We are on vacation in Tahiti (by airplane). Since Tahiti is such a special place to us, we wanted to write some posts about what it has been like to come back again.
Day 1 – Sunday
Our flight arrived at 6:00 am. Keith and our friend Rose were astounded to see chickens running around the airport’s parking lot. Christi and Eric informed them we’d be seeing chickens everywhere.
We rented a car and headed straight to the condo that we had rented in a suburb to the southwest of Papetee, the main city in Tahiti. The condo is near the airport and Marina Tahina. The condo had looked nice online, and we were pleased to find that it was even nicer than anticipated. The best part, though, is there is a view of the anchorage where Kosmos was anchored twelve years ago:
After dropping off our luggage, we made the short trek to our beloved Carrefour (which is a high-end grocery store plus a Target rolled into one) to stock up on groceries. Eric and Christi were flooded with memories from twelve years ago: dinghying into the marina, then walking to the store; how excited we were to have such a huge selection of food after so many months of bare-bones grocery stores on the rest of the islands that we’d visited prior to arriving in Tahiti.
After we returned from shopping, Eric and Keith tested out their new snorkeling equipment in the pool at the condo complex. Everything worked fine.
The red-eye flight had messed up all of our body clocks, so we spent the rest of the day resting in the condo and went to bed early. Here is the sunset from our balcony:
Day 2 – Monday
We were all still jet-lagged, so we were wide awake in the wee hours of the morning.
Once it was late enough in the morning for stores to open, Rose and Christi went to the airport to change money and went back to Carrefour to pick up some items we’d forgotten the day before. They also stopped by a fruit stand to get baby pineapples and our beloved pampelmousse.
After getting back, Rose and Christi tested their snorkeling equipment in the pool, along with Eric and Keith. Unfortunately, Christi’s new full face mask was missing a tiny, translucent piece of plastic that is critical for not fogging up the mask. We don’t know if the mask was shipped without it or if it popped off at home between being unpacked from shipping to repacked into the suitcase. Fortunately, we had brought our old snorkel masks along too, so she could still go snorkeling.
We decided to visit Venus Point, a park at the edge of Mataivai Bay, about 8 km east of downtown Papetee. It’s one of the more historical landmarks in terms of western influence on Polynesia. It was visited by several European ships in the 1700s. Samuel Wallis arrived in the Dolphin in 1767, staying for a few weeks and introducing the locals to metal and the concept of guns. Captain Cook arrived in the Endeavor in 1769. One of Captain Cook’s assignments had been to track the transit of Venus across the face of the sun from the Southern Hemisphere to help calculate the distance between the sun and the Earth. He did so from this spot — hence the name. He set up a fort and observatory; we couldn’t find any information on how long Cook stayed. The HMS Bounty spent six months there in 1788 prior to the infamous mutiny. After the mutiny, 16 of the mutineers returned to Tahiti, where they settled permanently. One of the local families, the Pomares, took advantage of the fact that the mutineers had guns. The Pomares hired the mutineers as mercenaries and declared themselves the new monarchy. The London Missionary Society ships arrived at Venus Point in 1797. LMS partnered with the new king and queen to spread Protestantism and eliminate the locals “wicked” ways.
Nowadays, Venus Point is a nice park with a playground and a beautiful black sand beach; a popular place for the locals to hang out. Eric and Christi had visited Venus Point twelve year ago and thought Keith and Rose would enjoy it
The main attraction at Venus Point is the first lighthouse built in the South Pacific, in 1867. Interestingly enough, during WWII, it was painted to look like a coconut tree, making it invisible to Japanese plane, and locals hid in the building.
Here are some other pictures of Venus Point:
After Venus Point, we drove around Papetee trying to find a reasonably priced wet-suit for Rose. No luck with that. We did find a small marina on the east side of Papetee. As we drove by in the car, we noticed that the quay in downtown Papetee was now a real marina with floating docks and finger slips! We also noticed that the scenic waterfront walkway was dotted with several playgrounds. We don’t remember playgrounds twelve years ago, but then again, we didn’t have a child and weren’t looking for them, either.
Beyond the upgrades to the waterfront, Papetee looked mostly the same to us — a small city with relatively good first world infrastructure despite the fact that is socio-economically low. Rose wasn’t impressed.
We went back to the condo to rest until dinner. Even though we had groceries, we were too tired to make a meal for ourselves. We were dismayed to find that most restaurants are closed on Mondays, leaving few options. Even though we were anxious to eat local cuisine, we wound up going to a restaurant that served American food called Route 66.
Fortunately, they had poisson cru, which is the staple meal here in French Polynesia. It is raw fish with veggies in coconut milk; kind of like Polynesian ceviche. Each island makes it a little differently, but they are all delicious. Eric and Christi had been craving poisson cru, and it was delicious. The salad was great and the fries were good, but we were unimpressed with the burgers.
After dinner we went to Mahana Park, which was relatively close to Route 66, to scope out a potential snorkeling spot. Here are some pictures:
