Rain

"La pluie est traversière, elle bat de grain en grain,
quelques vieux chevaux blancs qui fredonnent Gauguin"

 

Some of you may know the lovely song by Coco Rosie entitled “Tahiti rain song”. I don’t know if either of the two sisters that form the Coco Rosie duo visited Tahiti before writing this piece and recording it in their bathroom (as was their entire first album), using the sound of water drops falling on buckets as accompaniment. But what I am sure of is, should they have visited the Marquesas Islands and chosen to sing a “Marquesas rain song”, they would have opened the tap outright, and perhaps the shower as well.

The Marquesas Islands are way up North from Tahiti (1500 km, roughly the same distance as between France and Finland), which in this hemisphere means that they are much closer to the Equator. The climate is as a result quite different, milder but a lot damper. I was lucky to arrive in Hiva Oa on a sunny afternoon, but such was not the case for Vincent, who had spent the week before my arrival without seeing the sunlight for more than ten minutes. And today is the third consecutive day of a very rainy spell, which means dark brown water running from the tap, swollen rivers vomiting tons of mud into the ocean, and roads becoming very dangerous  due to frequent landslides.

Overall, the weather changes very swiftly as on all islands, but it is fair to say that during the rain season it tends to alternate between heavy showers and torrential downpours. This surely explains why Englishmen and Brittons settled on the island by the dozens in the late 19^th century…