Post #443622 by bigbrotiki on Mon, Mar 30, 2009 12:04 PM

Great stuff. A spark plug Lei, what a classic! And finally a photo of Fred! He looks like in his 50s-60s, so he was not the youngest when he opened the place. Wonder if he was a Trader Vic's customer when he lived in San Francisco. Do you have the image with the caption intact? Would love to use it eventually.

And that honeymoon cottage! I bet it originally looked much more Polynesian than in that 1981 photo... Arrgh! Now I wanna see original pics of it...and of the interior! They must have advertised it? Nobody kept anything from back then! Well, ol' Fred sure liked to honeymoon.

I need help with something else: The most imposing structure of the compound is that 50 foot high rectangular tower, which is referred to as "Manu- a chief's house" in the brochure:

Now Polynesian pop is often marked by mixing up ethnic info and using the Polynesian idiom purely for mumbo-jumbo effect, and that might be the case here, because anywhere I looked, MANU refers to "birds" in the Polynesian language. But what is that tower based on in the first place? It's structure reminds me most of what is called "oracle tower", as seen in re-built Hawaiian heiaus, like King Kamehameha's temple in Kona:

It was later built out to resemble this old print (BOT page 58):

Does anybody on TC have any more info on the design, purpose and use of these towers? Or any other suggestions WHERE in Polynesia a structure like this might have been used in ancient times?

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2009-03-30 12:11 ]