Today we are in Papeete, Tahiti. Papeete is the administrative capital of French Polynesia and is a city of over 100,000 – and it shows in the traffic and housing. We were fortunate to have spent the morning exploring the interior of the larger of the two land masses that make up Tahiti. Papeete is nothing to shout about. But the interior of Tahiti, and once away from the city, is gorgeous!

Tahiti Nui is what most people consider as “Tahiti,” but it is connected by a land bridge to Tahiti Iti. About two-thirds of the population of French Polynesia lives on these two extinct volcanos. Nui is over five million years old while Iti is only about 800,000 years old. Tahiti has both white sand and black sand beaches. The white sand beaches are on the south side of the island and the black sand beaches are on the north. This is due to the water runoff going from south to north (southern hemisphere). The northbound water carries all of the volcanic debris and, thus, black sand. It is just as smooth and soft as white sand, but startling in that it looks nasty...but what in Tahiti could be nasty???

This map is too busy for my taste, but it shows an excellent representation of Nui and Iti. 

Papeete means “water basket” in Polynesian and comes from the time when that area of Nui was mostly swamp at the mouth of several rivers. Our journey today took us through the downtown area of Papeete and then northeast to the Papanoo (Pa-pa-NOO-oo)Valley and the rim of the Papanoo crater. 

We also had an opportunity to stop at the “Blowhole” and watch the crashing waves cause a waterspout to form on a volcano lava tube that had eroded at sea level. Quite spectacular!

Here are a few pix of our explorations:

Waterfall in the rain. It rained all day while we were there, but that did not detract from the natural beauty of the island.

We had to ford a dam and a river to get to the volcano rim, but as you can see, it was a little dicey, so we backtracked and found our way to the little iron suspension bridge to the upper right in the picture.

I was not going to walk across that!!

A wild hibiscus. Slightly different from those we have in Florida. At night, the flower turns orange and if it falls off the limb, it turns red. If it stays on the limb, it turns back to yellow as the sun rises.

Looks like I'm getting a waterfall shampoo, but, I was about a quarter-mile in front of this one. We saw dozens of these  falls.

At the rim of the volcano. The crater - what's left of  it - is about 6 km  (about 3.5 miles) across.

The blowhole. There is another, larger one on the opposite side of the road, but we got drenched when it spouted and I didn't want to ruin another camera.

Tomorrow on to Bora Bora. Stay tuned…