French Polynesia - Papeete Tahiti

 

Air Tahiti Nui Dreamliner - boarding at 11at night!

We flew in and out of Papeete which is the capital of French Polynesia.  The cruise started and ended there too.  It is a city of about 26,000 people on the island of Tahiti which has about 190,00 and the whole country is only 275,000.  I have to admit before planning the trip I did not realize that Tahiti was not a country but rather the most populous island in the country of French Polynesia which while an independent country is still related to France.  It was only on Tahiti that I saw a 4 lane road or a shopping area with multiple streets.  Papeete felt much bigger than say Kirkwood which is very similar in size.  I suspect the difference is that Kirkwood is a suburb of something bigger and Papeete is the bigger with lots of little suburbs/towns.

I had heard that Tahiti is what Hawaii used to be and there are definitely some similarities.  I remember being told in Hawaii that they use all of the vowels in a word - no silent ones.  Well Tahitian words are very similar like Papeete is not a 2 syllable word - it is 3: pa pay it.  The island of Tahiti is quite pretty - Papeete is a small city with a large port and a small airport that is half international. And the mountains and greenery and the blue water are everything you see on TV.

After landing at 4:30 in the morning - yes you read that correct 4:30 am, we wondered through a  combination customs/Covid line under a tent outside the airport terminal for around an hour.  We had to have been fully vaccinated and pass a covid test within 72 hours of leaving the USA and yet we still had another covid test to pass and complete contact tracing documents before we could get really into the country.  This test was unique - only one I have taken that included a swab of the mouth.  After that last covid test we were allowed to leave the airport and head to our hotel.  We spent a day and a night at the Intercontinental Resort Tahiti.  Arriving to find a very nice open air lobby area and a line with others from our flight waiting to check in - it might be around 6:30 by now.  Of course our room was not yet ready, but after giving our luggage to the bell man we went with friends to explore the place some.  As we wandered we smelled food and decided breakfast sounded like a good idea!  It was a large buffet with many types of food, some American, some French and some Polynesian.  Most was quite good.  We spent one day at the hotel.  With my cousin Kathy and her husband Scott we chose a pool with a grotto to hang out at for the day.  There was another pool with an infinity edge close to the water.  Our pool was next to the lagoonarium which Jeff chose to snorkel in a little bit.  Below is a picture of the pool area we spent the day at - me trying NOT to get a sunburn on my first day of the trip!  You can't really tell from the picture but the darker water is a different area - the lagoonarium.  A lagoonarium is a body of water with fish and other sea animals in it that is cultivated and maintained as a swimming area too.  Jeff was the only one of us to go in it.  He swam with lots of small colorful fish and a couple of 3 feet long blue fish.  The water was constantly coming and going through pipes to the nearby ocean so we saw crabs and other sea life on the other side of the walkway that were in the wild.

We all had looked at the website and were excited to have dinner at the onsite French

restaurant.  In addition to having a reputation for good food, it was also outside overlooking the water.  The picture below is of the restaurant.

Restaurant over the water

Our hotel room was billed as "ocean view" - well yeah sort of.  It was however a nice room with a balcony and a nice bed which was a welcome change after sleeping on an airplane the previous night.

Our water view room

The view from our balcony.  The water in the middle is the lagoonarium and the light blue is the pool and to the left is a lagoon.  Oh we weren't in the US for sure, notice the ashtray on our table!!

Same view just no balcony in it.

Next day was the big day - we were getting on our ship - yippee!!  I however am going to jump to our last day since that was the only time we spent touring the island of Tahiti.

