Tahiti Roadtrip

Last week's trip to Tahiti began on the 8 am ferry from Mo'orea. We loaded up the Land Rover with a week's worth of food (we ate very well on this trip, thanks entirely to Erica) and camping equipment. It was a beautiful sunny day, with clear views of Mt. Aorai looming over Papeete. First we drove to Paea to drop off a student from the class who was working on mosquitoes in collaboration with the Institut Louis Malardé, and then turned around to drive up Mt. Marau (1450 m), the long ridge overlooking Papeete and Faa'a International Airport. It was very exciting, after nearly two continuous months on Mo'orea, where the speed limit is 60 km/h, to drive on the RDO, the 10 km or so of real freeway outside Papeete, where the speed limit is 90 km/h and there are six lanes! The Land Rover could only do about 80, though.

Mt. Marau is the only mountain on Tahiti that you can drive to the top of, because it is dotted with radio towers and antennas serving Papeete and the airport. The ridge is covered in beautiful cloud forest, and by this point, the clouds had formed and there were almost no views of the valleys and mountains to either side. We camped out on Marau the first night, and awoke to amazing views west towards Mo'orea, and north towards Mt. Aorai. We drove back down the mountain, onto the RDO, along the north coast of Tahiti and then up the Papenoo Valley that runs through the center of the island. It's hard to overemphasize how urban metropolitan Papeete seemed, even though it's only the size of Berkeley! The Papenoo Valley is largely uninhabited today, but was a major center of precontact Polynesian settlement. The road alternates between gravel and cement, with lots of 15% grades, becoming increasingly sketchy towards the end. One section near the back of the valley, with a steep descent and reascent, is being undercut at the bottom because it crosses a stream, so I don't expect it to last much longer. We camped out along the Papenoo River, near a spot with an excellent swimming hole, and tried unsuccessfully to make a fire out of damp purau (Hibiscus tiliaceus) wood.

The island of Tahiti is actually two extinct volcanoes joined by an isthmus. The older and larger, Tahiti Nui, is to the west and has most of the population, as well as the highest mountains. The younger and smaller, Tahiti Iti, or le Presqu'île (The Peninsula) is to the east and is much more sparsely populated; in fact, there isn't even a road all the way around it. We drove next to Tahiti Iti, stopping for an hour due to road construction (photo above). After a briefer stop to pick up fresh ice and a new pair of sandals (one of the station dogs ate one of my sandals the night before our departure) at Champion, we drove up through a pastoral landscape of cow pastures to the belvédère (lookout) in the center of Tahiti Iti. That night we had amazing views back towards the town lights on the isthmus; the next morning, the skies were clear and we could see all the peaks of Tahiti Nui clearly. The pond nearby was even occupied by a pair of very skittish rare gray ducks (Anas superciliosa). That morning I hiked partway up towards Mt. Teatara, but eventually lost my way in a jungle of invasive Miconia trees when human and pig trails became indistinguishable, until I turned my GPS on and became unlost. That afternoon, the belvédère was visited by hordes of tourists, and I eavesdropped on their conversations as I wrote up my field notes. I was most amused by an older French man with a younger Asian woman, who bickered to each other in English about getting her visa extended and whether or not to ask me to take their picture. Eventually he approached me and after establishing that I spoke English, asked me what I was doing. I told him I was studying plants. Trying to impress me or her, he recommended that I go to the Marquesas Islands. I told him I had been. He looked a bit disappointed and asked me which ones. After I named four islands, he changed the subject and told me that one of my countrymen had spent some time in the Marquesas and written a book about it. I told him that I indeed, had read Herman Melville's book Typee about a sojourn on Nuku Hiva in the 1840's. His pride seemed a bit injured and the two of them left pretty soon after that.

Thanksgiving morning we ended up driving up a dirt road to go check out the vegetation around some lavatubes at Hitiaa, on the east coast of Tahiti Nui. It had rained the previous night and our colleagues from the French Polynesian government who we planned on meeting called to cancel. They turned out to have been wise, because after we got partway up this road, it started to rain torrentially, so we drove back in the storm along the coast road and back to Papeete, where we had lunch and coffee at Les Trois Brasseurs, French Polynesia's only brewpub. The rest of the afternoon we spent in various government offices in Papeete, and then we had Thanksgiving dinner at the roulottes (food trucks) at Place Vaiete on the Papeete waterfront. Erica had salade Niçoise, and I had poisson cru (raw fish in coconut milk). I had always thought of the food trucks as a very locally authentic thing, but virtually the whole clientele there were Japanese tourists.

Friday was spent running more errands in Papeete, and learning how to parallel park a Land Rover. While waiting for the ferry to go back to Mo'orea, we ran into a bunch of the students from the Berkeley class, who had just returned from a trip to Raiatea. They gave me back the map I had hand-drawn of the trails on the island, which had been heavily annotated with silly doodles and Princess Bride references, stained with various fluids including ketchup, and had the edges burnt. This will be going on my office wall when I get back to Berkeley.

The ferry ride back to Mo'orea was rough, with huge gray swells and the catamaran blades lifting out of and plunging back into the water. Erica and I had dinner at Chez Luciano, a pizzeria run by a crazy French ventriloquist who screeches like a cat and keeps offering pizza au chat, and then returned to the station. It was an excellent trip. The Glochidion trees were fruiting everywhere, and I was able to collect lots of caterpillars. Plus, it was good to get off Mo'orea.

Things have been pretty quiet here for the past week; a few staff from UC Santa Barbara are here, but that's it. It's been phenomenally beautiful for the past few days; the lagoon is a shade of turquoise that makes you miss this place even though I have another eight months here! I have started reading Proust's Rememberance of Things Past in the original, a goal of mine since high school. I'm only on page 6, and it's amazing, but I recently realized that it is seven volumes in total, so I'm not sure when and if I'm going to finish.

My next trip, in a week and a half, will be to Maupiti, the oldest and smallest of the high Society Islands.