My laundry pile has piled up so high it just had to be tackled today. We have tried to run it a couple of times and it kept getting an error. We thought it was because it is quite bouncy here in the marina, last night I tried to run it as the place was as flat as a millpond, but it still got an error. Rowan had the genius idea to unplug from the shore power and run the generator to run the machine and low and behold it worked! Turns out the marina is 60 hertzs and not 50 which the boat is built for. So strange that it is just the washing machine that objects to the wrong hertzs. Anyway it meant I could succesfully spend all morning running endless loads of laundry.
Rowan went into town to look for a car to hire, which he walked miles to find traipsing around endless car hire companies. Eventually he found a lovely mother and son who he hired a tiny car from. In the afternoon we headed out to the brand new museum of Polynesian culture about 14kms out of town, which had been highly recommended to us. On the way we visited the Taine marina which is where we are leaving PolePole when we go home, sadly the office was all closed so it did not prove fruitful. The marina have a crazy system where you can only book 48 hours in advance, which feels like leaving it a little late for us. This means we need to be in the marina a week before we leave. That leaves us a week to see around the Society islands before we head home. We also have a big blow arriving on Wednesday for a week, so a lot to consider. There is a lot of chat starting in the Yachtie community that next year is going to be an El Nino year, that will potentially be worse than normal as the area of warm water in the sea is bigger than normal. This means French Polynesia may not be a great place to be sailing, lots of cyclones! So we are having to maybe rethink our plans, and not spend another year sailing here and head West as soon as we return in September.
We had a very good trip to the museum which was very impressive. They had interactive screens, clearly showing the creation of French Polynesia. The Tuamotus atolls are the oldest islands, the volcanoes have gradually sunk while the coral around them has grown a lot faster than the volcano sinking which is why you get left with these coral atolls. The islands were first settled by migrating Polynesians, from Tonga and Somoa as early as 500BC. They were later discovered by European explorers during the 16th century and eventually colonised by France in 1880. French Polynesia finally got independence from France in 1977 and in 2004 became an overseas country of the French Republic. There were a lot of old artefacts and loads of old wooden canoes to admire. It is a new purpose built building that was very bright with high ceilings, making it very enjoyable to go around …… plus it was air conditioned!
We collapsed back on board PolePole, managing to find some on street parking to park the car. All the parking garages are closed over the week end for some reason.
Another sunset over Moorea
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