Easter Island and Tahiti (Sun 30th - Wed 3rd Dec)

11 hour LAN flight from Santiago to Tahiti made more bearable by a short stopover on Easter Island where most of the passengers were heading. This was a pleasant surprise as we didn't even know we were going to Easter Island until just before the flight took off. We were allowed to disembark and spend an hour in the transit area waiting for the plane to refuel and take on a couple of new customers. Didn't get a chance to see the famous statues but it was good to see another island even if the views were rather limited.

In case you are wondering Tahiti is the biggest/main island in French Polynesia which covers a huge area about the size of Europe. French Polynesia consists of 120 odd islands witha population of about 250,000 of whom the majority live on Tahiti. The island is in the South Pacific roughly half way between California and Australia. We checked into our hotel late Sunday evening. Tahiti is an expensive place and the taxi drivers fee of £12 for a 5 minute journey was early evidence of that. Although there are more attractive islands than Tahiti itself such as Bora Bora and Moorea we decided to stick to the main island as we only had 3 days. As the temperature on the island averaged about 30 degrees most of the time was spent by the hotel pool or the beach (see video). However we did manage to fit in a half day tour of the island (including the Gaugin Museum - he lived there for a few years and is buried there) with our very informative American guide Dave, a walk around the capital Papieete and a Tahitian dance evening at a nearby hotel. The hotel breakfasts were superb (if expensive) and our policy was to stuff ourselves silly which kept us going until the evening. Gwen would have liked to have stayed longer but to be honest I was ready to leave for our next destination New Zealand.