Tahiti

  Papeete,Tahiti, French Polynesia
Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Tahiti - 11th March 2009

Our next stop after Easter Island was Tahiti, we thought we deserved 10 days holiday on the beach after 7 months hard labour.

Le Meridien

We had booked 5 days holiday, via Expedia, in "Le Meridien", a flash 4 star resort on the west coast of Tahiti, as they were doing a special "5 days & pay for 4".
When we arrived, we took a 10 minutes taxi ride from the airport to our hotel where we got our first surprise, he wanted £30 for that short journey !
We discovered that prices on the island were about 4 times higher than anywhere else. The price of food at the hotel was a joke, £19 for a continental breakfast, £51 for a main course & their special gourmet meal was £86 per person - we didn't eat much at the hotel.
Luckily there was a supermarket right outside the hotel, so we had most of our meals, out of paper bags, on the balcony overlooking the ocean - very romantic.
Our room was right above a pool stocked with Koi Carp who would go berserk over bits of bread & crisps - I had hours of fun tormenting the fish.

Sandy Beach

The hotel literature said it was on one of the golden beaches on the west of the island. Well, what little sand there was, didn't stretch very far & was stony - but there were lots of beautiful fish swimming near to shore - & the hotel provided snorkelling equipment.
The pool was unusual in that it was lined with sand & had a sandy "beach" round its edge. The staff would bring drinks to your sun lounger but we didn't avail ourselves of that service as we didn't want to re-mortgage our house just yet.

The Reef

Tahiti is in a group of islands which include Moorea & Bora Bora, so we thought we would enquire about moving to one of them. A fellow traveller told us that the world "credit crunch" had closed down many of the hotels & restaurants on Moorea & it was looking a bit sad. Bora Bora is one of those places where "if you need to ask the price, you can't afford it" - it's where husbands take their new brides when their father-in-law is picking up the bill. So we decided to stay on in Tahiti. We tried to extend our stay but the hotel's "special low price" was higher than the original price, so we moved on to the Radisson who were doing a "4 days for 3" promotion.

Daytime View

The Radisson was on a black sandy beach which we didn't like the sound of, but was actually very nice. Our room had a two-seater Jacuzzi which pumped hot water into places that polite people don't talk about. There was a free shuttle into Pape'ete, Tahiti's Capital, so we explored the town & bought our "supermarket banquets".

We did have one meal in the restaurant when they had a "Traditional Tahiti Gala Evening" with grass skirted dancers & girls dancers as well.

Pape'ete still has a strong French influence, apart from speaking French. The supermarkets sell French cheeses & stock rediculously priced French wine, New Zealand wine is not stocked even though it's the nearest wine producing country. Some of the expensive bottles of French wine didn't sell too well, they had thick layers of dust on them (serves them right).
I found some delicious Argentinean wine in cardboard litre packs at a fraction of the cost.

Jam Session

We came across a group of musicians busking in the main street playing guitars & solid body ukuleles, which sounded a bit like banjos.