Escape to Tahiti! also, OMG I SAW DOLPHINS!

After the feast day, all three of us GSIs had the day off. So, Thursday escape to Tahiti!

We took the white truck and got on the ferry over to Tahiti Nui bright and early in the morning.

It is so nice to get away from the students. When you live just a house down from them, even on your day off you are pestered with questions. I feel like more of a mom than a GSI most of the time. I keep having to remind them to drink water, lock up their stuff, clean their dishes properly, pick up after themselves, don’t get spined by urchins, swim with a buddy, etc etc etc

 

Our escape was certainly long overdue. It is hard to believe we have already been here nearly a month! We have all been working really hard for this course, more than for any course we’d be GSIing for in Berkeley. I am sure the three of us all had grand plans of things we would get done in Mo’orea, and we have not accomplished most of those goals. Hopefully now that the student’s projects are set and we are getting more into our duty rotation I will find more time off.

Anyways, our adventure!

There is currently a drought here on Mo’orea and in many of the Pacific islands, with considerably less rain than in past years. That being said, it has been a bit rainy in the past couple of days, which is very good for the island. Fortunately, the rain clouds, and the sunlight and everything lined up perfectly and we got a great big RAINBOW to send us on our way. Mo’orea looks like some fairytale tropical paradise even moreso with a rainbow hanging over it. It reminds me a lot of pictures from Peter Pan of Neverneverland.

 

The island of Tahiti is a much newer island, and has a great geologically educational cone shape to it. From far away I find it more pretty, but up close you really see how inhabited the island is! I like Mo’orea better for its smaller, more quaint feel, but I’m excited to get to Tahiti Iti and the south side of the big island to experience a bit less of a metropolitan Tahiti.

After our rainbow treat, we also saw a whale breaching off the reef. I doubt I will ever get to post any whale pictures; they are quite tricky to get. We might go whale watching someday next week, so maybe I will eat those words.

I DID however get a picture of ….. DOLPHINS! There was a great pod of about 50 of them swimming in our wake as we came into the port. This is probably the most exciting thing that has happened to me since coming here. I have never seen dolphins before! They are so graceful and playful in the water. This is my best dolphin picture. DOLPHINS!!!!!

We parked the car and walked down to the big yellow church, a classic tourist orienting spot, and certainly a very pretty church indeed. 

 


The stained glass had some very interesting classic  Christian symbols mixed with local Tahitian symbols, such as flying fish, breadfruit, and coconuts. Mom and Dad, you will definitely enjoy going to mass here on Sundays; all the churches are so pretty!

To market to market to buy a paréo! The Marche Municipal was very lively for a Thursday morning, and I enjoyed seeing all the different foods and things for sale. I’d like to come on a weekend when the locals are more numerous than the tourists. It was interesting to be greated by ‘Bonjour’ before ‘Ia’rana’, but perhaps that is a Tahiti-Mo’orea difference more than anything. 

Lots of tourist junk for sale, like Hawaiian stamped purses, and shell necklaces and SHARK JAWS. Jenny and I got some strings of shells for making our own necklaces, and Bier got a new print shirt to blend in with the locals. We enjoyed some delicious fresh squeezed pineapple juice, and I had a great conversation with a guy selling healing balms that solve all your problems, from migraines to tummy aches, to insomnia and fatness. ‘This one is for fat people- you put it on the skin, and it makes you skinny from the inside out’. 

After the market we drove down the coast to the west, trying to find a dirt road leading up to a nice hike we’d been recommended. Alas, we couldn’t find the damn turnoff, so instead we stopped in at the Tahitian museum. It was really interesting to see all kinds of old artifacts and tools, especially the intricate fishing hooks. 

I found it interesting to learn many of the ornaments were made from human hair, especially old men’s white beards.

The kitchen display was interesting, since we’d just enjoyed our own Tahitian feast.

My favorite part was the giant clubs and spears used in warfare. How interesting it must have been to see hundreds of tattooed warriors wielding these impressive weapons in battle!

Of course the canoes were impressive, given how far and wide they travelled in their wooden vessels. Such impressive navigation skills, and what adventurous spirits to just shoot off in any old direction and hope to come upon land. Jenny played a bit of Pocahontas with one of the outriggers.

 

I was impressed at the size of the whale skull on display. Bigger than me!

We gave up on finding our obscure road after a while, and decided instead to go east a bit and see a different part of the island. We ended up at Venus point, the most northern tip of Tahiti. There was a beautiful black sand beach there, from which we could see our own home, Mo’orea.  We hadn’t brought lunch, so we grabbed a random hamburger and frites with rotui ananas juice and enjoyed it on the beach. Hmmm, delicious!

