No, I’m sorry but the correct reply is:
“We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren’t developed.
But we’re going back again in a couple of weeks!”
Animal Crackers (1930)
Day 10 (August 13).
St Regis offers room service breakfast that is brought to your balcony by canoe. Your order is set up on the balcony table. We’d planned this for our final breakfast at the resort the night before. In the early light of day, however, we second-guessed the plan. Yes, it would have been a unique experience, and yes, I am sure we would have enjoyed it immensely. The problem was we would have missed out on the variety we’d come to expect and appreciate from the buffet. A room service breakfast was an order, with a finite number of items, whereas eating at the restaurant we could have anything we wanted, as much as we wanted, and even change our minds on the spur of the moment, and the choices, all the mouth watering choices. Remember the old cartoons where one character or another is levitated off the ground by the aroma of a dish? Well, that is what breakfast was like for us almost every morning. 
Sometimes we didn’t know that we wanted until its aroma hit us upon entering the restaurant. Room service would have been relaxing, but it simply could not hold a candle to the St Regis’ buffet experience, so off we went.
We typically went to breakfast around 6:30 and finished up around 7:30. Today, we lingered until around 8:00, just to take it all in for the last time. As usual, breakfast was great.
After leaving the restaurant, we walked around the resort for a bit. My wife stopped by the boutique to pick up some snacks, as she typically does when we vacation outside the US, to hand out to colleagues when she goes back to work. I think her friends are more fascinated by the foreign packaging and brands they’d never heard of than the contents. She cleaned the poor shopkeeper out of Vidal Melons, which is bubble gum in the shape of a melon, but don’t take this as an endorsement of the product as I tasted one and no, just no.
When we returned to our villa, I took a little more footage as this would be our last opportunity. You can hear us sigh as we entered for the final time.
It didn’t take long to finish packing after breakfast as all the was left were our toiletries. We could have sat around the villa a little longer as the yacht to the airport wasn’t scheduled to leave for another hour or so, but my wife decided to call the registration office to send the cart for us and our luggage then. We looked around one last time, checked to ensure we didn’t leave anything behind, and brought our luggage to the front door.
Approximately 15 minutes later, a porter rang our doorbell and asked if it was okay to take our bags. After the last bag was loaded, we hopped in the cart for the ride to the dock. Here is a clip of the last part of the ride.
Upon arriving at the dock, we left our bags with the porter and went into the registration area to check out, and it was all “Oh, Monsieur and Madame Onomatopoeia, you are leaving us so soon?” Sure, go ahead and make me feel worse than I already do. As part of the checkout process, we received our boarding passes for the flight back to Papeete Tahiti. We were advised that all we had to do upon arrival at the airport was to show the boarding pass to the attendant at the gate at the time of our departure and board. How efficient.
That done, we went outside and sat in one of the shaded areas meant for those preparing to get the boot. We asked another departing couple how they liked it. Their response was “it was perfection.” After another 10 minutes or so, my wife noticed Adelaide walking toward us. Of those departing, we were the only couple to have celebrated a wedding so we were the only ones she knew personally. She hugged me and my wife and made small talk about us visiting again and how we should definitely come back for our 30th anniversary.
In short order, the yacht appeared, docked, and let off 5 new couples with mouths agape and not knowing where to look first. That was us just last week, and now one of these couples will probably be sleeping in our bed tonight! Damnit!
After the welcome procession for the new guests and removing their luggage, the porters began to load ours. After the luggage was loaded, we boarded. I counted 10 couples and 1 family of four leaving with us so the boat was pretty crowded. Once aboard, one of the crew came by with necklaces made of many small shells and draped one around my wife’s neck and then mine. He also handed us bottles of water and two cold cloths.
After 10 minutes or so, as we wondered why we were still at the dock, the captain went on the intercom to advise that we were awaiting one more couple. About 5 minutes later, we saw the couple running up to the yacht to board. My wife laughed and said “maybe you two are related,” in a not-so-subtle reminder of my holding everyone up during the jet ski tour a few days before, which she’d ribbed me about every day since, conveniently denying her role in the chaos. Here is a small clip after we boarded the yacht. On the dock, you will see the oft-mentioned Adelaide in a cute black dress who decided to see us off.
