Many of my posts aim to be thoughtful musings about the land around me, the people who inhabit it, and how they collectively help shape my worldview.

This is not one of those posts.

I mean, I do have those thoughts now about Tahiti and the people I’ve met here, but this is not one of those posts.

This is going to come out as more of a Johnny Cash-style ramble about where I’ve been these past few days. There’s an awful lot of blahblah below, so folks other than my mom (Hi Mom!) should feel free to just powerscroll through the verbiage and look at the pretty pictures. Honestly Mom, I promise I won’t feel judgy if you do, too – there won’t be a test. But there are a lot of pretty pictures.

And folks who have been following along on Facebook or Instagram have seen pics from the first day and a half, so you can skip straight to Day Three).

Here we go.

Day One…

…didn’t get off to a good start. I’d loved the couple of walking food tours I did in Italy last year, and figured the advertised “Pape’ete Street Food” tour that met at 8:30 would be a fine way to get acquainted with the town. By 9:00 a.m., dodging from scant shadow to shadow in the escalating heat at the designated meeting place, it was clear that the guide was a no show.

I retreated to the nearest place I could find that had air conditioning and smoothies to work on a revised plan. Problem is, of course, when you’re overheated (88F, 70% humidity), tired (nine hour flight from Seattle) and hungry (“Come with an empty stomach to taste all that Pape’ete has to offer!”), the resulting mood can’t help but spiral downward. I didn’t want to be cheered up.

Another shower, another nap, and it was lunchtime, but I was still in a sour mood. Basically ended up wandering the city for the day, trying to get a sense of it and coming away unimpressed.

Evening fared a little better (I can’t remember – maybe I had three showers that first day?). The temps veered toward survivable once the sun plonked below the horizon, and I sallied out again to sample the roulottes, the food trucks that populate Place Vai’ete by the water every night, and wandered through the very non-Tahiti’esque Christmas decorations at town hall.

(Y’all have seen these pics before here.)

Day Two…

…was better. The island of Mo’orea is about a 30 minute ferry ride northwest of Tahiti. It’s a little smaller, and much more rural. For you Hawai’i buffs, think of Kauai vs Oahu – I think the parallels track pretty well. And a different company was offering a “Mo’orea Street Food Tour” the next morning. I exchanged some email with them beforehand, just to be sure that they weren’t the same company that had just stiffed me, and confirmed that they could pick me up from the ferry dock in Vai’are.

Mo’orea native Heimata Hall of Tahiti Food Tours already had a lovely family from Sacramento/LA on board when he swooped in, and started us on a counterclockwise sampling of his favorite spots, snacks and dishes on the island.

It became clear right off the bat that this wasn’t just a casual gig for him, and some post-tour Googling revealed that in addition to being adored by the folks at every food stand and shop we stopped in, he’s also a big thing off-island (see, e.g. here and here). Not only did we get to taste half a billion (I may be exaggerating) different local and national specialities, we got the lessons in Tahitian history that explained how they happened. Something like casse-croûte chowmen – a chow mein/baguette sandwich – doesn’t just happen by accident.

We tasted crunchy pepper-lime mango, boiled Tahitian chestnuts, chicken in taro leaf, banana jelly pudding, poisson cru, fried dumplings, pie and and and and I don’t even remember. And yes, they’ve got avocados the size of Nerf footballs.

By the time I rolled back onto the ferry southbound, I was a stuffed and happy camper, contemplating lazily how I would spend…

…Day Three

Getting out of big, dirty noisy Pape’ete seemed to be key. As Heimata drove us around Mo’orea’s geological crazyscape on Day Two, I had mused aloud, asking how hard it was to rent a car to do the same on my own. “Oh, you should absolutely do it!”

Really? Just rent a car and drive around Tahiti? I poked at a few web forms, asked ChatGPT to suggest some itineraries, and damned if it didn’t actually look doable.

