French Polynesia - Oct
Sorry in advance for all of the shirtless old guy photos...and this was going to be much shorter but I had some 'happenings' that I wanted to remember.
French Polynesia
Had a strange happening yesterday…or today…or maybe tomorrow, now??? We flew from Auckland, at 4:00 PM on the 22nd (October) and arrived in Papeete, Tahiti at 10:00 PM, ON THE 21st. We’ve flown east a lot but we’ve never gained a day before. My watch is ALL confused…the step counter went from 8K for the 22nd to 297 when we got to immigration (back on the 21st) and now at 7:30 am (the next morning, but back on the 22nd) it’s already at 8500. When we left Auckland, we were 18 hours ahead of StL (US Central time zone) - when we landed in Papeete (Pa-pay-ay-tay) we were 5 hours behind StL. I’m all messed up…I hope this doesn't screw up my Wordle streak.
As always, more words below the pictures.
All while snorkeling!
Yes, I'm a child...
6 in the morning and your door is locked. The bathroom is on the OTHER side of the door. You're old and really need to go to that bathroom. A guy in a pink bathrobe has to break into it from the other side.
French Polynesia is made up of a group of islands and archipelagos, including the famous ones Tahiti, Bora Bora and Moorea and then a lot of smaller, more exotic spots, like Rangiroa and Tupai. Unfortunately we only went to Moorea and Tahiti and should have looked into trading some days for Bora Bora, as we heard from everyone we met that it was much better than Tahiti. And honestly, after spending some time on Tahiti I think we definitely would have been happier heading to another island for a few/most of those days. We went to the island of Moorea for a few days, which is a 40 minute ferry ride from Papeete (Tahiti). You can see the island from Papeete - it’s not big and takes about an hour to drive around but had a lot more usability than Tahiti. There aren’t many easy to reach beaches on the islands but once you find them they are beautiful. The islands are mostly surrounded by barrier reefs about a km out, so the beaches are calm and shallow, mostly sandy and made up of that insanely beautiful blue water you see in National Geographic. Even our untouched iPhone pics look unbelievable and capture the different shades of blue that you don’t think should exist outside of National Geographic or an iMax movie. But, lesson to you from this rookie traveler, ask yourself why the cruise ships don’t dock at a particular island BEFORE you go there. If there is a line at a restaurant, you go there, if there is no line at an island but only an airport, find another island!
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If you know us you know that the highlight of our travel is meeting people. I know there was a point in our trip, probably around day 27, that wife thought to herself “I don’t know if I can do this for much longer with JUST listening to this guy speaking to me all the time and asking stupid questions and touching me and asking MORE stupid questions and now he has that annoying Oklahoma accent…and is there a knife in this hotel room????” Really, ANY chance to meet ‘OTH’ people is a blessing for her and just an excuse for me to ask someone else annoying questions. We met Marc (you know he’s Canadian or French already because he is with a ‘C’…he’s Canadian) at our hotel on Moorea right away. We were sitting next to him at hotel dinner and immediately asked him to move all of his food over to our table and eat with us. And then we didn’t really separate from him for the next few days. Marc and I are almost the same age and, like us, he’s retired with no kids. He travels about 6 months, minus one day, each year, and has been traveling since he was young, so we had lots to talk about. One of the highlights of the entire trip happened because of Marc. He was going on a whale watching snorkeling tour and called us about ten minutes before it was set to take off and said they had a couple of cancellations if we wanted to go. Naturally we said yes and ran to the boat dock just in time to get on the boat.
Going whale watching, like diving, often means getting on a small boat past the breakwaters, into the larger swells. It also means that you might pay a lot of money and not see anything. Fortunately the swells were not much more than a couple meters, so it was a fun ride. Even better, we saw a huge mother humpback whale and her baby and jumped in immediately. Lyd is still nursing a bad arm so she had to stay in the boat, but Marc and I, and our newest good friends, Csaba and Lara, jumped in the water immediately and started following our guide Henoit (?) through the swells to where they thought the whale would resurface. Henoit was definitely in shape - that kid was pulling a boogie board and half towing the other three while I trailed off to the side. I’m a strong swimmer and I was struggling to keep up with them, so when we first saw that beautiful monster and her baby from about 30 feet away I was huffing pretty hard. One of my GoPro videos was funny to listen to - as I was breathing really loudly through the snorkel and sounded like Darth Vader on meth.