A few minutes later, we were pulling away from the St Regis dock for the last time, heading for the airport. The day was absolutely gorgeous. It is difficult to come to grips with ending a vacation on such a beautiful day. Here is a clip of the yacht pulling away from the dock and part of the ride to the Bora Bora airport. I tried to capture the staff waving goodbye to us from the dock. I think you can just make it out even with my crazy zooming and shaky-cam.
Approximately 20 minutes later, we were docking at the airport in Bora Bora. Here is a clip of the yacht arriving at the airport and porters removing passengers’ luggage.
In no time, the flight was called and all the passengers queued up. As the St Regis attendant said, we simply showed our boarding passes to the person at the gate, which was just a door to the outside, and boarded. Couldn’t have been simpler.
On the way back to Papeete, our plane had to stop on the island of Morea to pick up additional passengers, so instead of the flight taking 40 minutes or so, it was 35 minutes to Morea, and then another 10 minute flight from Morea to Papeete. I don’t believe I have ever taken a 10 minute flight before but it kind of messes with your head. As soon as the pilot leveled off, there was an announcement to prepare for landing. It took longer for the passengers to board in Morea than the flight itself.
We arrived at Faaa Aeroport in Papeete a little after 12 Noon. One thing we planned to do after our arrival, as our flight to Hawaii was not until 11:30 that night, was to take the ferry to Morea. However, like our plans for breakfast, after retrieving our luggage, we changed our minds. It suddenly seemed a bit of a hassle. Instead, my wife decided she wanted to go into town for some shopping …of course she did. Before that, however, we needed to stow our luggage as there was no way we were going to traipse around Papeete with full 65 liter backpacks.
Conveniently, Faaa has a luggage storage service. I mistakenly thought it consisted of a DIY locker set up with a credit card swipe apparatus. It is actually a room with metal shelves and a woman behind a counter who checks your ticket, passport, and photo ID, then takes, tags, and places your luggage on one or more of the shelves with numbers corresponding to those on a ticket she gives you at the end of the transaction. The price is quite reasonable as I paid the equivalent of $15 for all our luggage and other stuff my wife purchased. On the one hand the storage service is very secure, as the storage area is locked at all times. On the other, it is very inefficient. We were in a queue behind two other couples, just two, for a half hour. On top of all of this, we had to wait until 1:30 for the storage facility to open as practically the entire city of Papeete closes from 12:00 to 1:30 every weekday, that includes most businesses and shops. We were wondering why the entire airport was a ghost town in the middle of the day. Now we knew.
After storing our bags, we needed to find out how to catch a cab, and even what they looked like. My wife, ever proactive, simply walked up to two police officers and asked. Now, one important piece of information here, which very well could have been our experience only but, contrary to what we were told about the citizens of Papeete, almost everyone we spoke with, with the exception of airport staff, spoke no English at all. We expected English proficiency to be higher than that of hinterlands like Bora Bora. Boy, were we wrong. Not even the police spoke English but seemed to relax a little upon realizing I understood their French. Also, no one we encountered in Papeete was as friendly as we’d become accustomed to in Bora Bora, not even as friendly as Bora Bora mainlanders who had no reason to be kind to us. They weren’t rude, really, but brusk certainly. The police gave us the information we needed to catch a cab but seemed annoyed by the imposition. The cab driver got us to the center of town alright, but he grunted his responses to our questions rather than using actual words, leaving us a little confused as to where to catch a cab on the way back. We decided to have a light lunch at a cafe in town and the waitress never smiled. If anything, she glowered. Food was good, though.
We walked to Le Marche, which is a large, two-story, internationally known, open air food and souvenir market. We looked around but didn’t purchase anything as none of the food was prepackaged and we simply didn’t want to chance it. My wife went into a few ladies clothing shops but didn’t see anything she liked.
