Hey everyone! Lauren here to tell you about the rough start to our round-the-world trip as we headed to French Polynesia. Traveling doesn’t always go as planned! In this case though, there may have also been a lack of proper planning
Getting to French Polynesia
Of course, getting to French Polynesia, the first destination on the second “half” of our around-the-world trip went anything but smooth. Our flight to French Polynesia departed from Columbus at 8:15am, and thanks to Gerrod’s mom being off work due to the lovely government shutdown, we didn’t have to look for someone to drive us to the airport.
As always, the Columbus airport wasn’t very busy, and it seemed like we were landing to our first layover destination, Chicago, in no time. But after finding our gate for our second flight to San Francisco, we soon heard an announcement that the flight would be delayed by a few hours. Gerrod and I realized that this delay would cause us to miss our flight from San Fran to Pape’ete, French Polynesia, so we headed over to the United help desk to figure things out.
The United agent was very helpful, but there was no easy solution. It seemed like there was no available flights from San Francisco to French Polynesia that we could hop on until the next day. It took 45 minutes to find a solution, and we ended up changing our flight from Chicago to go to Los Angeles, and then we would join a Delta Airline flight to Tahiti from there. This meant that instead of arriving in Tahiti at 6pm on January 8th like we expected, we would be arriving at 7am on January 9th.
We landed in LAX around 3pm and our next flight wasn’t until around midnight. LAX is so huge that it took quite some time to walk through the airport to the international terminal, track down a place to print our new boarding passes, and go through security.
We made our way to the lovely Korean Air Lounge for free food and drinks (thanks Chase Sapphire for the Priority Pass lounge access!). Here we cancelled our first Tahiti Airbnb since we would be arriving the morning after planned. I also napped in the lounge, and we had some dinner at PF Changs since there was a discount with the Priority Pass. We couldn’t find our flight gate for awhile, but eventually we tracked it down and boarded our plane! We were both exhausted, but happy to finally be on our way!
Arrival to French Polynesia
We landed at the Pape’ete, Tahiti airport around 7am. After filling out immigrations documents we realized I messed up the dates for our Airbnb booking, and were about to be homeless for the night. We decided to contact our host on Mo’orea to see if we could come one day early. After tracking down wifi to message our host, we anxiously waited around outside the airport for a response. Luckily, it did not take her too long to message us back and she said we were good to come a day early! WHEW!
Ferry Ride to Mo’orea
So we got in a Taxi at the airport to take us to the ferry terminal, which cost 2500 Francs. Our driver spoke great English and told us about the island, black pearls and how they are made, how and why things are so expensive, some things about her family, and where to buy things: the open air market.
She dropped us off at the Aremiti Ferry dock, and we bought our ferry tickets for 1500 Francs per person. Our ferry wasn’t for about 2 hours, so we dropped off our bags at the bag check and walked to the market that our taxi driver had showed us. We bought a bundle of 5 pineapples at the market, and looked around the shops for a bit.
We headed back to the ferry terminal, and had some coffee while we waited to board the ferry. Since getting to Mo’orea was so eventful, I will talk about our amazing time on the island in our next post!
Until next time!
Lauren (and Gerrod)
