Christmas cards
Trip Start
Apr 01, 2005
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119
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Trip End
Dec 29, 2005
Moorea and Tahiti, French Polynesia
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Our flight in from the Cook Islands contained about 20 backpackers from our hostel, but almost all continued on to LA. One young lady from Wisconsin, Stephanie, said goodbye to her gaggle of study abroad classmates and spent the night in the Papeete airport with us. At dawn she left to check into her Sheraton hotel room, and Aaron and I caught the 30 minute ferry to Moorea. Neither of us could tell you a thing about it. We both had to be woken up by the crew and told to get off the boat.
We found a very chilled place to stay called Camping Nelson and I immediately went to sleep for three hours on the beach. Not that I got much sleeping done between the pack of topless women to my left, the adorable french toddlers to my right, and the stingray circling the shallow lagoon waters in front. That evening we splurged on a dinner theatre show at the Tiki Village. It was of course a contrived and stereotyped package for tourists, but a very well done one. Dinner was excellent and the show was great fun. We were a bit baffled when the traditional fire dancers cleared the sand stage to let Joseph usher Mary to the manger, but decided it was better not to ask questions while the chieftain led the carolers in silent night.
The next morning we were just leaving our hotel after breakfast when we ran right into Steph again. She had come over to Moorea for a day trip and somehow managed to be standing opposite our hostel just as we were starting out. She joined us for another lazy day on the beach. Spend much time with Aaron and you'll inevitably find yourself playing cards. After snorkeling in the shallow lagoon for a while, we played rummy 500 until our bus back to the late afternoon ferry.
Back on Tahiti-nui, Steph still had her Sheraton room until our midnight flight. We spent our Christmas eve playing cards by the hotel pool, watching the sunset dip over the man-made waterfall, and listening to the lounge band play holiday songs in the native language.
