Tahiti: cash or GTFO

Note: haven’t figured out a nice way to embed photos from Flickr yet, so you can view the whole album on Flickr

So, basically I’d say my lesson from Tahiti so far (or more accurately, French Polynesia) is that if you aren’t happy, nay excited, to throw down some money on it – just don’t. Or at least warm up with a month in Thailand or somewhere that’s tropical AND aimed at a range of budgets to get your feet wet. But if you do have the money, it’s everything you wanted.

My first night was great, or at least as much as it can be when you land at 1am. I got my complementary airport pickup to a guesthouse five minutes away, there was a traditional band at the tarmac greeting the plane even though it was 1am and pouring and humid, my hotel hosts were really nice and the room had air-con, I posted my celebratory Instagram, etc. The next morning they drove me fifteen minutes down to the main area of town (actual Papeete – like most airports, Papeete airport is in the next town over, Fa’a’a) to catch the ferry to Moorea.

I chose Moorea because it seemed to have awesome beaches, and was a little cheaper than the main islands (partly because you can catch a ferry for $30 return instead of flying for $400 return like Bora Bora). I’d been hoping to spend less than $100/night (quite a bit less!) and I found a hostel online (http://camping-nelson.pf) that seemed like I could manage this – $25/night for a shared room with three beds. Nice! It had wifi, so it would totally work for my visions of sitting on the beach on my laptop (note: that’s a specific and high priority vision I had when planning this trip), or worst case, if the wifi didn’t reach the beach, I could do a laptop-beach-laptop rotation. So then I got there and basically it’s called Camping Nelson because you are meant to be in a tent, and the rooms are kind of an afterthought. Or else they used to be the main thing and the owners just got sick of it? The whole place looks like it’s decaying. There used to be a kitchen. The owner told me there hasn’t been a kitchen in “forever”. The wifi is only on when he’s in the office, which is 8-12, 1.30-4, roughly, sometimes less, sometimes it doesn’t work. There is no powerpoint in the dorm room, but you can pay 50 cents an hour to plug something into the wall next to his desk. There’s not even a fan in the dorm room. After some disappointed time staring around and a wander along the beach I had a nap, it was nice and cool with strong winds blowing (and rain. It rained most of the time).

After my nap, I felt better about life, and went for a walk thinking about something to eat. I went past a few restaurants but pretty much everything was closed until 6pm, it felt like. There were some pretty neat scenes – the whole place seemed on an edge of decay, like I found an entire bulldozer that had just been left there and had a small forest grow around it. Bizarre. I walked maybe a couple of km, and then got to the IHG InterContinental. It was a bit after 5pm and one of the things I’d wanted to do was see a Tahitian performance at the Tiki Village (tikivillage.pf), but hadn’t been able to figure out how to organise it. I expected that the concierge here could help me, so I went in and wandered around a little jealous of everything and got them to add me to the list of people being picked up by a bus at 6pm.

For $100, it felt expensive (but see: Tahiti) but I thought it was worth it. I might have been a little less sure if I didn’t speak French; French was clearly the main language and then most of it was translated into English. The English presenter wasn’t as good at showmanship as the others, which was a shame. But I got the best of both 🙂 The village tour, where we split into French-speaking and English-speaking, was pretty short in English but mildly interesting. The dinner was pretty good, I was definitely ready for it so it would have had to be terrible for me not to enjoy it by then! But whole roast pork and slow cooked chicken and vegetables is hard to go wrong with. While we ate dessert, we had some demonstrations on how to wear a pareo (sarong) – I don’t know about the group as a whole, but the general vibe at my table was that we’d never be able to do any of what she was demonstrating. The women’s demo was done by a pretty 20-something girl, who showed about fifteen ways of tying it on and then got a woman from the audience to try one (it came out wearable, but looked a little fragile) and then an older, less fit guy got up to do the guy’s demos. I thought this was going to be a joke, and it partly was – by the end he was wearing five of them tied to look like underwear, pants, a vest, a cloak and a turban. Then he got two guys up to try and follow him in one simple skirt pattern – they were useless. Like, sure, maybe it’s harder than it looks, but how can you not realize that he is holding a corner and you are holding the middle of an edge? Or maybe it was just a case of failing to realize that it was an important difference, despite this being the step they failed on every time and also really? This went on a bit long and I wanted someone to put them out of their misery.

Finally, the show. Before it began, they got all the women up to try some dancing, and damn my hips were sore after about 20 seconds of it. (Bonus: I will never see anyone from that crowd again. No nerves!).  Then they got all the men, which included two boys of about ten years old who got into it really enthusiastically. I’m pretty sure they did this so that when the show began, we would all look at the dancing and think “damn, that’s sure harder than it looks!”. It was the telling of a traditional myth, I think about how women stopped being mermaids and came to live on land? It looked a bit amateurish to start but better and better as it went on. I just wish that the rest of the audience could have refrained from clapping every time an actor went still for a second,  like they’d never seen a play before and were just constantly thinking it was the end. Kind of ruined the dramatic silence moments. It went a lot longer than I expected, starting at about 8pm and going to 10.30. The last part was all fire-twirling and juggling which was pretty well done, a few dropped sticks but when they throw them five metres up I give them a little slack.  The dancers were all relatively young but the musicians and narrator were older – I wonder how many other places are teaching anyone these dances? The village itself is a reconstruction, and during the day I think they do more cultural tours of it. It seemed like a good thing to spend money at.

