Tahiti - Papeete

Papeete

I am looking at a map, standing in the shade of the Papeete Market on the Rue Paul Gauguin, trying to get my bearings.  New cities and new places dazzle and confuse in equal measure.  Time perspires in this heat as everything else seems to stand still.  I need to find a Bureau de Change on the Boulevard de la Reine Pomare. 

I also need to find a shop that sells a phone charger... batteries are running low in every sense.  Adjusting to an 18hour time difference is not the easiest thing to do – even in a place as beautiful as Polynesia. 

Having flown all this way to Tahiti it seems insane to want to sleep in my room, or on the charcoal sand underneath yellow skies.  Fortunately, a local stops, offers help and draws careful crosses on my map.  He talks for a while about where I have come from, and talks with great enthusiasm about rugby and his favourite team, the All Blacks. 

Papeete, unpretentious, bouncing with colour between its narrow boulevards, all lined with trees – this place has such a good feeling to it.  It has a huge double-storied market slap bang in its middle, buying and selling food, flowers, colours, coconuts – there are few things more enjoyable than wandering around a city’s market.  Here you see glimpses of the city’s essence, the soulful nature of its people and how life operates there.  Papeete Markets – compared to other markets I’ve visited – seems clean, hospitable and welcoming.  

At the Gare du marche, I sit for a while and drink fresh orange juice from a clear plastic cup in the afternoon sun.  I look out across the harbour at the Ferry Terminal blurred with movements, coming and going, shipping tourists and locals to and from the nearby island of Moorea. 

The afternoon seems to slow to an ebbing lull.  People watching begins to become an effort. 

The air is perfumed with blossom and the sounds of cooing doves before chirping birds begin to get things going again, chasing each other in the crouching branches of overhanging trees. 

Soon, laughter fills the air.  A shift in gears occur.  People walk past, turning to smile when the moment arrives.  Slowly the day is starting again as 4pm in Tahiti equates to 10am body clock time (yesterday). 

Back at the Rue Paul Gaugin, I wait for my bus back to Papava, to swim again in the bottle green ocean, as the yellow sun sinks beneath a black horizon.  I have successfully found my landmarks for next time: the Papeete Market, The Cathedrale Notre Dame, the Municipal buildings and also the ocean.  Four points of a compass – my compass.  In the shade my body feels heavy and tired, almost urging my bus to arrive.  Slowly, I begin to imagine being asleep on that black ash beach, watching yellow skies fade to twilight as a green flat ocean rolls ashore in a hush of pink foam and surf.  The colours here are out of this world.