To be entirely honest, I wasn’t expecting everyone in Tahiti to speak French. Sure, the clue is there in the country’s actual name, “French Polynesia”, but I guess I was expecting them to speak Tahitian? Maybe from all the place names and so on? It was a nice surprise, and I did pretty well for not having spoken it in a year or more! A lot of people seemed very surprised to learn that I was Australian when I was speaking French to them, which is fair because I suppose there are not that many Australian tourists in Tahiti who do!
I briefly met quite a few interesting people:
There was an elderly(-ish) couple staying at the hotel I was in from the airport. They were Swiss, and they were in town for one night before they flew to another island where they were picking up their catamaran and sailing to Australia. Apparently they got into sailing in Marseilles a couple years ago, after they retired, and now they spend six months a year sailing, then store the boat wherever they finish and go home to family for six months. Not a bad lifestyle!
The girl I shared a room with my first night at Nelson was French, but living in New Caledonia to work for a few months and was on a short vacation from there.
At the hotel I moved to, I didn’t meet any other guests (pretty much everyone I saw was either a couple or a family with small kids). I had a great productive last day in Tahiti – woke up in my nice hotel room, went for a 2 mile run, rented a kayak and paddled out to an island and back along the coast past the abandoned Club Med up the beach, showered, packed and checked out at 10.30am! So then I felt pretty justified in sitting by the pool reading for a few hours before going to catch the bus to the ferry.
When I got to the bus stop, there was a was Tahitian guy, Hiva Huevo (I think), already there. He was from the island of Tahiti, but a friend had offered him a place to stay on Moorea while he looked for work on that island. He said he could walk, but it was kind of a long way and he was tired from dance practice all morning (I think? I guess it’s a plausible enough sentence, but it did make me question my french understanding a little). We were both very disappointed when a lady in a shop nearby walked past and checked that we knew the bus was scheduled for 3pm, and the 1.30pm bus had already gone – the current time being 1.50pm. My hotel had offered to arrange a taxi to the ferry for me, but that was $15 and the bus ($3) had seemed pretty pleasant when I caught it from the ferry a few days before. They warned me it was unreliable, and told me it was scheduled for 2pm. Huh. I was hoping to make the 3pm ferry – the backup was the last ferry of the day at 4.45pm, but it was possible I’d have to pay an upgrade for that one (it was faster).
So we’re standing at this stop and Hiva starts waving at cars trying to hitch a ride. Most people just wave back, but finally a young guy stops. He says he isn’t going far, he’s just out to buy a last-minute birthday cake for his younger brother (but I guess he wasn’t in a rush?). Hiva jumped in and said he’d help me with my bags – it seemed like it was unlikely to go wrong, and I knew we could wave the bus down from wherever we happened to be, so not much risk of being stuck forever. The first shop we came to was closed, so we ended up going about three kilometers up the road with this guy, and then he bought his cake and turned around and Hiva and I walked up the road a short way to just outside the IHG hotel. There, I stood mostly in the shade at his suggestion while he kept waving (still managed to burn a sandals pattern into my feet though). After some time, an elderly couple stopped and picked us both up. Some five minutes later they dropped Hiva off at the post office, and I continued with them to their house. She was a native of the island, he had moved there from France 20 years ago. They dropped me off just past their house on a long straight stretch of road next to the beach, so I could see cars coming – saying that in the old days, everyone in Tahiti would have stopped to give a ride, but today society is so unfriendly, good luck!
