Papeete

We docked in Papeete early in the evening.
Papeete is the capital of French Polynesia, and primary center of Tahitian and French Polynesian  commercial, industrial and financial services.  The urban area of Papeete had a total population of 136,771 inhabitants at the August 2017 census.  This was a major change from the small islands and villages we visited in the last few days.
As predicted by our Catamaran captain in Raiatea, the weather that greeted us in Papeete was different than what we had experienced in the other islands. The other islands weather was mixed but we always got both sunny and rainy portions of the day.  Papeete forgot the sunny part.  If we had not known better, we would have thought we were in a monsoon.

 The four of us had booked a hotel room at the Intercontinental and had imagined having a lovely day of hanging out by the pool, site-seeing and a leisurely dinner before having to go to the airport for our overnight flight to Maui
What actually happened was that we were transferred to the hotel before 9:00 am where we were gladly checked in but our room was not ready.  The hotel was full of people who were leaving Papeete on the ship we had just left and they were not being allowed to board until afternoon.  Therefore, the open-air lobby of the hotel was packed with luggage and people.  So, our morning and early afternoon were filled with watching the monsoon, taking taxis back into town to visit the markets and eating lunch and retuning to watch the monsoon.  We finally checked into our room around 3:00 pm, met for cocktails, ate dinner and left the Intercontinental for the airport at 9:00 p.m.

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