Tahiti
Trip Start
Jan 31, 2006
1
70
100
Trip End
Dec 11, 2006
Papeete, French Polynesia
Thursday, September 21, 2006
So, after another fight with a hotel manager as we left The Quadrant in Auckland (he tried to renege on the NZ$89 deal and charge us more. We won.), we caught our Air Tahiti Nui flight to Papeete, Tahiti. It was a lovely, shiny new plane with stacks of legroom, so it was a great flight. The added bonus was that we crossed the date line, so having left at 1pm on the Friday, we arrived at 8pm on the Thursday!
We took a cab to our hotel (the first of many excruciatingly expensive cab rides. If I ever move abroad, I'm going to Tahiti to be a cab driver), the Radisson Tahiti. We had originally planned to go across to Moorea or Bora Bora and stay in an overwater bungalow, but after seeing the prices, we decided Tahiti was just fine, thank you very much. I was a little apprehensive as reviews on Trip Advisor had slated the Radisson for rude and slow staff, but they couldn't have been more helpful when we checked in
Tahiti 1
. We were taken in a little buggy to our room, which was fabulous. A big living room with an enormous day-bed sofa, fabulous bathroom and spacious bedroom. On top of that we had a lovely terrace that overlooked the black sand beach. I could tell we were going to be quite happy here. Richard also made my day by giving me a present - a pair of Prada sunglasses that I had been coveting for quite a while. Who mentioned budget??I couldn't wait to wear my new sunglasses and so sprang out of bed early the next morning and threw back to the curtains expecting beautiful sunshine. But this is our trip, so of course the rain was lashing down. And it continued all morning, although we did brave it to dash across to the restaurant for breakfast. Well, it was included, and it was a buffet - I would have run through fire to get to it.
The rain finally subsided in the afternoon so we decided to take the hotel shuttle bus into town to have a look around. Of course, we didn't know that you had to book a seat on it so it was fully booked. This was a good thing in the end though as it meant we caught "Le Truck" instead, the local bus service. I was a bit confused as to the name as a shiny new normal bus turned up rather than a truck, but all was made clear on our return journey which was a truck with bench seats in it.
The main town, Papeete, was a fairly uninspiring port town, but it had a great market that we visited where they sold everything from fish to flowers to Polynesian shirts (which Richard thankfully resisted). We spent a pleasant couple of hours in the market and I bought a shell-thing with a couple of holes cut in it that holds your sarong together (terrible description I know and I'm sure it has a proper name, but for now it shall be the shell-thing), but as the rain had stopped, the heat had returned and I was melting, so we decided to go back to the hotel
Tahiti 2
. We went via the supermarket, which was a Carrefour, being a French island. It was exactly like walking into a Carrefour in France and, after I had managed to prise Richard from the cheese counter, we went back to the hotel with enough provisions for dinner, thus avoiding selling one of our organs to pay for dinner at our hotel. I should explain that our hotel was in the middle of nowhere and Le Truck only runs during the day so your dinner choices are the hotel restaurant (v expensive), a cab into town for dinner (v v expensive) or a picnic in our room (v cheap). The journey back was great because we inadvertently chose the indirect Le Truck service which literally took us round the houses up hill and down dale, but it meant that we got a glimpse of local life. It also allowed ample opportunity for Richard to get a good luck at the ridiculously beautiful Polynesian women.....
Back at the hotel, we decided to go for a late afternoon swim in the gorgeous infinity pool. The swim was great for the first five minutes until the heavens opened again. Already wet, we persevered for a while until the rain became truly torrential and so we made a very wet dash for our room, where we stayed for the rest of the evening, listening to the rain outside.
Thankfully the sun shone the next day and so I donned my sarong, new shell-thing and new prada sunglasses (and my bikini of course) and we found a couple of loungers in the shade by the pool (after another buffet breakfast of course). We lasted about two hours before I had to get into the air-conditioned room for some respite from the heat. In the afternoon, we decided to catch Le Truck back to Carrefour to get our dinner for that evening. Having checked that the buses ran on Saturdays, we stood at the bus stop outside the hotel to wait. God, did we wait. An hour later, the security guard kindly tells us that the buses don't run on Saturdays. Brilliant. Two very sweaty and grumpy people trudged back into the hotel to order a taxi to take us the supermarket. After handing over our life savings to the taxi driver, we made it to the supermarket and back in one piece. It was therefore more than a little distressing when, later that evening, I decided to have a look at the hotel information booklet and discovered that a meal from room service was exactly the same price as the taxi to the supermarket.....