I was now about a third of the way to the ferry, at not quite 3pm. I’d given up on the first boat but was pretty confident I’d make the second. I wasn’t at all confident that I’d be able to hitch a ride on my own, but it seemed worth trying, and after only a few minutes got picked up by a guy about my own age who was heading to pick up the kids from school. His name was Kevin, and he was very jealous of my trip. He said he’d always meant to travel but in the end he’d only left Tahiti once, for a visit to Australia when he was 13 years old and went with a friend’s family. I didn’t quite follow the story – either the friend himself, or another boy they’d invited, had been unable to go, and so Kevin was offered the ticket. He dropped me off in a small town at an actual bus stop. Partly because this was at the entry to the town so most people were driving in, partly lack of motivation, I ended up waiting more than 30 minutes here until the bus arrived at 4pm, when I was starting to get nervous. For some reason, I’d even convinced myself that I was wrong about the 4.45 time and it was probably a 4.30 departure! But the bus did come, and got us all there in time for the ferry, and I didn’t even have to change my ticket.
So I got back to Papeete at 5.30pm, shortly before the sudden nightfall that I expected about 6pm. I’d heard that there were some areas of Papeete that you shouldn’t wander around alone in after dark, and I figured it’d be even less advisable when carrying a pack with all my stuff and obviously lost. So I walked down to the tourist info office along the harbour (filled with serious and casual runners of all kinds, backdropped with an incredible sunset) and asked about a bus to the airport. I had 500 francs set aside for the bus, and 1200 francs +some coins for something to eat. “A bus to the airport? Now?” they said, looking dismayed and putting up a closed sign on the door. “There’s no bus at this time of night!” Fantastic. So I went over the road to a taxi stand and asked the first driver how much to get to the airport (about 15 minutes away). 1800 francs, he says. No credit cards. So I count my coins and ask if he will take 1750 francs, and he agrees. Very shortly after, I’m at the airport – only 8 hours before my flight departs at 2am! There is one other flight scheduled before that – to LA, at 11pm – so it wasn’t exactly bustling either. Fortunately businesses here took credit cards, so I got some airport takeout pasta for dinner and settled in with a book.
Eventually a girl asked me to watch her pack while she got some food, and then we sat in the same group of couches for about 4 hours before saying hello to each other. She was French and also on a round the world trip – she worked in banking in Geneva before quitting her job about four months ago, and was planning to spend the last couple months of her round the world trip in South America before going home. Finally, after about seven years sitting there, check-in opened! Of course we had been sitting the furthest from the line so everyone else had been lined up already for ten years and we were at the back. Once I got to the front of the line, there were three counters open and for some reason each passenger was taking forever – I think because all of them actually had too much luggage (one girl was trying to re-pack her bag at the counter). Finally finally, one of them is done, and the counter guy goes on a break. So I wait another forever, and the next passenger is done, and the counter guy goes on a break. So I wait again until the third passenger is done, and am mildly surprised when the counter guy stays there and waves me forward. Because I’m magic, I complete check-in in about 30 seconds – although he did ask me for proof of my forward travel from Easter Island, and I suppose if he hadn’t accepted the itinerary of my RTW trip on my phone, then I might have been there forever arguing or trying to dig something up?
And then we got into the international waiting area, with a giant duty-free store and a tiny bar that had a small sign saying “no credit cards”, so people all walked up to the bar, got ready to order, then saw the sign and looked sad and walked away. It was quite a nice area, but still pretty warm so I really wanted a cold drink – I figured it was worth asking if she took any other currencies, and managed to buy myself a sprite with USD$6. Worth it! I continued reading Ancillary Sword until we boarded, when I found myself in possession of two seats at the sparsely populated back of the plane and managed to go to sleep for a few hours, waking up for quite a decent dinner (or breakfast, whatever).
Impression: it might have been just the area I was staying in in Moorea, but there was a weird kind of decay everywhere. Abandoned buildings, four-five streetlights out in a row (even more noticeable when these two coincided so you’d have a 100m of total darkness), and then of course the abandoned grown-over bulldozer. Perhaps the Club Med going away took away so much business that the area itself collapsed a little? Viewing that from the sea was pretty cool – a caved in mosaic area that I think might have been the pool and lots of quite well-executed graffiti. I didn’t see enough of anywhere else to get the same impression, but in other places I could see new construction and places for sale, so it might have been a very localised effect. Some photos:
