We booked a cultural tour of the island. The ship is at anchor so a small boat took us to the harbor where we boarded a bus.. It’s a slightly upscale version of the buses that are used on the islands (they look a little like wooden buses from the 50s).. This 2.5 hour tour of the island was excellent. The island has 6000 inhabitants and no excitement. It’s pretty poor and mostly agricultural. It doesn’t get many tourists, either. The largest and most expensive hotel on the island (Sofitel) closed about 5 years ago and has been empty and decaying since then. The main town, Fare, is one street and a few shacks with stores and bars. Two little shops with souvenirs are more expensive than those in Papeete. We also visited a vanilla plantation (Vanilla is one of the biggest crops on the island) and several ancient stone temples (mareas) as well as a village whose main claim to fame is a bunch of huge eels living in the river. The villagers feed the eels so they are not only humongous, but also friendly. Supposedly they have blue eyes, but it was hard to see. We met some interesting people on the tour – a couple of orthopedic surgeons (husband and wife) from Kansas (She is of Polish origin and even speaks some basic Polish) and a very nice couple from Sweden. Towards the end of the tour it started pouring again so we decided to go back to the ship rather than staying in the one-street Fare.
In the evening everybody was invited to captain’s party. We bumped into our dinner companions from last night, Sybil and Phil, who invited us to have dinner with them in a different restaurant , which requires reservations, which we didn’t have. Since they did, we had no problem joining them at their table. We had such a great time that we closed the place. Actually, all the tables were already cleaned out when we were leaving. We made another reservation to have dinner together on Christmas Eve..
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