Papeete - Day 1
We woke up at 6:30 local time (after only 4 hours of sleep), finished unpacking and went up to deck 9 for breakfast at the Panorama Buffet. A very wide variety of food was available, including wonderful fresh baguettes of French bread, which is baked daily here on the island. Sandy was in heaven with all the fresh fruit (especially the pineapple-we ate it every day). We had signed up late last night for the Tahiti Circle Island Tour from Renaissance, which left at 12:45pm. So we had most of the morning to go into Papeete and find the famous open-air market.
First thing to take care of, though, was to get our money changed. I withdrew 20,000 CFP (about $163) at dockside with my ATM card (direct from my checking account back home). We walked across the street to the main bank and then changed all my dollars that I brought on the trip over to Pacific French Francs, called CFP. I changed $580 into 69,000 CFP.
We found the market place without much trouble, and marveled at the beautiful flowers available, as well as the huge selection of fresh vegetables and local craft goods. Sandy bought a much-needed straw hat with beautiful added "flowers" of more straw around the crown for 2500 CFP. We also bought a beautiful bouquet of fresh tropical flowers for our room. Couldn't resist ! After all they were only about 500 CFP, they would have cost us at least $40 dollars back home.
We went up to the second floor of the market where many smaller gift shops sell carvings, lower-quality black pearls, and the ever-present pareas, the vividly colored dyed cloth wraps that many locals wear every day. Sandy bought a beautiful blue patterned parea and a pair of smaller ones for us to wear around our necks as bandanas. Mine was a very nice lime green and yellow tie-dye pattern.
We returned to the ship for lunch at 11:30am, and found our excursion tickets had been delivered to our room. We also found a letter from Renaissance acknowledging the 6-hour delay, and that they were giving everyone on that late flight an on-board credit of $100 per person! That just paid for our first two excursions each!
At 12:45pm we went dockside and boarded our bus for the Tahiti Island Circle Tour. The a/c on the bus would be very welcome as we circled the main island for the next 41/2 hours. Our tour guide, named Homer, was an older American who had moved to Tahiti many, many years ago and had worked in the hotel industry here and knew everything and everyone. He speaks Tahitian as well, and was very informative during the tour.
We stopped first at a viewpoint overlooking the harbor at Papeete near a hillside hotel with steeply terraced rooms. The peaks of the island's mountains were covered with clouds, and whenever the sun came though, the bright green of the lush vegetation stood out. Our next stop was the abandoned lighthouse at Venus Point. It was aptly named as we saw our first topless Tahitian beauty sitting up and sunning herself along the beach there. She seemed not to care that busloads of tourists were watching her.
We rode further around the island to the famous Blowhole, a rock formation on the shoreline where water traps a pocket of air every third or fourth wave and then blasts a huge spray of mist into the air. There is a small air hole in the rocks on the opposite side of the road where the same pressure blasts just air up the hole, and if you are standing over it, it will just about blow your shirt right off.
After passing through many small towns we stopped at a local supermarket for snacks, etc, where we bought a six-pack of the local beer, Hinano, and a package of Apricot crème-filled cookies. Hinano is a very tasty lager beer, somewhat similar in taste to Heineken.
We continued around the island perimeter to the Public Gardens, where we stopped for photos. The beautiful flowers were soon ignored as we discovered a gorgeous waterfall about 100 feet high around the bend. It started clear up at the top of the high hill deep in the woods there. The lack of breeze that deep into the garden made the air extremely humid, though, and it can quickly overwhelm you with the heat.
We had brought 2 liters of water on the bus and had half of it gone by now. We actually brought about 12 liter bottles of water with us from the States, as we heard you must buy the bottled water here on the ship at $2.50/bottle. Since we planned ahead on that we are good for at least the first 4 or 5 days. We also brought wine to drink in the room. If we bring it to our dinner table they will charge us a $10 corkage fee.
Next we stopped briefly at a famous fern grotto, and very dark hillside cave-like hole that goes about 200 feet deep. The high humidity had water literally dripping into the small pool at the bottom with huge strands of fern leaves hanging overhead. The path to the grotto takes you past a large stand of bamboo trees, reaching at least 75 feet into the air.
The afternoon clouds began to gather and for about 10 minutes we were riding through some rain along the western coastline. We saw a beautiful rainbow on the island side of the highway but weren't able to stop for a photo.
We returned to the ship, where we freshened up and changed into long pants to get dinner at the Club Restaurant on the ship. We were seated (at our choice) at a table with 3 other older couples from California and Atlanta GA. We all had a very nice dinner of very good quality food. The oldest couple from the group said they'd taken at least 25 cruises since retiring!!
They said our ship, the R3, was by far the most luxurious ship they'd ever been on. After dinner, we had desert with freshly made vanilla ice cream. Vanilla is a large export here in the islands. This ice cream was absolutely the best fresh vanilla flavor I've ever tasted.
We went up to Deck 10 to look at the library on the ship - it is wonderfully cozy like an English mansion library. You can just take any of the books there back to your cabin for reading whenever you want. Unfortunately, they didn't have any books on tropical fish to help us identify the various varieties we would encounter during our upcoming snorkeling excursions.
We finally made it back to the room, where I offloaded all my still photos to the laptop, and then we hooked up the video camera to the TV and played back the day's footage. We signed up for a Tahitian traditional dance show at 5:15pm tomorrow. We have to look around on the dock and find a local boat to take us out to a motu for some snorkeling. Don't have any arrangements yet so hope we can find something, as at this point the rest of our day is wide open.