We got the see the whales three times and it was magical each time. Seeing sharks or turtles or octopi under water is special to me, but being able to spend just a few minutes alongside one of the most majestic creatures, and her humongous baby, in the world is worth every penny and more. Definitely one of those African safari type special moments of my life. And on top of that we got to meet Csaba and Lara…people I hope and expect, along with Marc, that we’ll get to see later down the road somewhere.
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Occasionally we splurge a little bit. Sometimes it’s from paying more than we should to stay in an amazing location and sometimes it’s by signing up for that excursion that you know is overpriced but they either have a competitive advantage or they are a monopoly provider or it’s just so novel/amazing that you just have to suck it up and go with it. Here we are doing it everyday, unfortunately. Everything is expensive. And the beauty merits the cost. But if you don’t pay the money, the alternative is, unfortunately, pretty subpar and regrettable. Also, getting here is not quick so it means that mostly it’s for the wealthy or the adventure travelers or honeymoons and anniversaries so they can just charge you more. Or, like us, it just happened to be on the path from New Zealand to South America. It’s an 8 or so hour flight from the US west coast and a 20+ hour flight from Europe, which tends to weed out people that don’t like long journeys. Because of that, and that it’s isolated from most other other countries, stuff is just expensive here. Except mangoes. People just throw those to you from outriggers while you’re snorkeling. Mangoes are about my favorite fruit. And you won’t ever have a better mango than when you are straddling a pool noodle in the ocean, with sharks and turtles swimming below you, and breaking into a free mango that some random muscular paddler just threw to you. And doing it animal style with your hands and then stuffing the mango into your face with no fork and knife. Surprisingly mango with a little sea salt thrown in is quite tasty. And you don’t have to worry about the sticky mess because, well, you’re sitting in the ocean!
But, back to my point. We splurged this part of the trip. We were able to use some points to get our costs down a bit and then, due to our IHG status, they upgraded us. So we basically bought the cheapest room possible but then they upgraded us to a fancy over-water bungalow. And the funny thing that I was 2nd most happy about…it was right next to the guest laundry room! As I write, it’s early morning (meaning 7:30 for me) and I’m sitting on the back deck of our room seeing glints of light splash off the water through the deck slats below me. We’re separated by about 10 meters from the nearest bungalow and about 100 meters from the start of an armada of berthed sailboats and yachts. There are all sizes of boats out here, in particular there’s one big black two-master that looks like it could be from the Swiss Family Robinson story. There is stuff ALL over the deck, tied up in nets and ropes. It looks like Fred Sanford is living on a boat, but one that costs a million dollars. Every once in a while a dog runs across the deck and uses the bathroom on the deck - I suspect there is a poo pad there, or at least I hope there is. Occasionally someone from a sailboat will emerge, get in their attached dinghy and motor off to the port, about a 5 minute ride away. I’m not sure why they are leaving this early but I’m making up reasons in my head - they live on the boat and work in the city, they are getting supplies for the next leg of their ATW journey, they are taking their kids to school, they ran out of coffee or toilet paper, they need to walk the dog, etc. I’m wondering too much about it but it’s got me thinking that there is a whole population that, at some point, decided to buy a huge boat and just live on it, away from the high-rises and streets and stray dogs and QuickTrips and Costcos and people. They just float there. And batten everything down. And then batten it down again.
The guy from the Swiss Family Robinson/Sanford and Sons boat drove up on his dinghy and unloaded even more stuff onto the big boat from the dinghy and I’m simply watching from across the water. Possibly a bit creepy, I know, but I have nothing else to do while I’m sitting in my own personal little heaven, waiting for my laundry to finish the wash cycle. I notice that the guy gets onto the big boat and disappears below deck, when, the dinghy just starts floating off because the guy forgot to tie it down. Rich people can’t be as daft as me, can they? So initially I think “Can I swim over there and retrieve the boat for this guy…maybe there’s a reward?” But then I realize that swimming that far might not be as easy as it looks (maybe 100+ meters) and I might get a cramp and then the guy will have to rescue me and his boat is long gone by then, so I just start yelling from across the water “Sea Peace! Hey, Sea Peace” because that’s the name of the boat. I yelled for a minute before the guy emerged and he’s looking toward me and probably thought I wanted some Gray Poupon or something. So I’m waving and pointing to his dinghy and he finally realizes what I’m doing and I’m sure I heard him say “Merde” as he pulled off his pants and dove in. He was definitely French because he got almost naked in a flash. I was pretty impressed that he was able to swim that far, as every time I spied on him he had a cigarette in his mouth. But, he finally got to the dinghy and got it back to the big boat and waved to me with a “Thank you!” Somewhere in Tahiti I’m a minor hero.