We only had time for a quick swim in the water, but I am so glad we did because it was lovely to swim with barefeet for once. The sand was so soft between our toes, and the beach was so peaceful and quiet. I look like a postcard in front of Mo’orea on this nice beach, don’t I?

We zipped back and made it on the ferry to get back in time for our Tahitian dance lessons with Sam (to continue every Friday until the end of the course, so hopefully I learn to swivel those hips!). Home sweet home!

Bier was pooped after our day of vacationing, and it was definitely a well-deserved break. Such a nice day away!

Of course, we were also glad to be home; how can you not be happy when you live somewhere so beautiful, with such clear and blue water and skies!?

Tahitian feast

So, I am writing this on Friday, and we have now been abandoned by all professors. It is a GSI-only show for the next week and a bit!

To celebrate the departure of our two first illustrious professors (Pat and Jere) we had a delicious Tahitian feast on Wednesday. It is also the 20th anniversary of this course, and after seeing the logistical work going into it, I'm impressed it has continued uninterrupted for so long! It is great that there is such a community of alumni of this course. 

The best part of the feast was that the students and all of us got to help with preparing the food, as well as weaving the baskets that food was cooked and served in. 

First there was the grating of the coconut. We used these ingenious little stool tools that help you scrape out the coconut. To get coconut milk, you squeeze the ground coconut through some cheesecloth. The dried stuff gets used in cakes, and for our feast, in coconut bread (mmmm!).

The coconut milk got used for us in making some poisson cru. Poisson cru is a traditional dish, which is very slowly growing on me. I don’t like eating fish very much, so eating raw fish is a whole other ball game. Usually it is tuna, which I am told because is a deep sea fish has fewer parasites and is therefore safer to eat raw. I am so glad none of the students are working on fish parasites, or I might not eat fish again.

Here are some students making po’e. This involves mashing up various vegetables and roots, in our cases tapioca and squash, and the wrapping in banana leaves to cook in the oven, and then mixing with coconut milk to make a sweet dessert.

Breadfruit (uru) is an old staple which here we are peeling with a cut cowrie shell. I think the students are also peeling the taro, which is going to get baked until it turns deep purple. Everyone learned how to weave, with some people picking it up faster than others. Jenny was getting frustrated because her baskets were not perfect.

The coconut fronds do lend themselves well to weaving. Here are us three GSIs with the serving dishes our food will soon be displayed in. These more beautiful weaved plates were done by the locals (they ended up using our half-assed creations for holding food food cooking).

One student, Courtney, picked it up better than others and made herself a little hat!

Aha, the fire pit (hima’a)! I didn’t get any pictures of everything getting put in, because I was playing with a little girl named Sherina, who is the daughter of one of the station employees. But I did get some pictures of the epic unveiling, so here we will see the process in reverse.

First, the sand which has been covering everything is shoveled off. Already it is steaming from the inside.

Then you take off the burlap covers which have been keep off the sand and holding in the heat.

Next are some banana leaves, and for the modern hima’a, they use a metal cage. Traditionally the food would have been placed directly onto the hot stones in the bottom of the pit. The cage helps keep everything contained and makes it easier to take out. 

Banana leaves cover all of the food, which is contained in pots, our weaved baskets, wrapped in leaves, and I think the pig was just laid directly onto the hot stones in the bottom of the basket.

Our students all helped with taking the food out of the now burnt baskets and arranging it nicely on the platters. 

Everyone seemed to have had a tiare flower (the white ones) or some other behind their ear. I understand that putting it on the left means you are taken, and on the right means you are interested, but I think there has been so much confusion over this that half of us are getting it backwards!

The food looked so delicious! Here is a picture of the dessert end of the table, with po’e, and baked coconut bread (on the left) and some breadfruit.

My plate was quite overflowing, because even though I only took a small bit of everything, I ended up taking too much! Ok, let’s see what we have. Starting with the big purple root vegetable (taro!), going clockwise, we have the banana po’e, coconut bread, squash po’e, baked tapioca, poisson cru, pig, more pig cooked with spinach, chicken stew with carrots, fafaru (more on this below), and baked breadfruit, all with some delicious coconut milk for dipping. Delicious!

So, fafaru.  This special dish is definitely ‘interesting’. It is a local delight for some, but not for all (Hianano, the station manager told me she hates the stuff). It is fermented fish. Jelma, who works here too, told me that they take a fresh fish, usually tuna, but you can make it with almost anything. Cut it up. Put it in a jar with fresh seawater, for three days. After three days of sitting in the seawater, you rinse it a few times with more seawater, and then add the fafaru sauce, which is made of other fermented fishes, for flavour. Hmmm, not delicious. I tried a bit of it, and it was so, um, unusual, that it threw off the rest of my meal. I am glad I tried it, but I don’t think I will be eating this again!

