Well, today was interesting. We only had ONE Friday the 13th...I was worried we might have two.
We had a nice day today. We took off down the road that runs along the south side of the island almost to the very end and took in all the sights on this side of Tahiti. Tahiti almost looks like two islands, each one basically a circle around a volcanic center, with them joined by a strip of land probably about a mile wide. In the center of both parts of the island are mountains, actually the remains of the volcanoes that formed the island, and up to 2241 meters (about 6800 feet) on the western (larger) portion of the island and 1300 meters (4100 feet or so) on the eastern, smaller portion of the island.
Our first stop down the road was the "Musee de Tahiti et des iles" or, loosely translated, Museum of Tahiti and its islands. This was actually rather interesting in that it chronicled how Tahiti was formed, how it was settled by Polynesians, and the early colonization of the Europeans.
This is a pic of the musee itself with some of the mountains in the background:
The museum was well-organized and had a lot of artifacts and information throughout Tahiti's history. This was interesting. When Capt. Cook arrived in 1773 to chart the island and take plant samples back with him, his two ships were blown aground on the reef offshore of the island. This is one of the anchors from his ship "Resolution":
The museum had a large collection of early stone tools, most made from basalt, which is very hard:
The gardens around the museum were really nice as you can see from this:
If you're not tired of looking at seashores by now, here is the shore at the museum grounds, looking north:
And here is a pic of the mountains off in the distance as we were leaving the museum:
The next stop on our tour of the island was the Grottes de Mara'a, just down the road. These are three caves that have eroded in the side of the mountain and have water flowing through them. Two are really small, but the third one is 260 feet deep, 100 feet wide at the entrance, and 30 feet high. It was actually interesting, with about two feet of water inside the cave, flowing out and down the hill. The pic doesn't do it justice, I'm afraid:
Like I said, the picture doesn't do it justice, I'm afraid.
On the grounds of the grottoes, we saw this strangler fig which, judging from what we learned in Australia about them, must be several hundred years old to have completely killed off its host tree and grown to these dimensions:
Our next stop was the "Jardins de Vaipahi" about 20 km down the road. There is a small waterfall here and the Gardens are pretty:
The last stop of the day was the "Plateau de Taravao" which is on one of the higher points of land on the eastern, smaller portion of the island. The drive up there was on a pretty rough road, but the view was nice. From here you can see the western portion of the island in the background and the isthmus that connects the two portions of the land together. You can see how narrow that isthmus is:
Tomorrow, we're going to take in the sights on the north side of the island before heading out at 11:00 pm for Honolulu and then, after an 8-hour layover in Hawaii, on to Phoenix, where we'll arrive around 10:00 pm local time on the 15th. Not looking forward to the marathon travel but boy, will we be glad to be in the USA again and really looking forward to Patrick's graduation and then.. HOME.
Pat's Paragraph... Tahiti has daily showers, they come and then they go. We were out walking in them today in the gardens and got a little Tahitian liquid sunshine. My hair was so frizzed from the humidity, rain didn't matter. Roger mentioned yesterday that the poorer areas of the island are very bad with litter, garbage and rusted junk sitting around among the weeds. Some of the homes are literally shacks of corrugated metal with a blanket over the door. We saw families bathing in the creek today. The cost of living here is very high and the first time you see a bottle of water costing 750, with No decimal in it, you are shocked. These are Pacific francs. We haven't had to buy gas yet but I know it will be a shocker. I want to tell everyone to please be happy with where they are, and with what they have, because there are a lot of places that are worse and a lot of people that have very little.or nothing. We're really looking forward to being home.
