Tahiti Nui and Tahiti Iti

Oceans, the final frontier.  These are the voyages of the ms Amsterdam.  Her 113 day mission to seek out and explore this big blue marble.  To accept strange and established cultures.  To boldly learn strange old customs,  (music starts low and crescendo's),  To eat as much as can be eaten.......then we go to commercial....

Ok, had to do it.   LeRoy grew up being a Trekkie and like several of my past posts, they tend to reference a TV theme.   Are you beginning to think I watch too much TV?  Yeah, me too.

Colorful dancers greet us in Tahiti!

Ahhhh Tahiti.  Ahhhh, Moorea.  Ahhhh, Bora Bora.  Otherwise known as French Polynesia.  You have all heard of these tropical paradises.  Perhaps you have imagined yourselves one day being there.   Perhaps you have been lucky enough to already have done so.    Well...

There are some good reasons they are considered paradise.   One, they are in a tropical zone on the map.  Two, they are made up of ancient volcanoes just as all the Pacific rim is.  Three, they are covered in LUSH vegetation which result in delicious fruits and beautiful flowers.   Let's look at these features and put them together a little differently.

Tropics.   Think hot, steamy humid weather.   Volcanoes.   Think hot steamy volcanic rock spewing out from deep within the earth's hot steamy core.    Vegetation.   Think hot, steamy, sticky, thick plants.   Now, how does this climate stay this way?   Glad you asked.  Think rain.  We have visited the  driest desert in the world when we were in Peru.   They average about 9 mm of rain per year.   You cannot call them tropical.    You can call French Polynesia tropical.   Are you still thinking rain like I asked?  Go ahead, take a guess.  How much rain does Tahiti average per year?    No fair using Google.   Give up?   Try 5 meters.   Now I flunked metric conversion so I am just going to call it 15 feet.   A couple of short years ago,  2012 I think he said, they got 12 meters.  Call it 36 feet.   The Tahitians have a name for the rain that I cannot pronounce but they considerate it a gift from the heavens.  They are surrounded by a lot of salty water so that fresh stuff coming from the sky is a gift.

So what do you think it was doing while we were on Tahiti Nui as well as Tahiti Iti?   It was a raining.   It is a way of life here.  Not too much stops.   The scooter people put on a poncho and travel just as crazy as if it were dry.   So here we were a bunch of boat people, I'm sorry, landing party, loading up in our open 4-wheel jeep things to go see the interior of Tahiti.   We were on a mission to learn just as others were on other mission to learn other customs of this old culture.  We were loaded up with our phasers on stun and our cameras with full battery charges.  When you think interior you can imagine old volcanoes.   Steep grades and little or no road.   Most of the time we stayed near a river with a road used by hydroelectric workers.   Tahiti gets about half of their power via hydroelectric generation and half by diesel generators.   Power is expensive here.

Each time we stopped we poured ourselves out of the vehicles along with the collected rainwater and we go about taking our official documentation pictures for historical data.   Oh, and what else do you think comes with hot steamy sticky thick vegetation??   Mosquitoes the size of small dogs.  They circle around us obviously waiting to gain enough numbers and to figure our weaknesses before they launch their attacks.  Then they come in with their 18 gauge needles to drain us of our life blood.  But they don't stop there.  A few times they went deep enough to suck the marrow from our bones.  But I have outsmarted them.  I now have enough wine and alcohol in my bloodstream to thwart even the most veteran little varmint.  They would fly away from me swaying a little, slurring their buzzing and could never fly in a straight line again until they made it home and slept it off.  A few times I had to reach up and pull Vialula back down to earth.  The evil things were trying to take her off to their nest and make her their new queen.

Cathedral de Notre Dame

So by now you are thinking Tahiti was a bust.  Not even close.  We had a great time.  Vi bought a new dress in town at Le Marche (The Market) which sold flowers, fruit, vegetables, sarongs.  It's a cross between the Farmers Market and the Flea Market at home.  We exchanged some US dollars to French Polynesian Francs.  One dollar is 105 Francs.  We bought a few needs, Had a coke, went to the local Catholic Church built in 1875 named Cathedral de Notre Dame.

Colorful flowers at La Marche (The Market) in Tahiti

On our adventure to the island's interior, the main theme was waterfalls.  I didn't count them all but a hundred would not be an overestimate.  Some were due to the current rainfall we were having but the overwhelming majority is just normal waterfalls.   As you remember, it is all volcano.   What is really cool is that the water is flowing underground thru lava tubes in the mountains.   And then it just shoots out the side like a water faucet.  But we drive along and you look way way up in the mountains and water is just flowing down everywhere you look.  It feeds down and waters all the greenery that grows vertically right out the side of solid rock covering everything.   It looks like a green mountain but it is still volcanic rock.   And all so lush.  Every color of green you can imagine.   I am torn because green has always been my favorite color but now all this beautiful green has been challenged by the perfect blue of the ocean.   Either site is just a treat for the eyes and when you get one against the other it is indescribable.

How many waterfalls can you count?!!!

Tahiti is a port.  We come in and tie off.   Moorea and Bora Bora are tender ports where we lay offshore and take the tender boats into the lagoons and depart.   As we left Tahiti, the rain was blowing and the waves were rolling.   It was a rough go of it.   We arrived outside Moorea and there was absolutely no chance that we could navigate into the bay and use the tenders.   40 mile per hour winds and 8 to 10 foot swells squashed any hope for that so the Captain made the decision to forego our stop in Moorea.

Tahiti is a port - Pilot boats guide ship in.

We headed for Bora Bora.   We arrived at 7:00pm on Sunday evening, and the rains have finally subsided. We are looking forward to our new adventure tomorrow in Bora Bora.

Vialula and LeRoy arrive in Bora Bora!