On Tahiti’s Main Island, History, Culture, and Nature Shine
25.07.2023 - 10:43
/ matadornetwork.com
Compared to its sister isles, Tahiti gets no respect. But there are plenty of reasons to give the main island a closer look.
With neither a grass skirt nor a fragrant frangipani lei to welcome them, most foreigners arrive in French Polynesia via Papeete to find a bland international airport. Sure, there may be a desultory ukulele trio in some far corner of the terminal, but it’s still an unfortunate introduction to the French dependency. Papeete is greatly lacking in tropical charm, despite the fact that it’s a capital city in the South Pacific. That’s why most travelers tend to spend just one night there, usually as a convenience on arrival or the night before departure, rarely going beyond the urban center.
But for those with a sense of adventure and the keys to a rental car (easily booked in advance at the airport or in town), the main island of Tahiti has plenty of alluring sights. And most of them can be seen in a single afternoon.
No one would be surprised to learn that Tahiti is famed for its seafood and its unpretentious preparation of the ocean’s bounty. And if a meal like that can be enjoyed within a coconut’s throw of the surf, all the better.
The Tahiti Pearl Beach Resort is just 15 minutes from downtown Papeete on a clockwise drive around the island, but it feels like another planet. The resort is Tahitian to the core with its massive, palm-thatch-roofed, open-walled restaurant; lush gardens; vast swimming pool; and waves crashing on the beach. In fact, it would be out of place almost anywhere else.
The poisson cru a la tahitienne — a traditional raw fish salad with juicy chunks of tuna in a bracing sauce of onion, tomato, cucumber, lime juice, and coconut milk — sounds ideal when I read the menu, and proves to be when served. The setting is idyllic: booming waves washing up onto a volcanic black sand beach, soft Polynesian music floating down from hidden speakers, and the mountainous silhouette of Moorea (where another local food adventure awaits) rising just across the channel.
Casting a somewhat macabre tone to the otherwise ethereal setting are the overgrown ruins of what was once the Hyatt Regency Tahiti resort atop a nearby hill. Shuttered for more than two decades, the resort’s abandonment is still a source of dispute among the locals. (Was it a tax lien? Partner dispute? Something more sinister?) The creaky remnants of the resort loom over the bay, awaiting a Polynesian version of Stephen King to give them life again, if only in literary form.
Photo: Mark Orwoll
Not far from Tahiti Pearl Beach Resort is a popular park brimming with people, palms, and portraits of the past. At its heart is a 100-foot-tall lighthouse constructed in 1867 by the father of author Robert Louis Stevenson. Some