One nice thing about rental cars on Tahiti is that they all have big stickers front and back that alert other motorists that you’re a Damned Tourist and probably have no idea what you’re doing. I took comfort in that and made it the entire day on the forbearance of others. Mind you, drivers on Tahiti seem to lean into the same sort of aloha that I remember from driving on Oahu – smiles and understanding waves, not honks when I inadvertently rolled to a near stop on the highway trying to convince myself that that crazy potholed driveway-looking dirt path was actually the road I was supposed to turn off onto.

I quickly got the hang of things and soon found myself cruising in the flow: oooh – what’s that stand by the roadside?

Rather than trying to craft a coherent narrative of it all, I’m just going to give you my principal stops along the way.

Farmers Market!

Readers know that I love a good farmers market. Or any farmers market. Right outside of Pape’ete I pulled off the road into a park to adjust my seat and reorganize, and what should I find there? Bought some tasty dried bananas and more of the boiled Tahitian chestnuts as road snacks.

The benefit of exploring by car that I hadn’t fully appreciated was that, whenever I got overheated, I was just a quick scramble back to the car and the push of a couple of buttons away from recuperation.

Side trip to the Arahurahu Marae, the only fully-restored marae (temple/meeting place) on the island

Mara’a Grottos

I quickly discovered that another handy alternative to air conditioning was to just stick my head under whatever stream of water happened to be coming from above. The Mara’a grottos are a series of fern-hung cave’ish, well, grottos surrounded by paths where you can just hang out in the mist that comes off the water from the vegetation-packed cliffs above. There are flowers. Oh boy are there flowers.

Speaking of flowers

Everything I read about visiting the south side of the island emphasized Vaihipi Water Gardens as a you-really-gotta-stop-here spot. I was not disappointed. The gardens were much tamer than I would have expected from Gauguin’s old neighborhood (the now-defunct museum is a few miles down the road), but the paths were lined with signs that described the origins, attributes and traditional/modern uses of the plants and flowers. And, of course, there were more waterfalls.

Around the bottom

Tahiti-Iti and Teahupo’o

As you can see from the above map, Tahiti Nui (the island proper) has a mini-me, Tahiti-Iti, barely attached at the southeast corner. If you follow the road right to the end you get to Teahupo’o, which by any rights should be just another little fishing village. But it’s a little fishing village that’s world famous for some fluke in the coral reefs that here conspire to create some of the most monstrous surfing waves in the world. When Paris hosted the 2024 Olympics, they hosted the surfing competition here.

I’ll admit, I was tempted to join the kids bodyboarding in by the shore, just to be able to say, “Yeah, I’ve surfed Teahupo’o…” But resigned myself to just getting my toes wet and heading back up the road, where more adventure awaited.

The inscription on the base of the statue reads: “I am Vehiatua-i-te-mata’i, the daughter of the Winds, she who rides the swells of Ta’aroa!”

Oh! And I forgot to mention lunch. Food here has been freaking amazing, with fresh fish, fruits and veggies available from ad hoc stands along the roadside, tiny little wood-and-tarp restaurants and food trucks (roulottes!) in addition to the regular fare. I may eat my words, but emboldened by the tour with Heimata the day before, I found myself leaning more and more into tiny places that younger me would have felt challenging.

Tuna carpaccio with so much garlic that I think I can still smell it on my breath…

Beaches and waterfalls

The east coast of the island is much less developed – there are roadside villages here and there, but only one place that even felt remotely like a “town.” I pulled over a few times where there was parking to get my feet wet in the sand and watch kids surf, and found my way to a few more waterfalls, including one (Vaihi) where swimming was not prohibited.

Venus Point Lighthouse and Park

It was approaching dusk as I made it to the home stretch back around the top of the island. I was smelling the hay – it had been a long day on the road – but I’m glad I resisted to temptation to skip Venus Point.

Okay, that was quite the litany of places. It’s now the morning after, and I’ve made it to the ship, where I’m attempting to shift gears, get my tech head on and get to doing what I came out here to do. I’ll keep you posted!