Week 16 – Adventures in Tahiti

Another Week, Another Paradise!

It’s Tahiti and it’s exactly what you’d expect: beautiful blue lagoons, steep green mountains, sea life… you know, typical paradise. We took advantage of said paradise and did next to nothing for the week. Other than renting a car for the day, we just relaxed.

An interesting note: Tahiti was not in our original planned route, that is, until we added Easter Island. You see, there are only two flight destinations from Easter Island: Santiago and Tahiti. We weren’t too keen on backtracking to Santiago, and after doing some research, we found that flying from Santiago to Easter Island to Tahiti was virtually the same price as a roundtrip ticket from Santiago to Easter Island. Flights from Tahiti to New Zealand are relatively cheap while flights from Santiago to New Zealand are quite expensive. So, it made sense to go through Tahiti. We figured we should stop and check it out for a few days, just for fun. 🙂

1. Go

• Plane – 8,325 km (5,173 miles). Wow, that a lot of flying. At the beginning of the week we flew from Easter Island to Tahiti and at the end of the week from Tahiti to Auckland, New Zealand
• Bus – 29 km. From the ferry to our campsite on Mo’orea.
• Taxi – 10 km. From the ferry to the airport on Tahiti.
• Hitch hiking – 29 km. Total desperation! We had to catch the ferry from Mo’orea back to Tahiti on Sunday so that we could catch our flight at 6pm to New Zealand. Little did we know that the bus that got us from the ferry to the campsite does not run on Sundays. Hitching in Tahiti is supposed to be relatively safe, but it’s never completely safe. Thankfully everything went well and we had great drivers.
• Car – 170 km. We rented a car! A brand new experience for us on this trip! We drove around the whole Island of Tahiti.
• Ferry – 90 km. We took the ferry between Tahiti and Mo’orea.
• Foot –  73,000 steps in 7 days (approx. 36 miles)

2. See

We spent the first few days on the island of Tahiti. We were feeling pretty jet lagged and still recovering from a short bout of food poisoning (yay, travel), so we were pretty lazy. We did rent a car for the first time on our trip and drove all the way around the island. We stopped by a huge grotto (80 meters deep) with a freshwater lake, a black sand beach, and a viewpoint for the sunset.

French Polynesia – Tahiti – Grotto

French Polynesia – Tahiti – Black Sand Beach

French Polynesia – Tahiti – Sunset over Pape’ete

The second half of the week we headed to Mo’orea, which is actually better (in our opinion) than Tahiti. It’s more remote, less crowded and smaller. We treated our few days here like a true vacation: sleep, eat, swim, walk, lay on the beach, nap, read, repeat. With a Roulette and grocery store right around the corner, we barely had to move for three days.

French Polynesia – Mo’orea – View of Lagoon from Camping Nelson

3. Eat

Polynesian food is delicious… expensive but delicious. But tasting local cuisine is an important part of travel, so we are willing to spend a little cash to make it happen. Luckily, there are cheaper (by Tahiti standards) options than sit-down restaurants. We enjoyed the Roulettes (food trucks) scattered around the islands serving delicious local dishes.

One of our favorite dishes was poisson cru, which literally means “raw fish” in french. And that’s exactly what it is, huge chucks of raw fish. It’s similar to ceviche in Peru but much less acidic. We had two versions: one with pineapple, shredded carrots, sweet pickles, onion, lettuce, and tomato; the other with coconut milk, tomato, cucumber, carrots, and lettuce (pictured below).

French Polynesia – Mo’orea – Lindsey with Poisson Cru

Another favorite was a Chinese dish called ma’a tinito. This dish was something we might throw together at home while trying to eat up random ingredients. It had pork, kidney beans, Chinese cabbage, and macaroni, all in a brown sauce served with rice.  A little strange, but oddly satisfying.

4. Drink

We spent a few evenings drinking Hinano beer while watching the sunset. We also enjoyed the local fruit juices at the Roulettes (mango was a favorite).

5. Sleep

While on Tahiti, we stayed at a very nice guesthouse (with A/C) with an incredibly helpful staff willing to make phone calls on our behalf. They helped us book our rental car and picked us up from the airport for free. Our only complaint was the location. It was right on the edge of Papeete, which meant it was in walking distance of all the shopping and restaurants, but nowhere near a beach. But it was still a nice place to stay for a few nights.

In Mo’orea, we stayed at a campground with cabins. We had a private room with a fan (no A/C) right near the water. The beach was literally steps away. The staff was friendly, but not nearly as helpful as other places we’ve stayed (we expected this since the price was very low).

French Polynesia – Mo’orea – View from our room at Camping Nelson

French Polynesia – Mo’orea – The beach at Camping Nelson

6. Move

Pat got in a few good runs this week, but the heat made it a bit rough. The sun rises really early here compared to our previous locations (6AM instead of 8AM), so we have had to get up earlier to beat the heat. Lindsey was finally able to get out on a run for the first time in weeks. We also went for a few short swims, but nothing long enough to count for much.

Check out Pat’s CADENCE Week 16 post (coming soon) for details about this week.

7. Etcetera

Another sunset shot:

French Polynesia – Mo’orea – Sunset from Camping Nelson

On the surface, Tahiti seemed really expensive – our guesthouse in Papeete cost nearly $100 a night, our rental car as nearly $100 for 24 hours – but we were able to save money in other ways. We didn’t eat at sit down restaurants, but ate out a few times at roulettes. We were totally prepared to average $150 and fully expected Tahiti to blow our daily $100 out of the water. To our surprise, we came in at $124.25 for our daily average. 

Check out our Flickr album to see all our photos from this week.