My Winter is Warmer than Your Summer
After not having found a friend’s house to leave the car, we took it to LAX Park, which seemed to offer the lowest rate for monthly parking. It is a giant fenced parking lot filled with cars which are basically touching each other. I have no idea how the valets have room to pluck a car out of the middle of the crowd to get it ready for the returning owner. Hopefully I’ll get my car back, but if not, it’s had a good run, with 230,000 miles.
We found the Air Tahiti Nui checkin counter, and soon were on a bus taking us to an isolated jetway on the tarmac so we could board. The flight was pleasant: the food wasn’t ultimately superlatively awful, and the entertainment system only crashed once with an Ignore / Retry dialog. There were a couple movies which were watchable enough. The plane was filled with eclipse chasers, many bound for the Paul Gauguin which we sailed on in 2005. Some we recognized, others recognized us from earlier eclipses. After landing in Papeete, the Tahiti Airport Motel loomed on a hill just above the airport, and we could easily walk up to it without dealing with taxis. Its wi-fi was a little sketchy; for some reason mail didn’t work reliably, but doing anything in a browser seemed to work OK.
Ray has noticed that a week ago we were at the base of the snowfields on Mt. Hood in Oregon, in the peak of summer as throngs of kids headed to the lifts with their snowboards. And now we’re in 80-degree humid tropical weather in Tahiti in the dead of winter. The ocean is about the same temperature as the pool at Timberline Lodge.
Today we took a little propeller plane without oxygen masks on a 30-minute flight to Huahine. Most of the passengers were headed to Bora Bora — only about ten got off here. We spent today, the Fourth of July, a Sunday where everything is closed, going on little walks and mostly hanging out under the fan in the room in the little pension where we’re staying, conveniently located right on the main drag. No fireworks to be heard anywhere, but there were a few trees full of birds which make an incredible racket when you walk under them. The only restaurants open for dinner were four food trucks called roulottes — we had a nice pizza from one of them with bits of tasty merguez. Hopefully we’ll find some tours of the archeological and snorkeling sites in the next few days, and rent some bikes and tool around the island which is probably about three miles by six miles across. It’s a beautiful place, much more Tahitian than Papeete, which is much more French.