This is Moorea.
It's where I'm going to be for the next ten weeks, more or less. This tiny little island is a satellite of Tahiti, about the same size as San Francisco and in some ways the same texture in an oddly exaggerated way. It's full of hills, with some jagged ones sticking straight towards the sky, covered by a carpet of green. A lagoon with its own barrier reef surrounds the island, the building blocks of the atoll that an already eroding Moorea will eventually become.
Too be honest, beyond that little bit, I don't know much about the island. I've spent the last three weeks in a 9-5 lecture series preparing me for this trip, which I'll be taking with twenty two other biology minded peers. I've sat through lectures on volcanology, coral reef development and death, dangerous marine mammals, the ecology, economy, and politics of the place, equipment lectures, and a slew of other things. And I have my own goals for what I want to accomplish during my stay in Moorea. I want to find bug (insects, to you nitpicky ones out there murmmering about hemipterans). Big bugs, small bugs, flashy ones, not so flashy ones. A lot. And a whole great diversity of them. Some specific project (probably dealing with native parasites vs. imported agriculture ones) will come of this, but that's all I've figured for myself now.
But in my pack, there's a pith helmet. And a travel watercolor set. And a variety of sketchbooks, pencils, and pens. Here's my dirty little secret: As if enacting some romantic notion by going on this trip, I really, really want to be a classic naturalist. Like mid 1800s naturalist. With giant packs of specimens and funny hats and three piece suits and epic facial hair. Like in sepia photos and all that glorious memorabilia.
Yeah. So I'm going to be leaving for Moorea in a few hours. I'm writing this entry in an airport, crowded around with fifteen other chattering young adults, all of us concerned about what we'll be doing once we get there. I know what I want to do there. I think we all do, to some extent. The great question is what, exactly, will we end up knowing at the end of it?

Photo: NY Times