Papeete, Tahiti, Society Islands, French Polynesia
We have established that Papeete is a city of contrasts. A land where, quite literally, dogs and cats are living together.
One of the most striking personifications of this is the harbor.
Now on our journey through the islands of French Polynesia so far we have navigated everything from rock minefields that will spear your hull like a ripe mango to rip currents that turn your boat into a bumper bowling ball with coral reefs and desert islands playing the part of the bumpers. So we had a pretty solid feeling that, with enough preparation, we could handle just about anything this island could throw at us.
Which is of course why, in Tahiti, it’s not the island that will sink your boat. That would be too easy. The reef limits how big the protected shipping channel is but what room they have is clear from natural obstructions. See, Tahiti is a developed port. In fact it’s the only developed port in this entire county. Which means that everything, and we do mean everything, not to mention just about every one, that goes anywhere in French Polynesia comes through Papeete first. And while this town is ridiculously huge by island standards, London-sized it ain’t. Lots of people, lots of stuff, all trying to get somewhere at the same time in a small city. So while the environment has been beaten back for your navigational well-being, it’s everything else sharing your space in this very confined, busy harbor that makes life interesting. Let us elaborate: Continue reading “Mind the Jetwash”
Papeete, Tahiti, Society Islands, French Polynesia
Tahiti is also the place where we part ways with FLY AWEIGH. A few months and about 5000 nautical miles ago, two friends asked us to come with them on an amazing adventure. To do what many dream about but few actually accomplish: to sail a 44 foot sailboat from Mexico to Tahiti. Along the way we’ve faced thousands of miles of open ocean and become shellbacks, combated air pirates, opened coconuts with dull machetes, swam with 250 sharks and had a dozen other adventures. What was promised was the trip of a lifetime. It did not fail to meet that lofty mark.
Now we are here, in a place we talked about as if it would take an eternity to get to and really it only took a couple of months. Our time together has come to an end. Since we already have our next boat out of Tahiti lined up in a few weeks and Tiffany’s mom is coming out by plane (wuss 😉 we will become “normal tourists” for a time. It should be interesting. Don’t worry, we’ll keep the blog going with our adventures in Tahiti & Bora Bora just like we did in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle. Allan & Alison will continue on their cruise and we will very likely see them again on this trip. From now on though, it will be as friends passing in a port.
“Shipmate” is a term that people throw around a lot without understanding what it means. Most seagoing military types understand what it means to serve on a ship with another person: when it comes right down to it, it’s just you and your crew against Continue reading “The Little Boat That DID!”
Due to their unique design, Coral atolls are ideal for watersports where you want lots of wind and little waves. As this was our last real chance to play in a wide-open lagoon without a lot of traffic or other people around, both Allan and Greg made it a point to enjoy themselves to the fullest. Allan, being obsessive about the whole wind-power thing, went windsurfing. Greg was more…unorthodox…in his choice of recreation.
Perhaps you noticed the pier and what appeared to be bungalows in the background of the video? That is in fact a resort hotel that you can stay at on the island of Tikehau. Pretty easy to find, just Google “Tikehau + hotel.” It’s not as if there are a lot of choices on the island. Just a little caveat that off season prices for their cheapest room start at $520 US per night. That does not include airfare or transport to the hotel, mind you. With the nearest airport being on the next island over, you may want to plan ahead on your connection. Drinks also are extra and about $20 US at the bar.
When we see things like that it gives us pause for a moment to appreciate what we are doing. Right now we are on an island that people pay thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars just to spend a few days on. It’s just one of the places we’ve seen and that you have enjoyed along with us on this blog. We are very grateful to have this opportunity and we are now convinced that sailing is, without a doubt the best way to see the South Pacific islands.
When starting at $520 a night you expect a seriously awesome experience and being as this atoll has no major attractions aside from the sun, ocean, motu and the lagoon, well, needless to say the snorkeling and diving should be spectacular. It was:
And of course, the main anchorage of Tikehau is on the opposite side of the island from the only navigable entrance to the lagoon. We’re not asking them to pick up their whole village and alter the geological formation of their atoll just for a few boaters (there were only 3 other boats in the anchorage while we were there) but really, it’s like they planned it this way.
The island of Tikehau is of particular interest because it is famed to have beaches with actual pink sand. Wanting to see this natural wonder and having just left the big village of Rangiroa, we had our fill of the city and decided to spend some time exploring one of the islands or “motu” that make up the ring of the atoll. You’d be amazed how much stuff you can find on a small desert island.
The reason Tiffany was poking around dead crabs was that she was looking for purple dead sea urchin spines. Hey, they have peach sand, so why not?
We found a bunch of them:
And using Alison’s beading kit Tiffany was able to create some tropical jewelry:
The quest for sustenance is more complex than you might imagine.
