Greetings from Bora Bora

Draw yourself a big, lumpy blob. Now draw a ring around the blob, so that it looks like a target for very poor archery students, and you have yourself a working map of Bora Bora. The blob is the island itself, while the ring is a series of smaller islands called motu. They surround and protect the big island, like a kind of entourage.

Bora Bora's airport is on the motu at the top of the ring, and it's an airport in the loosest sense of the word. You step out of the airplane, walk down the single airstrip (the same one the U.S. Army built during World War II), pass through a little open-air building with a couple of gift shops and people passing out flower leis, and end up at a pier. From the pier, several launches — most of them are about the size of fishing boats — depart for the various resorts on the island.

Most of the resorts are in the pattern of the Bora Bora Hotel, the island's first, and the first to come up with the idea of over-water bungalows, little thatched-roof cabins on pilings over the lagoon. The story goes that someone was shooting a movie on Bora Bora and there wasn't enough hotel space for the crew on the island, so they got the idea of housing people over the water. It's not as risky as it sounds — the cabins are out of the lagoon between the main island and the motu, rather than the South Pacific — although you can see all kinds of fish, including reef sharks and manta rays, while snorkeling through the coral beneath the bungalows.

People here say that almost everyone in Bora Bora is linked to the tourism industry in one way or another. Of course, people who tend to say that tend to be in the tourism industry; the folks on the main island selling bananas and breadfruit or running the local post office might see things differently, but they aren't saying anything.

All of that might change in a few days, however. There's an election coming, and President Gaston Flosse is facing stiff opposition from a party that supports independence from France. There are strong feelings about the election here, especially from the resort owners, who worry that the only way an independent French Polynesia could support itself is to tax the islands' hotels and resorts through the roof.

"Let's face it," one manager said to me last night, taking a long drag from his French cigarette. "President Flosse is corrupt. Chirac is probably also corrupt. We won't even talk about Bush. But we have to be practical here... As a businessman, I don't want to see an independent French Polynesia."

Would that be a good thing? It's hard to say. So far, it's hard to see the real Bora Bora beneath the cruise ships, all-inclusive resorts and the thousand-and-one stores selling black pearls and island clothes. Maybe I'll get a better sense of things as I travel to some of the other islands. There's a lot to see here, but in terms of understanding, it's still a big, lumpy blob to me.