We enjoyed a lot of good company in the fare potee (gathering house). The pig seemed to enjoy himself too. And Bier should did enjoy the pig skin!

Of course the night was rounded out by some music and dancing. Strangely, some country singer (center) from LA joined us for our feast, and he sang a few pretty bad songs after eating. One of his songs about Mo’orea included the phrase ‘dolphin holding a bottle of rum, meet me at the tiki bar’. Reeeeeeally bad singing, but I think Tahiri, one of Hinano’s sons, had taken them out to film a music video where the shark feeding happens, and paid him so much for it, it would have been rude not to invite them. Fortunately it wasn’t long until the traditional Tahitian music started up.

I finished my night by breaking into the student dorms since the key I gave them didn’t work in their door (woops). I am not sure if there is photographic evidence, but that is probably for the best. I am sure they are glad they didn’t have to sleep outside, thought the fare potee would have been pretty spacious and comfortable.

Hoorah! What a delicious feast and great night!

Snorkel pictures!

As promised, here are some exciting snorkeling pictures!

Here are some pictures of cushion stars and their associated shrimp. One of our students, Eric, is doing a project on the relationship between the two. They are pretty cute.

Here I am snorkeling! I look pretty awkward in the water- that is almost a 'queen wave'- but I'll work on that.

 The reef near the Hilton (where we went to snorkel) is really cool and 3-dimensional looking. This makes for some cool optical illusions. This picture looks like it is two morphed into one or something.

There are lots of amazing fishes on the reefs. It is often hard to get a good picture of them because they move so quickly! I captured these two butterfly fishes, and it's probably the best fish picture I got all day.

I love the way the water surface looks from underwater. This picture makes me feel like I am the littler mermaid! 

 This spiny guy is the voracious crown-of-thorns sea star. Periodically it will have outbreaks and devour the reef. The spines have a poison that isn't very pleasant, so I vetoed a student project that wanted to focus on them. I have no more interest in going to the hospital, thank you very much!

 

This is a beautiful tridacna clam. They come in all shapes, sizes and colours in the reef. One of the students made a comment about how our 18-girl and 3-boy contingent is a clam jam. I’ll let you interpret that as you will!

This fuzzy picture of a hole is actually a picture of an octopus, Octopus cyanea. I’ve seen three of them now, and they are one of the species that Jenny studies. You can see the white eye in the top middle of the picture there, and some little suckers in the bottom of the picture. It is too bad I couldn’t get a better picture; next time I’ll have to take video and try to capture the awesome colour changing abilities of these fun guys.

 

These are some of my favorite creatures on the reef, known as ‘christmas tree worms’. They are burrowing worms who filter feed on plankton after burrowing into a coral head. They have brilliant colours, ranging from yellows, oranges, greens, blues and reds. One of our students is doing a project on how they are dispersed in the reef and how that relates to the various currents of the water. I am pretty excited about this project, because it’s the sort of thing I would have done if I were a student here.

I really like this picture showing some live corals. It’s kind of how I imagine a reef looking. The small branching one a bit to the left is Acropora, and the other chunky looking one more to the right I think is Pocillopora. I am working on my reef creature identification skills, so correct me if I ever get this stuff wrong (Julie, I’m looking at you here!).

 

This spiny Diadema urchin is of the same type that spined one of my students. I’m working on getting some pictures of that incident, since I am hoping it won’t happen again! Her foot has actually healed up pretty well.

Unfortunately this poor sea cucumber did not fare so well. The poor guy is going to have a hard time scuttling about now with all those spines in him/her.

Another fish picture that worked! I have a million pictures of fish butts, so I have to celebrate when I actually capture their faces. This guy I think is a lemonpeel angelfish, though it’s quite a bit more orange than some of the others I have seen around.

  

This is Jenny. She has picked up a triton here, I think ‘triton’s trumpet’. I am going off of our reef creature ID book, and the fact it looks like triton’s trumpet from the little mermaid. You may at this point realize that all of my marine ID skills come from the little mermaid or from finding nemo. This is why it’s great to have a buddy like Jenny to swim around with! She knows what is safe to pick up or not, which makes things a lot more fun, and definitely more safe. I almost picked up a cone shell last week (which is a nasty venomous snail that can kill you). Woops!

These two pictures are some of my favorite fish! They are the spotted daschylus, a type of fish that associates with anemones (like nemo!). One of our students is looking at personality in these fishes, and as much as I don’t like ‘behavioural syndrome’ work (because it basically aims to ‘explain’ why behavioural variation exists, in an adaptive way, and is statistically flawed, but that’s another rant), her project will be pretty cool. I think they live in family groups, but as far as I know they are a pretty under-studied fish. I like the more territorial fish like these guys, because they don’t run away nearly so quickly, and you know where to find them. Also, I love symbiosis, so anemone fish rock my ocean world!

