Pape ete, it's two words, pape and ete. All the vowels get pronounced. Pape means water. Ete means basket. It is the capital of Tahiti and really of the South Pacific as well. It is France in the same way that Hawaii is the US, except that they use Tahitian francs – 75 francs is a dollar..
We went off to a lagoon tour today with about 40 of our closest friends. The seats are built for much smaller people, so you do sit close.
The day was beautiful, sunny, a slight breeze, hot, but not too hot until you get on the beach. The beaches are black sand, not white, and the sand gets very very hot. I was not too interested in the swimming because the black sand reminded me too much of copper concentrates and it seemed like swimming in the concentrates thickener. I'll pass on that.
We went to Pointe Venus where Captain Cooke came to make the astronomical observation of the transit of Venus. From his data, combined with that of astronomers in Europe, it was calculated that the distance to the sun is 150 million kilometers. There is a little monument there, but somebody stole the brass plaque about ten years ago.
It is also where Capain Bligh landed in Tahiti with his ship, the Bounty. There is a monument to that, as well. On the monument, he is listed as Lieutenant Bligh. The “captain” part is just because he was commanding the ship. Fletcher Christian is listed as “Master”, and there were two others of that rank.
On the way to Pointe Venus we saw some spinner dolphins, only one of them actually spinned. These were very small, about 4 ft long, and not very active. I don't think anybody got a good picture of them. I got a pretty good shot of a bird that followed along with us for a while. I thought I saw some people camping on a little bitty island called a “motu”, but it was just a trash pile instead of a camp.
The scenery was beautiful, we had a good view of “the diadem”, a crown shaped mountain up the valley from Papeete. Then it was back to the ship for a hamburger and a swim in the pool. All in all it was a very relaxing day.
We skipped the night time entertainment. It was a magician we had seen just about 3 weeks ago. He was good but we have to get up early again in the morning to visit Bora Bora.
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