Tuesday 31 October - a lazy day

We have had a very, very lazy day today. We have lounged around at the hotel, beside the water, watching the kayaks and little boats go by. A few kids enjoyed the water in the lagoon, swimming with the fishes, and there were a couple of birds building a nest in a tree near us. We had a little walk to a local shop and bought some bits for a late lunch on our terrace. It has been another sunny day, with a few clouds, the humidity gradually builds as the afternoon wears on, and it will cool down a little when the sun goes down.

We will be meeting for our first group dinner tonight, but quite a few travellers won’t be arriving until after dinner.

Monday 30 October - A trip into Papeete

Today was planned as a free day - to help us get over the tiring day of travel yesterday. Ian slept until 5 a.m., which was normal for him. I was awake at 3, 5, and again at 6. We took our time getting ready and went for breakfast just after 8. There was a nice buffet breakfast and also made to order omelette‘s. The French seem to do very small serving sizes of coffee, so we took our time and had several cups.

We walked around the resort, it really is a beautiful place, the views across the water to the island of Moorea are truly spectacular. We found a seat with a good view to take photos and a couple not too far away noticed our tour company address label tag on my day bag - they introduced themselves, we’re on the same tour. We spent most of the morning chatting, they are from Kamloops and have toured with the same company many times before. We haven’t seen anyone else (in our group yet), but suspect more will arrive tonight or tomorrow.

We took a taxi into town, Papeete, just before noon and had a walk around. 

We walked around the outside of the Notre Dame Cathedral, unfortunately, the inside was closed today so we didn’t get to see the stained glass windows or wood carvings. The cathedral is the oldest Roman Catholic Church on the island and was completed in 1875. 

We continued on to Bougainville Park, named after the French Explorer (Louis Antoine Bougainville), it is a very small park with a stream filled with koi and other fish. We continued on and came to the French Polynesian Assembly. The grounds were open to wander around, so we did, at the back was a royal pool where Tahiti’s last independent monarch Queen Pomare IV is said to have regularly bathed. Before the Assembly and High Commissioner’s house were built here, it was the grounds of the palace of the Tahitian monarchs. There are plenty of fish in the water now. Apparently, giant mottled eels live here too, but we didn’t see any.

We doubled back and walked along the waterfront, there was quite a bit of construction going on so we couldn’t always get to the waters edge but could see lots of boats, big and small.

Papeete is a fairly busy place, lots of traffic and mostly local people. Some are obviously poor, and they could be seen resting in the parks along with the wild hens, roosters and baby chicks (we saw everywhere). Nobody bothered them, or us. People were very helpful, without us asking, when looking at our map they would come and ask if they could help us - and when realizing we didn’t speak French they would find an English speaker to help - very friendly indeed.

We took a taxi back to the resort and had a quiet afternoon, on one of our two balconies, as we had an afternoon rain shower. It has been a hot and humid day so we needed to top up our liquids!

We took a walk off the resort tonight to get some dinner. About a five minute walk was a park on the waters edge that has three food trucks there every evening from 6. There are some outside tables and chairs set up and by the time we got there it was packed with locals. We bumped into the couple we’d met this morning and we managed to find a table and ordered pizza, it was very good, we were all impressed. 

Sunday October 29 - Let’s get going again!

 Today has been a long travelling day. Red Car Service picked us up at 1:30 a.m. to get us to the airport in plenty of time for our first flight at 6:30 a.m. It was a United Airlines flight to San Francisco, which took about 6 hours. We then had a layover of 4 hours before our second flight, from San Francisco to Papeete, Tahiti, which was scheduled to take almost 9 hours. You know what they say about “Best laid plans”. We ended up having a four-hour delay while they did a repair on the plane. The GPS wasn’t working - I guess they have to have two devices operational so it had to be fixed, makes sense that we’d want to land on the right island 😎. We eventually landed and found ourselves in a lovely little airport. We could see the luggage carousel from the Customs arrival desk. There were lots of ‘greeters’ and we even had some musicians performing. Once through we quickly found our transfer to the hotel was waiting for us, we had them wait a few minutes while we used the ATM and off we went. The hotel is only 10 km away so it was a short drive. We checked in and we’re told we’d been upgraded to a suite overlooking the garden. It has two bedrooms with ensuites, a kitchen, living room and large balcony/terrace. It’s huge, I will have to explore more in the morning, it’s now midnight (6a.m. in Toronto) and bed is calling.