Day 31: Papeete One (turnaround day)

Our active few days have caught up with us, and we both slept hard last night. It's quite a different sensation, sleeping on the docked Pacific Princess. Our cabin, midship on Deck 3, is very stable and quiet, but there are still the gentle motion and low hum of engines inherent on any moving ship. Last night, we had neither, and just had the hum of the air conditioning coming from the ceiling vent. If I'm not really tired, the different feel sometimes makes for a restless night, but I had no issues last night. We were wiped out!

We were up around 6am (early for me in Papeete) and immediately started using the wifi minutes we have left from the cruise that ended this morning, before they got cut off. We talked to the Internet manager several days ago about rolling over some of our purchased minutes to the next cruise, but he was adamant that we could not. As a result (and unbelievably), I managed to use all of mine in 10 days. We had so many things to do last cruise related to our changed travel plans (and they might still be changing, and that's a story for a whole other post...Carol, we're still pondering, but we did book refundable air, so...).  The 250 free minutes we get for our Captains Circle perk do well for us on a 10-night cruise in the Caribbean where we have free internet through AT&T two days out of 10 (Fort Lauderdale and St. Thomas) and wifi speeds on the ship, though still slow, are worlds better than on the Pacific Princess in French Polynesia. 250 minutes per person don't go far down here, at least not for me, trying to post photos to the blog. And G uses all of his minutes in paying bills and checking on accounts and making phone calls. We have learned that Raiatea and Papeete offer the fastest and most stable ship's internet of the cruise, so Mom can almost always count on receiving a phone call on those two days (for free, using Vonage!  Get the app!). 

Here are a few more photos from last night that I didn't take time to publish yesterday (what with my enthusiasm about those dessert crepes waiting for us in Papeete!)...

We thought this was so interesting as we sailed past the north coast of Moorea. The layers of mountains were beautiful, but look at these ones in particular. It seems that's the same geologic force shaped both rows of mountains very similarly, right down to the little bumps on each one. 

Sunset with Moorea on the left

Docking in Papeete last night at 8pm

On the pier, these two Princess demarcations indicate exactly where the forward gangway of the Pacific Princess will be placed. 

Anyway, back to today...the Club Restaurant is open for breakfast on turnaround day from 6am to 9am, and when we went around 7am it was nearly empty, but gets very busy later in the morning. Disembarking passengers are asked to vacate their cabins by 8am, and that is when the masses hit the dining room and buffet. I took a minute after breakfast to check out the Owners Suites on the back of the ship. Oh my, they are beautiful, but their most attractive feature is a second, half bath off the foyer (foyer!  They have a foyer!!). Oh, what I wouldn't give for a second bathroom!

Papeete on a weekday is a business day for us, and we were kept busy getting caught up with things at home throughout the entire morning. G called our dear friend Martha who is getting our mail for us (she is also the dear friend Martha who takes us to the airport and watches our house and who we would love to bits even if she didn't do those things) to go through the mail with her. Honestly, we could travel forever without issue if our credit card companies' security didn't keep getting breached. That creates all sorts of trouble for us. A new credit card arrives in the mail, but we aren't there to get it. Even once we do get the new numbers (thank you Martha!), we have to activate the new card (try doing that from outside the country) and then change the numbers with the vendors who auto charge to it and it's all a giant PITA (and I mean GIANT!!). We're also getting weary of Microsoft freezing our Hotmail accounts because we're accessing them from French Polynesia. It's obvious that we will continue to face issues that are new to us simply because we're down here: every time we get one fixed two others pop up.

By the time that the most critical of things we needed to attend to were completed, the Club Restaurant was open for lunch. I don't recall that we've had embarkation day lunch on the Pacific Princess yet, so, hopeful for G's beef tenderloins and my lemon salmon, we decided to eat lunch there before we walked off the ship. Well, we were the only two people in there. And we did enjoy our favorite embarkation day menu as well as the attention of at least six waiters with nothing else to do. But the highlight of the meal were the truly made to order orange soufflés for dessert. Probably because there were no other diners, we were asked to pre-order them midway through our lunch. As a result, they were the best soufflés I've ever had on Princess. Soufflés for lunch dessert...is that decadent or what??

A note about our table for 2 in the Club Restaurant at dinner...as I've said, it's only inches away from a table for 6. When the 6 is made up of people who don't know each other, we seem to get absorbed into their conversations. That's fine; we can still have our courses on our own schedule. However, last cruise, a family of 5 was dining there, and I'm not certain we said more than two words to them all cruise. They had their own sociability going there, and didn't need to invite us to join them. And that's fine too. It's nice to have a mix, but, really, we dine at a table for 2 because there are nights when we're so tired we can barely talk to each other let alone others. 

We finally walked off the Pacific Princess into a sunny Papeete, and our first stop was at the hotel Tiare Tahiti to make sure they had received our reservation starting December 28th from Booking.com (they had). We were also able to see a room today; they are basic but adequate, with a decently sized bathroom that will be a nice change for us. I think our only issue there will be security- not ours but our electronics, and I can see us carrying our valuables around in my backpack the entire time we're there. Douglas Pearson told us his home on Moorea was broken into seven times in one year and he says he has nothing worth stealing. Crimes against people are extremely rare; crimes against property are not. It's similar to what I read about the Samoan culture...they simply have a different concept of ownership down here. It's more communal.

We made our way through a few more pharmacies looking for anything familiar. It's so interesting to see how differently people purchase things, and what different things they purchase. For example, like in Brazil, I can't find antiperspirant anywhere; it's all deodorant. I guess their theory is that you're going to sweat regardless of what you use, so better to just make it smell nice. Similarly, dental floss is rare, but those GUM toothpicks are everywhere, display-fulls of them. Luckily, I never leave home without six months worth of dental floss, so we're good on that. But it is truly bizarre to stand in a pharmacie and be surrounded by hundreds of products, most of them in cellophane wrapped white boxes, and not have a clue (not a clue!) of what the products are. My limited French simply does not extend to knowing these item descriptions. However; we were surprised, in one pharmacie (only one), to find denture cleaning tablets, in boxes of 88 tablets. I now have enough that I can have my retainer in one glass and my night guard in a second and be ultra clean and sanitized!

We also, for the first time, used an ATM to get cash, which set us up for a brain-hurting algebra exercise later in the day. I got 30000 French Polynesian Francs (CFP). When I returned to the Pacific Princess and got on wifi, I could already see that $316 was deducted from my checking account, as well as a $9 international ATM fee. Of course, we wanted to see how that compared to exchanging money at the Passenger Services Desk on the Pacific Princess and that's when the brain hurting started. Two MBAs who haven't taken an Algebra class in decades couldn't reach agreement on whether to multiply or divide and which numbers to work with. It took a few minutes (sad to say) but we finally determined that it would have cost $20 more to exchange money on the ship, and we arrived at the same answer in multiple ways after a good deal of argument...er, discussion. It would have added insult to injury if the ATM withdrawal had ended up being more expensive!

The area pier-side where les roulottes are set up each evening as seen from the back of the Pacific Princess. Somewhere there are the best dessert crepes imaginable!

We decided to skip dinner in the dining room again tonight, instead having dinner on the terrace behind the buffet overlooking the lights of Papeete and les roulottes (food trucks). We're going out now for our favorite dessert crepes, but will return to the Pacific Princess for the 10pm folkloric show in the Cabaret Lounge. Orange soufflés and dessert crepes on the same day in sunny Tahiti...life is good. :-)