During our last week on the ship, we had met a pair of friends who were travelling together and offered us the chance to join their tour of Tahiti  after we disembarked from the ship (we had 11 hours to spend before our plane departed).  The tour was from a group called Tours by Locals.  Our local is now a French Polynesian passport holder but she is originally from St Petersburg Russia!  Anyway in what turned out to be a day of pouring down rain we headed off for our tour of the island in her van.  First stop was  Marae Arahurahu  which was a religious place for the Tahitians before the missionaries arrived. It is  built of stones  cemented together.  It has an altar and stones for people to lean against while sitting and was pretty big say 50 by 70 feet.  After walking around the area we were all soaked.  Our next stop was a grotto - 2 people got out and checked it out; the rest of us hid in the van.  After that the tour turned into a scenic drive for awhile with our tour guide being very creative and resourceful to get us the best possible view from inside the vehicle!  From the nice, dry confines of our van we saw:  a couple of popular surfing beaches complete with surfers, a black sand beach, some pretty views from up high in the mountains and pretty views of small islands forming in the ocean.  Natalia our tour guide even drove on the black sand beach for us some to get better views - we were all surprised she could do that and not get stuck in the sand like you would at most beaches in the US.  We also got a little local excitement.  It was raining so hard that the acacia trees were falling.  Like anywhere a tree blocking the road caused traffic.  However the memorable one will be the one that fell 30 feet in front of us as we were stopped from another tree blocking the road!  Happily no one was hurt and we all went on our way.

Marae Arahurahu

trying to stay dry

black sand beach

Surfers

Arohoho blow hole

The rain did eventually lighten up and we got out and saw:  Venus point, Arohoho blow hole, and  a Fautaua waterfall at full force thanks to all the rain!  The rain did make the blow hole and the waterfalls more impressive and fun.   The 2 pictures below are of Jeff at the waterfall - it stopped raining. The waterfall is about a 10 minute walk behind him in the first picture.  He is standing by a bridge that is elevated because during the rains the little stream floods and kept washing away the bridges. 

Venus Point is a park on the beach with many interesting memorials and sights.  There is a lighthouse (the only light house in French Polynesia), a memorial to the crew of the Bounty, and one for Captain Cook.  It is on a black sand beach so I got to touch it - it was soft.  

The only light house was built by the father of Robert Louis Stevenson of it he wrote "Great were the feelings of emotion as I stood with Mother by my side and we looked upon the edifice designed by my father when I was sixteen and worked in his office during the summer of 1866."

Venus Point - Black sand beach

Venus Point

  

Venus point was pretty much the end of our tour.   From there our tour guide took us to the airport to wait for our plane to board.  We got to the airport and I had no idea where anything was which surprised me at first since I had just been there and it is a small airport, but then I remembered I hadn't really been in it when we landed as they had kept us in a small confined area.

If a cruise starts and stops at the same place, then how do you visit it three times?   Answer: You repeat the cruise.  Windstar offered us a deal we couldn't refuse and assisted in changing our flights.  Thus, at the end of our first week in French Polynesia we also had a few hours in Tahiti.  We spent that day checking out the marina our ship was in and some local shopping.  The marina was a mixture of commercial vessels such as ours, ferries, small cargo ships, a naval vessel and large private ships - yachts.  60 foot long sail boats were the norm.  Jeff and I spent a couple of hours walking around and staring.  Since the marina was right in town, we also did some shopping.  We went to a local open air market - both food and touristy things.  Jeff bought a tee shirt there from a man who does pencil drawings.  His artwork was great, but he usually had someone else run the shop for him and it showed!  For the life of him he could not work the credit card machine and finally had to ask someone from the shop next door to do it for him.  By this time, I am sweating up a storm which is even less enjoyable then normal when one has a mask on.  We finally paid for the shirt and went in search of a shop we had been sent to by someone on Bora Bora.  The store clerk had claimed it was the best shirt shop in the islands.  Now the four of us (Jeff, me, Kathy and Scott) were using a crude hand drawn map with 3 pieces of information on it and no shop name.  Amazingly we found the bank by the church and there was the shop.  It was a nice men's shirt shop so Jeff now owns a Hawaiian style shirt that fits him nicely and is unique.