I awoke after the best sleep I've had for a while now. No lapping waves on the dinghy, no paroxysmal squalls and getting up to close the hatch before our cabin was soaked, no anchor alarms to check on, or loosely tied kayaks crashing on the deck. For the first time in several days, my back wasn't sore from the mattress.
It was pouring outside and didn't look like it was going to let up. We put on our swim suits to check out some of the pools. The Intercontinental had a lagoonarium which wasn't bad. Schools of fish swam around with some that were quite sizable. Shannon liked one that looked like a colorful zebra, and another torpedo-like swimmer that she thought looked like a cartoon fish.
Unfortunately, I cut my big toe on a rock getting into the lagoonarium which later was impossible to keep dry. Hopefully it won't get infected.
We packed up our room and checked out. The clothes we washed yesterday were still a little damp in this weather, but should be okay. We contemplated paying 10000 CFP to check out at night as our flight didn't depart until 2am. Originally, we planned to go to Moorea, but because the weather was so crappy, we didn't think there would be much point getting soaked there instead of on Tahiti.
We had two overpriced clubhouse sandwiches only to find that the shuttle between the hotel and downtown Papeete was full. So we walked, going by a Champion supermarket only 15 minutes away where we could have purchased some food to go. By the time we walked to the airport, it started pouring again, so we caught a cab the rest of the way.
The Lonely Planet wasn't far off the mark saying that Papeete could be skipped completely. We picked up a tourist map from the tourist center where 8 employees without clients to serve stared at us as we walked in. We wander a little bit at the market and up and down a few streets killing time before eating at McDonalds and taking a cab back to the Intercontinental. Cab fares pretty much double after 8pm, so we made sure to be back well before then.
Despite the exorbitant prices of everything in French Polynesia and Papeete, standards of living outside of the resorts and over water bungalows look very poor. Residential streets are unevenly paved, many houses looked shanty with corrugated tin roofs and wispy dirty curtains in the windows. Cars run well enough but are older and European sized. Maybe it's just because the rain and humidity makes everything look dirty and a little worn down, but I imagine a similar island country but with a British rather than a French colonial history, like The Bahamas for example, to be more affluent.
At the hotel, we sat on the balcony overlooking the swimming pools and Moorea in the distance until it was dark. Then we bought an hour of Internet at the business center for $10, did some quick emailing and spent a couple hours browsing and watching some of the pictures and videos we've taken.
For French Polynesia, we brought three cameras: the Canon 3i as the workhorse equipped with polarizing filter, my waterproof Lumix who unfortunately got moisture in when we were in Mexico so occasionally water condensed in the lens, and the GoPro with the wide angle lens. I back up all photos to the two portable hard drives we brought whenever we have access to a computer with two USB ports. While waiting for our flights, we swapped all of our photos of the cruise so we ended up with around 22 gigs of media.
The last half hour before catching our transfer to the airport was spent drifting in and out of sleep on a hammock beside the lagoonarium.
One more excitement for the day. When checking in to our flight at the airport, the agent told us we couldn't go to New Zealand without a flight out of the country! The way we booked our flights, New Zealand was the last leg of the expensive flights and our plan was to fly discount carriers the rest of the way booked later. Even though we had a flight from Hong Kong to Vancouver in February, it didn't matter.
Shannon was like "Wha? No way! We had been waiting all day and a couple hours at the airport and now we couldn't even get on our flight? What the hell?" Had we know, we could have had all friggen day to take care of this.
We were rushed over to a "ticketing office" just beside the desks where a couple of other people looked like they were in the same situation. There was a computer kiosk in the cramped office that Shannon impressively hacked into and we quickly booked an el cheapo flight from Christchurch to Sydney. It even had a printer.
Armed with this itinerary, which I might add seemed very easy to forge, we got seats together beside the window.
Goodbye paradise! And on to more adventure!
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