I’m sharing our experience so that you don’t make the same mistakes that we did when planning your trip to Tahiti.
Arriving in Tahiti
If you decide to plan a trip to French Polynesia, you will fly into Fa’a’ā International Airport on the island of Tahiti. The airport is about 3 miles from downtown Papeete, the capital city of French Polynesia.
Renting a Car in Tahiti
Dave and I decided to rent a car at the airport so that we could do some exploring. The main road around the big part of the island is only 72 miles. Even with stopping, it is very easy to drive the entire island in 4-5 hours.
Make sure that you book a car in advance as it’s much cheaper than booking one at the airport. If you plan to explore the island, you should also book a car with unlimited mileage. We ended up paying $200 in mileage fees for our one-day adventure in Tahiti.
Vacationing in French Polynesia is expensive enough without paying $300 for a 2-day car rental!
Fautaua Waterfall
We had planned to hike to the Fautaua Waterfall on Saturday, however we didn’t realize that to access the waterfall, you have to first go to City Hall to get a permit. City Hall is located in downtown Papeete and is only open 7:30 am – 3:30 pm Monday-Thursday and 7:30 am – 2:30 pm on Friday. The path to the waterfall has to be accessed by a gate so if you don’t have a permit you will not be permitted to enter.
By the time that I realized that a permit was needed, it was already 4:30 pm on Friday. Since we were leaving Tahiti on Sunday, we would have to skip the waterfall.
Over my many years of traveling, I’ve learned that sometimes plans don’t work out and in many cases changing plans last minute, many times, leads to even better times that what you had planned originally. Another lesson learned, but not to despair. Time for plan B!
La Plague de Maui
I decided that instead of Fautaua Waterfall, we should visit La Plague de Maui which is supposedly one of the prettiest white sand beaches on the island. From the Intercontinental Resort, getting to the beach took about an hour. When we arrived, we were completely underwhelmed. La Plague de Maui looked nothing like the pictures that I had seen online. In fact, we even drove around to make sure that I hadn’t made a mistake. Unfortunately this tiny stretch of rocky beige beach was in fact La Plague de Maui.
Ok, so now time for Plan C? When I was doing research after my waterfall mix up, I learned that Teahupoo Beach was just 10 minutes south of La Plague de Maui. So off we went!
Teahupoo Surf Spot
Teahupoo is a legendary surf spot where many world famous surf competitions have taken place. On the day that we visited, it was raining, but a little rain didn’t seem to deter the surfers.
Teahupoo is known as “The End of the Road” because it is quite literally located at the end of the road. So unless you want to take your car swimming, you can’t miss it! Considering how the rest of our day went, I’m surprised that we didn’t miss it and drive right into the water.
When we arrived at Teahupoo, there were about 30 surfers showing off their moves. I should also mention here, that the islands of French Polynesia are green for a reason. Even during the dry season you should bring a light rain jacket. It will definitely come in handy!
Read What To Pack For Your Trip a Trip to French Polynesia
After spending 20 minutes taking pictures and videos of the surfers, we decided to head back to the resort. Now, as you know, the day hadn’t been going exactly as we had planned and it was at this point of trip that I closed my phone in the car door and cracked the screen. Trying to find a place in French Polynesia to fix a cracked screen is pretty much impossible, so we were down to one phone for the two of us for the next ten days. This was definitely not turning out to be a great start to vacation!
Twin Waterfalls
Instead of heading back the way we came, we decided to finish driving back the other direction with the hope of seeing more of what Tahiti had to offer. Our next stop was the twin waterfalls.
When we arrived, we saw that there was a chain across the small parking for the waterfall. But after all the disappointments of the day, we were determined that we were going to see at least one waterfall in Tahiti! So we parked on the other side of the road and made our way up the path towards the waterfalls, hoping not to get shot. It was a little too cold to swim, but we were able to climb down and take some cool photos.
Now back in the car, I went to recharge our wifi hotspot and realized that our car charger port in the rental car didn’t work. And go figure, I left my portable charging pack back at the resort. Yes, walking disaster!
The road around Tahiti is a big circle and easy to navigate, so we decided to just go for it.
Lafayette Black Sand Beach Tahiti
At this point, I will mention that Tahiti does not mark the tourist spots like waterfalls and beaches very well. Because we did not have access to GPS, we missed out on a lot of sites during our one-day exploration.
During our drive, we did come across a very pretty black sand beach, which I believe was Lafayette, and were able to stop and do some exploring.
Papeete Roulettes
It was about 4pm and we were starting to get hungry, so we decided that on the way back, we would stop in Papeete and eat at the roulettes. After a few wrong turns in town, we finally parked and walked over to the main square with the roulettes.
When I was researching Tahiti and read about the roulettes, I had imagined them more like food trucks with a common area for eating. And although this was true of many of the roulettes that we experienced in other parts of French Polynesia, this wasn’t the case with the roulettes in downtown Papeete. They were more like café style restaurants with outdoor tent seating that you find in many parts of Europe.
Our dinner was good and reasonably priced…at least for French Polynesia (around $15-$20 per person for an entrée).
Nightlife in Papeete
After dinner, we went back to our resort and spent some time relaxing at the pool before taking a taxi out to downtown Papeete.
Even though most of our day, hadn’t gone exactly as planned, I will say that we had a fantastic night! We ventured out around 9 pm to Morrisons Café. When we first arrived, it wasn’t very busy so we spent some time playing pool and foosball with some of the locals. By 11 pm, it was a packed house and we were having a great time dancing the night away with our new friends. Tahiti definitely had the best nightlife of any of the islands that we visited!
So, yes, the start of our French Polynesian adventure didn’t quite go as planned, but we went with the flow and ended up having a night to remember! Now off to Moorea where we swam with a humpback whale and her calf!
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