Two days after leaving Tahiti, we made landfall at Rimatara, the first of the Australs.  As soon as I jumped off the boat that had shuttled me to shore — carefully, as it was bucking around in the surf — a man took my arm and guided me very deliberately through the smoke of a small fire burning on the pier.  Later in the day, this ritual was explained to me. Back in the 1890s, yellow fever came to the Austral Islands and decimated the populations of all of the islands except for Rimatara. The locals attributed the sickness to bad spirits that had come ashore on the other islands.  From that point on, it became tradition that everyone coming ashore on Rimatara must pass through the smoke of a fire to be cleansed of their bad spirits. They burn a fire at the harbor any time a boat comes, and there is even a fire at the airport that you must pass as you enter the building, supposedly the only instance of an open flame being allowed at any airport in French Polynesia.