We then wended our way back to the taxi stand, engaged the driver, and negotiated our price back to the airport. By now it was a little after 4:00 PM and, having nothing to do, we walked around the airport for a bit. The airport had the strangest McDonald’s I’d ever seen. It, in fact, was so strange that I had to double check to confirm it was a real McDonald’s. McDonald’s logo? Yep. Golden Arches? Yep, Ronald? Yep. Hamburgers? No! Fries? No! Big Mac? No! Filet-o-Fish? No!! Panini? Panini at McDonalds, but no burgers? I saw that they sold something called a McDO, but by then I was laughing so hard I never did find out what it was.
At this point, my wife was getting cranky, and so was I, to be frank. We needed a little shuteye and there was simply nowhere in the airport to get comfortable. After seeing an advertisement in an airport brochure, we decided to get a room at the Tahiti Airport Motel. I don’t like motels and haven’t stayed in one since my 20s, but we were wiped. I wasn’t expecting much but as it was directly across the street from the airport, it was very convenient. I just crossed my fingers that it wasn’t vermin infested.
We walked over to the motel and asked the manager if there was anything available. There was. She asked me to sign the room rental contract and said I had to return the key before I left. I told her we needed something just until our flight later that evening. She responded by saying we had to pay full price anyway, which I hadn’t questioned. We still had quite a bit of Tahitian money left so we paid with that. She then handed me the key and told me where the room was. The hallway was dark so that was not a good sign. We walked up to the second floor, put the key in the door and opened it. I half expected The Blob to jump out at us, but the room we walked into was actually quite pleasant. It was clean and bright with a comfortable king size bed, a big flat screen TV across from the bed, and a small fridge and microwave oven adjacent. It wasn’t bad at all. I set the alarm in my phone for 8:30 PM and while my wife was in the bathroom I fell asleep. When the alarm went off, we prepared ourselves and were at the front desk 15 minutes later to turn over the key as requested. The cost for the room was the equivalent of just $113 US! Had I known about this place, I would have stayed there our first night in Tahiti instead of the Intercontinental. As we walked back to the airport, I turned around and snapped this photo. Two thumbs up.
After another half hour or so waiting to get our luggage from storage, we queued up for the boarding process. based on the length of the Customs queue, we thought it would take forever to get through. After checking our backpacks, however, we were led to a separate, much shorter queue. The long queue was for Air Tahiti Nui flights. We were flying Hawaiian and there were only two people ahead of us. We got through Customs lickety-split and were in the waiting area before we knew it.
The flight from Tahiti to Honolulu was approximately 6 hours so we arrived around 5:30 AM on Sunday August 14. We had to go through Customs on the Hawaii side as well, but this time the process was more involved. I did like the automated customs process for the technology’s sake alone but it did take a more time than transacting with a live customs agent. After leaving Customs, it was a little after 6:00 AM. Although we had a connecting flight, it wasn’t scheduled to depart until around 3:00 that afternoon. My wife and I made our way to the Hawaiian business class lounge which, although comfortable, had nothing to eat but packaged cookies. Really, Hawaiian? Really?
After stowing our bags behind the attendant’s counter (thank you, Joanie), we left the lounge and had breakfast at one of the restaurants in the airport. Upon our return, we grabbed a couple of seats and fell asleep. When we awoke a couple of hours later, Joanie had placed blankets on me and my wife, which was very thoughtful. At around 10:00, we decided to walk around a bit. Before we knew it, it was lunch time. We ate something and then headed for our gate. We boarded our plane at around 2:30 PM for the 11-hour flight home.
Thank you all for allowing me to share the best vacation I have ever experienced. Please pardon the length, the myriad typos, the clumsy phrasing at times, as well as the delay in completing it. I hope I have provided enough details for those of you considering a getaway like this. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
We are now making plans for next year, and knowing that I probably cannot top this year’s, we are considering either Bali Indonesia or the Maldives.
Thanks again.
Heh, I’d forgotten about that Captain Spaulding routine. Thanks. 