Papeete, Tahiti - Feb 22, 2020

Papeete is the capital of French Polynesia, an overseas collectivity of France in the Pacific Ocean. The commune (municipality) of Papeete is located on the island of Tahiti, in the administrative subdivision of the Windward Islands.  It is the primary centre of Tahitian and French Polynesian public and private governmental, commercial, industrial and financial services.  Windward Islands are themselves part of the Society Islands.  The name Papeete means "water from a basket".  The urban area of Papeete has a total population of 131,000 with 26,000 in the city.  Temperatures are relatively constant throughout the course of the year, averaging around 23 degrees Celsius - Nice. It does help if you can speak french in these French Polynesia islands as this is the main language.

This is our third visit here and with some of our taxi issues of the past we decided to forgo any of these complications. These problems for us related to language and pronunciation of locations along with a somewhat feeling that we are inconveniencing them by attempting to get a ride. Our plan was actually to take the local bus to the monument of the Transit of Venus, but on route to the bus stop we were informed of some of the complications relating to taking the bus and these relate to scheduling (we were told that there really isn’t one) and as it was a Saturday that the buses stop or become very infrequent after 12:30? Okay, forget about that - we had visited it on a prior visit but hoped to have a swim there on one of the black sand beaches. That said, the main Municipal Market (Marche) here is pretty good, everything from fish to fruit to a flower market to many, many souvenirs including the plethora of black Tahitian pearls. We spent a good amount of time here wandering around and picking up a few things, yes… some beautiful black pearls. We strolled the colourful streets and made our way over to an oceanside park which was actually only about 15 minutes away from the cruise ship terminal. We did get some passing showers causing us to duck in for lunch, beer and wifi. So overall a nice easy relaxing day here in Tahiti. We shared our berth with a couple of mega yachts today, the white one is a 330 foot yacht owed by an Australian Billionaire, J. Packer while the almost same sized blue one owned by a New Zealand Billionaire. There is a reason why things are so expensive here, you can see the type of tourist that comes here and also the fact that things just cost so much money to get here as it is so far removed from the rest of the world. Black pearls are somewhat still reasonably priced. Bonus for us today is that for the sail a way we were invited to a Neptune Suite for sail away, nice. Thank you Ross and Jean who are also celebrating their 20 year wedding anniversary on this cruise, they are also calling it their 20-20-20 cruise. BTW, I think their balcony is about the same size as our entire stateroom, lol. Pretty nice… Another great entertainer tonight, Mr. Jim Hodson. A few pics of our day, hope you enjoy…

Quote of the day - “All human wisdom is summed up in two words; wait and hope.” - Alexandre Dumas