My host on the island of Tubuai was a kind, soft-spoken man named Daniel Tere.  He met me at the ship and I got into his quirky, beat-up old Renault, which wouldn’t start unless he locked and then unlocked the door.  It was Sunday, so absolutely everything was closed. Nevertheless, he showed me as much as he could—the local school, the island’s power station, the waste processing center, the Mairie (the local government offices), and the various churches (apparently 3 Mormon, 2 Catholic, and 7 Protestant; Protestant seems most popular on every one of these islands).   Everyone was either in church or walking or riding bicycles to and from it in their nicest outfits, which usually consisted of dresses for the ladies and shirts and ties for the gentlemen, with beautiful woven pandanus leaf hats worn by men and women alike. The women often wore hibiscus flowers in their hair. When I asked Daniel, “You don’t go to church today?” he replied, “No. Finish. 62 years. . . . Finish for me.” Despite his gentle nature, he seemed to be a bit anti-establishment, later expressing a pretty strong distaste for the fact that French Polynesia is governed ultimately by France.  “For me, France no good. Politicians . . . no good.” As I asked him more about himself, I learned that in his youth he used to be a champion spear fisherman who had in his early 30s represented the Austral Islands several times in the Oceania cultural competitions, held every year between the different island cultures of the South Pacific, including Australia, New Zealand, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Fiji, the Marquesas, the Society Islands, the Australs, Hawaii, and Easter Island. He claimed to have won a competition in 1991 by free diving to 35 meters and spearing a fish after a minute and half underwater. If this was true, it was an absolutely incredible feat.