Word: oa
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...Gauguin was a revolutionary," says my tour guide Tim as we drive through the rainforests of Hiva Oa. "He fought against the local church, he fought for the rights of us Marquesans. He lived according to his own values, and we appreciate him here still...
...With ornate geometrical tattoos covering his body, Tim is not the kind of guy you'd expect to wax poetically about a 19th century French painter. But then Hiva Oa is not your run-of-the-mill tourist island. With just 2,000 lucky inhabitants and one hotel, it's a place where the sight of a boy washing his horse in the surf on an empty black-sand beach, or copra drying in someone's front yard, is common. Hiva Oa is the second largest island in the Marquesas, a distinct group of 14 isles within French Polynesia, located...
...Destitute and unwell, the painter lived on Hiva Oa in his two-story thatched Maison du Jouir, or "House of Bliss." A former stockbroker, Gauguin had left his wife and five children years earlier to pursue his artistic dream at the end of the earth. (One of his letters home explains: "Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will.") He took up with various Polynesian women, and his freewheeling ways made the local missionaries livid. Less than two years after his arrival, he was dead...
...Hiva Oa's tiny main town of Atuona is where you'll find the Paul Gauguin Cultural Center, tel: (689) 927 897, a museum that opened in 2003 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of his death. Galleries are adorned with reproductions of Gauguin's work and writings from his famous Tahitian period. Full-figured island women in bright colors glow from the muted walls. The rooms are themed around Gauguin's quotes such as "escaping to reach art" and "becoming part of a primitive culture...
...Later, I watch the sunset from the infinity pool of the isle's token nod to tourism, the Hanakee Hiva Oa Pearl Lodge, www.pearlresorts.com. I realize that I can make out the hillside Calvaire Cemetery, where Gauguin's grave site is lovingly festooned with flowers. As vivid stars begin to pop out of the sky, I think of the painter's words: "Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity...