Cruising French Polynesia

The Disclaimer

First off, to those of you on my email list who have asked, you’re not being ignored. I messed up the middle finger on my right (i.e. dominant) hand, and it is taking a long time to heal, and has messed up my ability to draw, etc. As an example, here’s the first drawing I did after the injury.

The trip to Tahiti

Flying during the pandemic has been bizarre. We planned and booked the flights a year before, a nice, orderly and fairly direct trip. Well that plan went totally out the window. Now we had to start out by driving to Raleigh, about two hours, and park the car in a hotel’s long-term lot. Then take the hotel’s shuttle to the airport, to fly to San Francisco. The best connection we could get involved a 16-hour layover, so we had to stay overnight there. To add some drama, wildfires threatened to halt air traffic. Luckily planes were unaffected.

Tahiti

We arrived in Pape’ete, Tahiti on April 30, around 10pm, dog-tired. We dragged our suitcases up a steep hill to the airport hotel.

I was totally over the moon about going to Tahiti. Read all sorts of wonderful things about this paradise on earth. Never imagined I’d ever go there. Here’s a sketch from our hotel room.

And here’s a sketch of a French city on the Mediterranean coast.

Who thought they’d ever look so similar? And now here’s a sketch of a view from the cab on the way to downtown.

Well, friends had told us that they felt Moorea was the most beautiful island in Polynesia, and our flight plan brought us here five days before the cruise began. Moorea is a short ferry ride from Tahiti, so we decided to try a few days there.

The first thing we did the next morning was to take the ferry to Mo’orea, the island that you can see from Tahiti, about an hour’s ferry ride away.