First off, you may not recall that Greg is the ship’s only French speaker (and by “speaker” we mean a vocab of about 100 words…and about 7 verbs.) So when he’s not around and often even when he is, obtaining food requires our fellow crewmembers to overcome certain linguistic hurdles. Even on the few occasions where there is some level of reasonable verbal communications, cultural obstacles also seek to derail us. Our attempts to surmount these challenges are met with varying degrees of success:
When repeated communications attempts fail or what happens more often is that our wallets can not bear the strain of eating out more than once a week without mortgaging a first born child (which, oddly enough, no one on this ship actually has) we must instead resort to our own dwindling Mexican shipboard supplies to sustain our appetites. Which, after months of isolation from the necessities of life (like Trader Joe’s) those precious stores are beginning to run “a little thin” by our fellow crewmember’s standards.
Ok, you know, we have no idea how many cartons of rice milk they had onboard when we left Mexico. We also never actually even saw where they stored all of this milk on the 44 foot boat that we have all been living on together for several months now. Think about that for a second, we never saw the rice milk on the boat, and it’s not like it doesn’t take up some space. This ship has more secret storage compartments than the Millennium Falcon.
We do alright though. Mostly based on these meager and vastly depleted supplies we manage to cobble together rudimentary meals that we share with our fellow cruisers:
Alright, in all seriousness, for those of you planning on plying the seas of the South Pacific, cheap Mexican beer (Pacifico mostly) is a viable form of forex currency out here and the exchange rate is through the roof! Those yellow cans are greeted with sighs of satisfaction and envious looks when a captain brings out a drink at dinner. A sign of true friendship between cruisers is to share one’s “Mexican beer stash.” Being as Hinano, the local brew, comes in at least $5 US per can at the grocery store, spending a few pesos on some Mexican beer is one of the smartest investments in ensuring popularity with your fellow cruisers that you can make before departing.
As for us? Suppose we’ll just have to muddle through on Tahitian wine and French baguette pizza.
Look closely, there’s a spider in this plumeria (frangipani) flower!
There’s a winery on Rangiroa! We’ve been told that it’s the only winery on a coral atoll. The amazing thing is that they’re able to grow anything here at all. Back in the day, the islanders struggled to grow their crops. Plants had to be constantly fed with other food scraps and compost in the hopes that they would grow. Why? There’s no topsoil out here! When you walk around in the “brush” of the island, you’re crunching on shells and coral. Dirt is not native. Sand is, but sand doesn’t contain minerals. Only the extremely hardy plants can survive out here without help, and since when have you heard of grape vines as being extremely hardy? Never, that’s when. Even in California wine country they baby the grapes and make sure they get enough water and protection from the bugs and frost.
**20100527 – photo – Rangiroa (106).JPG**
We’d heard about this place quite a way back in our travels. As we’ve been going, we’re specifically looking for wineries, because, um, we like wine 🙂 The guidebook for French Polynesia mentions it briefly, but we had a hard time believing that there would only be one winery in the entire country of French Polynesia. I mean, come on… they’re FRENCH! And usually where there’s one winery, there are about 50 more. There’s bound to be more, so we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled!
Unfortunately the winery, Vin de Tahiti, was closed for the season when we arrived on Rangiroa (closed for the season!?! We arrived in the middle of the tourist season!?!). We did manage to get a nice guy to open the door for us and to answer a few questions. Here’s their story:
The wine wasn’t spectacular, but it was pretty solid. Definitely drinkable, but not something we’d go out of my way to find. (oh, wait, too late 😉 The most awesome thing about it is that it’s the only Tahitian wine you can get.
The funniest thing about our wine tasting experience was the chicken that kept wandering into the bar. Now, you would think we’d be used to it by now. After months in Mexico hanging around a cat that would steal your drink when you weren’t looking and sailing around a bunch of small islands with free range chicken working the copra industry, we shouldn’t be surprised where they end up! Maybe if the chicken had stayed outside the bar, we wouldn’t have thought it unusual. Heck, the chicken could even have just gone inside the door and we probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it, even though we’re talking lagoon view, individual bungalows, high end hotel here! No, we probably wouldn’t have been too excited about it. But when you’re sitting in the bar of a high end hotel, and a scraggly chicken jumps up onto a table near you and basically orders a cold one, well… you notice it…
Did you see that? A paved road! We’ve seen paved roads before in the islands but now we start putting this information together. How do you make a paved road on a remote desert island…well concrete requires sand, rocks, fresh water and cement. Cement you have to import on the boat, no surprise there. Fresh water can be harvested from the rain; take a while but do-able. Sand can come from the beaches but rocks…rocks are a bit of stumbling point. In the Marquesas they had mountains of rocks (literally) to turn into roads but in the Tuamotu, their land is not made up of rock anymore and shipping in tons of rocks can get expensive. So what is an islander to do except improvise?
And while we’re on the topic of logistics, Greg ran into something that seems out of place in the islands: a graveyard. Yes, we understand that people die (heck, they did a lot of dying not so long ago) but it’s where they go when they die that concerns me, and not in the spiritual sense either.