This spiny fellow is another urchin- Echinometra- which is a bit friendlier than the Diadema. One student project is going to look at the various urchins and their relationship to sunlight. They will move their spines towards you when they sense a shadow, which can be a bit disconcerting. Many of our night snorkelers have seen this quite dramatically when they are out there with their dive lights. I am hoping to get out night snorkeling soon- be prepared for a whole new batch of sea creature pictures when that happens!

And last but not least, the beautiful rainbow wrasses. I have to go drive around some people (my main job is as chauffeur here!), so I’ll leave it at that. I hope you enjoyed my sea creature pictures!

An update on a long week...

Well, today is Sunday, and we have hit the two week mark! Only 7 weeks left!

This past week was indeed both busy and a lot of work. After our day of transects on Friday, we had a rather comically disastrous stats workshop on Saturday. Bier and I tried to explain principle components analysis to the class, and they were definitely really lost. I can't believe you don't need to take biostats to graduate with a biology degree from Berkeley! We did however create a few running jokes, and they were really pleased to acquire one of my favorite expressions: massaging the data. There will certainly be much data massage in the coming weeks.

Saturday night was really fun; we had dinner (delicious curried shrimp!) and many drinks with Pat and Jere up at their bungalows. We heard many good stories and shared a lot of laughs. Unfortunately, the whole affair put me out of commission for much of our Sunday day off. Alas.

Monday we fired right back up with things. We had a few office hours and in the afternoon the students all presented their research ideas. Certainly a diversity of interests! It was pretty hilarious that very few students picked up on our millions of project ideas we'd been throwing out all week. Oh well, a scientist always has more ideas than they have time to pursue!

The rest of the week was a bit of a blur. I had some office hours Tuesday to help out students, and Wednesday I was the grocery driver, and also hosted some more office hours. Thursday I went with a group to hike the 3 coconuts trail again and explore their project ideas. My little arthropod clutch was very enthusiastic, which was encouraging. I would definitely be keen as them to do behaviour work here, since there are not that many mosquitoes at all!

Friday was somewhat relaxed, but there was the first of what I really hope is not a trio, just a duo, of injuries. Poor ole Roxanne fell off her bike and smashed up her knee pretty good. I spent most of the afternoon driving her around first to the local doctor, and then to the rural 'hospital' to get her wound cleaned and stitched up. The pharmacy bill was interesting (they wrote a prescription for gauze and bandages)! Her biggest disappointment was the advice to stay out of the water for two weeks, so hopefully she heals fine and gets back out to snorkeling soon.

Yesterday (Saturday) I spent a lovely morning snorkeling with Jenny. I took a million pictures, and will have to upload them in a separate post. Such cool things! We were over by the Hilton, and we oggled the accommodations there. Over-water bungalows would be super cool to stay in!

Saturday at 5 pm we enjoyed a cocktail party up at Jere's bungalow and the students made some great food. Salad, stuffed peppers, warm brie, bruschetta, and grilled pineapple with chocolate. Ridiculous! This is certainly a theme so far with the students- elaborate dinners. These kids sure know how to cook! I have probably already mentioned this before. So far we've had pineapple fried rice, home made pad-thai, baked pineapple and coconut pie (homemade crust!), and french toast with pineapple sauce with the students. Oh, did I mention they are obsessed with pineapple?!

Everyone had a pretty good evening with the professors, and I managed to migrate us out of there by 8:30 or 9. The party continued at the fare potee (hut of gathering in Tahitian) where we danced on the sandy floor in our barefeet. Bier and I bonded over how we aren't up to date with the modern dance music. I need to get out to a club sometime to update my music know-how.

Some of the students got excited and jumped off the dock in the dark, and thus happened the second (of the hopefully duo) of class injuries. I will certainly have to get some pictures from a student to post.

Poor ole Manu got stuck by a sea urchin in her foot. She had more than 30 spines stuck in her. The students got her foot into hot water pretty fast, which was good, and she was super calm about the whole situation. I am not sure how I got elected (I probably volunteered) but I pulled those damn things out of her foot one by one very carefully. You can't use tweezers because the spines are hollow and fragile, so I had to grab them with my hand and pull firmly but gently. The students made a 'Diadema rap' and one of the lines was 'urchin spines and nematocysts, good thing we've got an entomologist!'

Today has been a pretty stressful day of looking over student project proposals. It is quite evident some of them are not taking this class very seriously, but moreso very evident that the undergraduate Berkeley curriculum SUCKS. I won't say more about that to avoid going into too much of a rant. Until next time (look out soon for awesome snorkeling pictures!)

Doctor/mom Virginia!