When I went to bed at 11pm, exhausted, it felt like the room hadn’t seen a breeze in a decade. My roommate didn’t believe in open windows (security, I think) and after waking up several times, I woke up for good at 4am hating everything, especially the roosters that had started crowing at 3am. (Morons. I think they went all day except for a break at midnight.) Even though I was awake at 4am, unfortunately I was on the other side of the island from the annual Tahiti marathon starting right then, and had no way to get there. I guess I could have tried hitching but that’s pretty far down my list of things to ever try. So I waited until 5am when it was sort of light and went to the beach, because by god if I’m going to be miserable and tired in paradise I might as well get some beach time out of it.

And to be fair, the beach was gorgeous. Of course, it wasn’t great for swimming, having a small reef about three meters out and then more rocks ahead, but it was so nice in the water that it barely mattered. I tried doing some breaststroke back and forth across the front of the property and found out that my breaststroke muscles have atrophied since high school. It seemed like I should do yoga but I don’t know any. So I just lay on my back and floated a bit and swam back and forth. The water was clear, and I grabbed my phone and went for a walk, taking all these amazing pictures – I saw some couples I recognised from the Tiki Village show (one of them had I think been a honeymoon reservation? They had a table up front and were the ones who did the pareo audience attempts) at a very nice looking hotel just a few doors up. Eventually it was breakfast time, and I got a crappy baguette, some sliced ham and a packet of spoons from the grocery down the road, for $6. (The spoons were to try and eat the instant porridge I’d brought and made with cold water). Then I checked my email and found out my Grandma had died overnight, which sucked – at least I had visited just recently when I was in Melbourne, and I knew she was sick, but still.

So by then it was 11am, I was hungry, hot, tired and sad, so I chucked a hissy fit and decided to throw some money at it. I went and changed to a private room for the Saturday night, probably getting overcharged for it , and said I’d check out Sunday morning. Then my options were either head over to the ferry first thing Sunday and check in somewhere over on the mainland, or find another hotel over here for Sunday night. I was 80% just going to walk up the road to the InterContinental, but eeerrmmm, $250/night, that’s kind of an explosion in my budget. Obviously by now the office was closed for lunch which meant there was no internet, so I spent some time reading Beaty’s Code Book and going for a swim. When he got back, I checked out Papeete online: the Paul Gauguin museum that was the main point of being back in Papeete earlier than necessary has apparently closed, so I decided to stay on Moorea until the Monday evening ferry (to catch my midnight flight to Easter Island).  I looked up nearby hotels – the nice one just up the road said it was either booked out or unavailable to book online, no prices listed. A few other options I found for less than $100 were too far to walk to, and possibly not that much nicer than where I was. So eventually I walked up the street to ask about a room, and booked one for Sunday night for $150 with air conditioning and kayaks I can rent and tea and coffee and hot water and all kinds of stuff. They’ll probably even be able to help me get back to the ferry on Monday. I even got complimented on my french when I told the guy I was Australian! And then I went into a shop to get a postcard and bought a french novel set in Tahiti, which is probably terrible and ruins my multi-week streak of not buying any books, but will make me feel good about (a) practicing my french and (b) working towards my goal of reading something from/set in each country I go to.

Back at the campsite, I paid the difference for my room upgrade and moved into my new private room with fan. At first I thought perhaps I’d made a mistake in bothering to get the hotel room for the next night – having the windows wide open and a fan on made it nice and cool. But then I plugged my laptop in to the powerpoint in the room and got a small electric shock, so nope, not a mistake to leave. I did sleep pretty well though, from about 10pm to 8am.

Sunday morning – sunny! Finally! I left my room at 8am and felt like I was going to burn on the 10 metre walk to the bathrooms. I got back and sunscreened up, then had breakfast overlooking the beach. I officially packed and checked out a bit after 9am, then stayed and read my book in the shade for a few hours. Now THAT is honest to god 50% of what I want from a tropical vacation – lovely weather, a great view, and a great book (still The Code Book). Unfortunately the other 50% includes things like being able to sleep, and eat, and not run out of money, which is why I felt good about heading off at noon to check into my new hotel.

It’s now 12.45pm and hot as hell – outside, anyway 🙂 I am writing this from my comfortable air-conditioned room, complete with a lovely indoor shower, and a KETTLE and a powerpoint that doesn’t make me worried about the future of my laptop/health, and a sink in the room. I think I’m going to leave Tahiti tomorrow with fond memories – although, of course, I still have to choose between the $3 unreliable public bus and the $15 reliable booked bus to get to the ferry, and then get another bus from the ferry to the airport, and then survive at the airport until 1am for my flight. But I’m confident all that will go smoothly, ok?