So, in all of my productive back-deck pondering I got to wondering what they do in their boats all day long. There are two older heavy-set guys that get out early every morning, shirtless and in their too-tight shorts and just wander around the boat deck. They un-batten stuff, pick it up and look at it and then discuss it and then batten it down again, moving on to the next thing. There’s a lot of battening going on. Then they would discuss stuff, drink some coffee, smoke some cigarettes and head back down below. I suspect they read a lot and then drink some rum, but damn, I’d get bored just sitting there in that little bobbing cabin all that time - not sure I could do it.
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Well, guess I needed some new writing material. Yesterday we had to check out of our splurge hotel and had a really hard time doing it…we were actually sad to go. It was that stinking nice.
So, we left at four and drove south expecting to get a hotel down on the polyp island, about an hour and a half away. When we got there we realized we really didn’t like it (Tahiti isn’t really that great) so we turned around and headed back to Papeete. We didn’t realize that the entire island also comes to Papeete on Halloween so ALL of the hotels were booked. Seriously all of them. Huge parties and people wandering the streets in costumes. About 8:30, sitting in our rental car, as we were looking up ‘is it safe to sleep in your car’ and ‘where can you stealth camp on a beach’ we found a Hail Mary from google ai about a lady that rents out rooms to stranded air passengers and, possibly, halfway house escapees. We were able to book a room and drove over really happy to have a bed. We went from the nicest bed on the island to an attic turned into guest rooms with only a fan that was missing a front cover and macrame window coverings. And a shared bathroom with only cold water. We were happy to have it and they let us use the kitchen to eat our instant cup-o-soups and ritz cracker dinner.
Finally got to sleep and then this morning around six, got up to go pee. The door lock didn’t work and we were stuck inside. Thank Buddha it wasn’t one of those ‘my eyes are bubbling I have to pee so badly’ mornings, because we ended up having to text the owner, in French’ish, to help. Lyd finally resorted to calling her when she didn’t answer and I think she woke her up, because she asked if we needed help with our luggage or getting a taxi. Finally got the message across and she sent over three people and a baby to try and break in from the other side. My thoughts ranged from ‘are they trying to imprison me and take my 60 year old kidney’ and ‘I hope they don’t make me a sex slave’ to ‘I might need to pee in that corner over there’. The three people and a noisy two year old worked on the door from the other side with a master skeleton key and couldn’t get it and kept muttering in Tahitian or French and walking up and down the steps looking for something. The whole time we could see their key going in and out of the lock and getting stuck like ours did, and my need to pee scale rose to an 8. I slid my key through the prison window slot and, finally, after another ten minutes, they got it to work. I had already used the little pocket tool that mom gave me to unscrew two of the door screws in the off chance I needed to break out.
Lyd pushed past them as soon as they got the door open and beelined it for the bathroom and I tried to show pink bathrobe guy how I was using the key and the lock promptly got stuck again. Fortunately the door was open that time.
Traveling the world and making memories!!!
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OK, I screwed up my Wordle streak…dammit!!! We flew back to Auckland from Papeete at 9:00 in the morning on the 5th and experienced the reverse time change space continuum confusion. Since we had to get up so early in the morning to get to the airport I didn’t do my Wordle - typically I do it in the evening. So when we left Tahiti, at 9:00 AM, the flight was only 5.5 hours, but we LOST a day by crossing the Intl Date Line, and arrived on the 6th. And completely SCREWED up my LONG Wordle streak in the process. It was interesting traveling across the date line, both times, as we gained a day and lost a day. Sometimes this travel stuff is confusing!
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