Crazy Tahiti Paradise: Tales of the South Seas (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9782907776363)

Alex W. du Prel is an expatriated American living since 1975 on the islands of Bora Bora and Moorea, next to Tahiti. After studies in France, Germany, Spain and the USA, he worked as a civil engineer on large construction projects in the Caribbean and South America. At that time, he also built a thirty-six foot yacht that was to become his home for twelve years. To keep a freedom of travel, the author (a civil engineer) engaged in many, different professions: surveyor, welder, movie actor, mechanic, hotel resort chief engineer, construction superintendent, hotel manager, translator, cook, government consultant, island manager, journalist and editor. He sailed single-handed across the Pacific Ocean in 1973, then spent a year visiting many isolated islands and atolls of the Central and South Pacific, some uninhabited. In 1977, he built and operated on the island of Bora-Bora the "Bora-Bora Yacht Club", a small hotel that soon became the meeting place of all long distance sailors of the time. He sold the Yacht Club in 1982 and settled as a farmer, consulting engineer and free-lance journalist on the island of Moorea. From 1985 to 1988 he managed Marlon Brando's atoll of Tetiaroa. Since 1991, he is the founder and editor of Tahiti-Pacifique Magazine, the only French language monthly news magazine in the South Pacific. A truly international man, a specialist on South Pacific affairs and Polynesian societies, the author speaks six languages and writes in three.