This last month in Tahiti we’ve made use of all the time we had to wait for parts to arrive, by improving the boat and playing tourists. As we’ve not been keeping up the blog (sorry), here’s a short impression of our activities in the last month.

Improvements

Most of our time we spend on rearranging, tidying, perfecting and pimping the boat. Which for instance means we now have cabinet doors where holes used to be, we are able to easily find tools, spare parts, manuals and kitchen utensils again, can use the satellite phone for our sailmail, will have fresh herbs pretty soon, have very cool wheels under our dinghy so it’s easier to pull it up the beach, can actually open and close the now plastic (and thus not rusting) zippers of the deck tent and have all our food in cockroach proof containers (unfortunately very necessary at the moment, while we’re waiting for the boric acid to take effect), etc, etc.

Touristy stuff

Besides  making all these improvements on the boat, we also tried to make time to be tourists. So we drove around the island seeing the apparently world famous surf spot in the south, the cows in the hills of Tahiti Iti (little Tahiti) where it almost looks like the English countryside, the traffic jams in Papeete (we even know which roads to take to avoid the worst) and some very nice villages. We also visited the Tahiti museum (although interesting, very difficult to understand with all explanations in French and referring to faded colors on the display), saw some remains of Marae (temples), had dinner at the Roulottes in Papeete (food caravans which pop up at the main square at 6 every night with great food: Rolf couldn’t resist the WonTon Soup) and saw a Polynesian dance show by the Grand Ballet the Tahiti.

Whales

The coolest thing we did here though was a whale spotting trip. Not only did we see a humpback whale passing at 4 meters in front of the boat, but we were actually in the water snorkeling when a mother humpback whale (about 20 meters) and her baby (5 meters) passed just below us. They can not have been more than 2 meters away from us. Unfortunately no pictures of the whales under water, but Rolf did manage to make these of the whales coming up for air.