We’ve already made it clear that there isn’t a whole heck of a lot of real estate out here. Also, Catholic doctrine is pretty clear on the matter: no cremation. So how long will it be before these people are deciding between housing for the living and housing for the dead?
Speaking of the Catholic Church, they have one here and it’s gorgeous.
Did you see that tabernacle? It was the tiny little castle up on the altar at the beginning of the video. (For the uninitiated: Tabernacle is the little box they keep the blessed bread in. So in the minds of us Catholics this is the place where the physical presence of Jesus resides.) In the states, you find a lot of tabernacles made out of precious materials like gold & silver. Here they don’t have stuff like that so what they lack in metal they make up for in expert craftsmanship & skill.
The largest of these stores is Magazin (French for “store”) Daniel, which is so important as to be noted in our guidebooks as “the best supermarket on the island”. So this, according to our printed guidebooks mind you, is the best supermarket in the main city of the largest, most developed, most populous island of the 78 atolls of the Tuamotu chain. Here’s the tour:
And as a special treat for all of Greg’s fellow sci-fi nerd friends out there, look what he found!
If you don’t get it, it’s ok, he forgives you. If you do get it, you know why he put it up here… so awesome!
Oh the third place stuff from the boats go? Like we mentioned before, some stuff is custom ordered. Which is why this video is so amazing:
Greg getting his butt handed to him by an island kid in a game of ping pong is not remarkable. It’s the cultural significance of the thing! (no, not of me getting power slammed by a 10 year old, why are you fixated on that!?) It was the ping pong table, focus on his table! (I might note I scored some points.) What is remarkable is that the table was there in the first place. This most assuredly overshadows any *cough* – minor – *cough* point spread difference there may have been.
Oh you want the zoomed out picture? Being as on that Google map we showed you before the scale was 1 pixel = somewhere around 500 miles or something, I don’t think it would change very much. We’re still in the middle of the blue stuff. 😉
With about 2400 permanent inhabitants (this is a HUGE number by the way, we haven’t seen cities so populous since Nuku Hiva) being only a paltry 220 miles from Tahiti (laughable distance really) and with an airport with actual daily flights (*gasp!*) Rangiroa is the de facto capital of the Tuamotu. Its coral reef is made up of 415 motu (islands) and it has only 2 passes in or out. This is where our story begins:
We had gotten a little cocky about the whole “sailing though a dangerous coral reef” thing but don’t you worry, Rangiroa was kind enough to re-humble us. Her lagoon is big: about 50 miles long and 20 miles wide. This atoll actually has its own horizon and generates its own localized micro weather patterns. Land’s still about 300 yards across though, so no help there. 50 miles long, 20 miles wide and a lagoon about 100 feet deep. That’s a lot of water and there are only two skinny little passes (say about 100 yards across) in or out. Perhaps you can see where we’re going here.
Rangiroa has a tidal current.
Those weren’t jumping fish; they were 5 foot long dolphins surfing in the standing waves. Rangiroa is famous for them. Also, some genius French entrepreneur (they did invent the word, after all) built a channel-side bar with an observation deck to watch the struggling boats…it’s like the nautical version of celebrity death match with dolphin cheerleaders & umbrella drinks!
A 6 – 7 knot tidal current shifts back and forth throughout the day, creating 5 foot standing waves in addition to the coral on both sides of the channel just waiting to snack on your fiberglass hull. If you don’t know anything about tides and currents, let us give you a visual. We watched one boat who thought that the reports of the rip tide were exaggerated and decided to just push though. For a full hour we watched this cruising boat, at all ahead full, pedal to the metal, going though gas like a drunken sailor though vodka, transit this 300 yard long pass. 300 yards! At sea – calm. In the lagoon – calm. In the pass, one little boat struggled to get in while 2.09×1013 gallons of water wanted to get out…all at once. Oh yes, we just broke out the scientific numbering system. The same system they use to measure the distance to other galaxies. Do we have your attention?
“Oh but that isn’t so bad”, you say. “Just go in while the current is pushing you into the lagoon.” Bad idea for two reasons:
1) For the non-sailors out there, the way a rudder works is that it’s a board sticking out of the bottom of your boat that turns you by pushing against the water. Turn the rudder, the water flowing past it hits it at an angle, which pushes the board and the boat attached to it, in a new direction. If water isn’t flowing past the rudder, the boat won’t turn. When a boat is in a following current (aka being pushed) in a narrow channel where the speed of the water is equal to the speed of the boat, then no water is flowing over the rudder and your half million dollar floating condo just became the world’s biggest pinball.
2) You know that desert island with the one palm tree that people get shipwrecked on in the movies? Found it. It’s at the end of the fast flowing channel of Rangiroa, right there in the smack dab middle of where all the really fast water lets out.
It’s cute, when the current isn’t pushing you right into it – then it’s scary!
