but which still rises to 2,200 meters.
The viewpoint of Mount Aorai, the island’s third peak, requires four hours of sustained walking on a magnificent path and at times a little difficult.
On the peninsula, the Taravao plateau almost offers a Norman landscape with its large expanses of green and fatty grass. “There are places where you can relentlessly inspire fragrances that flutter like hordes of butterflies. “
Every garden, every frangipani, every kahaia (native tree of Polynesia), every wreath gives off it. Every visitor smells them as soon as they arrive: tradition dictates that a necklace of flowers is passed around their neck. Patrice Guirao likes to go in front of the small airport, where the braiders of these necklaces gather. “It’s a real tradition, not just a tourist trap. I find this magical place. “
Gauguin, on his perched banyan tree
These perfumes, he finds them in what is called “the bush”, the “fenua Aihere”, name given to the southern part of Tahiti, between the end of the asphalt road and the cliffs of Te Pari. The mangroves rub shoulders with the mapes forest, these trees “Directly out of the books of tales and legends”, also called “Tahitian chestnut trees”, 30 meters high and 1.50 meters in diameter and on which large flat buttresses develop which make the oldest of them like wrinkles. When they are scratched, a red liquid gushes out that resembles blood from a wound.
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