Papeete, Tahiti, Society Islands of French Polynesia

Papeete, Tahiti, Society Islands of French Polynesia                                      Friday, February 16, 2018

The captain announced the ship’s docking at 8:00am in Tahiti.

Larry and I left the ship enjoying the Polynesian sounds of numerous ukeleles and local voices.

                           We were given a little welcome blossom that smelled heavenly.

The dock was decorated handsomely with local foliage and flowers. This was quite a contrast from our last visit to Papeete which had been a rainy day making this kind of welcome impossible.

The Avis Rental Company had a car sent to pick us up at the dock. Larry enjoyed playing a few tunes with the locals.

                                                   My man driving his red hot rent a car. Tahiti is the largest island of the French Polynesia chain.  It was the most developed with lots of businesses and  much traffic in the city.

                     



We headed out of town going east first stopping at the old light house.

Larry enjoyed talking to a coupe of locals here.

                          

                                                            After enjoying the atoll scenery......

                                                        the drive along the coast was stunning!

We passed boats of all shapes and sizes...on an island they are important.

Black sandy beaches indicated past volcanic action.

We motored on to the Blow Hole where we enjoyed wading into the Pacific Ocean waters watching the locals surf the waves. What a gorgeous area!

The area was oh so beautiful!

                                         We had a wonderful walk to Vaimahuta Falls.

                 From there we drove to the Three Cascades…several fabulous waterfalls.

                                                         The tropical flowers were gorgeous.

We continued our drive to a smaller attached island called Tahiti Iti, going to Peue taking a side road up the mountainside. What a view!

We stopped at another waterfall at Papeari, hiking around the footpath chocked full of many local botanical plants.

We spotted lots of bananas and...

coconuts.

                                    

        Tatooing was invented on the Pacific Islands. We passed many tattoo parlors during the day.

We drove back into the bustling city of Papeete, returning the car around 4:30.  We spotted the Queen Elizabeth as we entered Papeete. We had made a pretty good day of touring Tahiti, driving about 84 miles around the entire island.  

On these Pacific Islands the internet is very, very weak and slow, so our blog update will have to wait till reaching mainland Australia .

                                           

Sail away was at 11:00pm….we were snoozing…getting ready for another day of exploration of the island of  Mo’orea, the second largest island of  French Polynesia.