I’m about $11,000,000 poorer after 5 days in Papeete, the land of $10 beers and $60 flipflops. I can officially report that the city of Papeete is a hole, and the only thing that one should do upon arrival is leave it.

Beer was so expensive that we were buying cases out of the beer in the ship’s stores and drinking it on the pier before going out on the town to cause problems. This provided us with ample opportunity to heckle the tourists coming off of the cruise ships that tied up around us.

However, the rest of the island of Tahiti is gorgeous. As part of my routine duties, I have to calibrate the shipboard gravimeter by taking a gravity tie with a portable meter at a point with known gravity. The old location where we used to do gravity ties no longer exists, as they have built a pier right on top of the location. I flipped through our book full of gravity tie locations and found that the light house at Venus Point had a gravity tie location.

According to my Lonely Planet guidebook:

Venus Point is the location of Captain Cook’s observatory, built to record the transit of Venus across the face of the sun to try to calculate the distance between the sun and the earth.

Of course it’s also a very popular topless beach. So off we went, meter in hand, to prove that gravity did indeed still work. Ya know, for science.

Read on for more pictures and a story of the trip to Point Venus and beyond.

Rob, the new computer tech that I am training on this transit had arrived the day before, so I had him come along, as well as another Rob, a Coastie from the icebreaker Healy that was along on the last cruise. Lee the geophysics tech was the busdriver for this expedition.

We stopped along the way out of town at Taharaa Point, which gives great views of Matavai Bay and the island of Moorea. The sound track of bad American rap blasting from the speakers of the locals cars only increased the ambiance.

Next stop was Point Venus. After high centering the cheesy rental car on a speed bump and checking out the shallow reef surrounding the point, we set about to do some work. Here it is, photographic proof that we did actually accomplish science. Gravity tie location DOD 2080-5, top of three steps leading to doors of lighthouse at Point Venus. Gravity value: 978,691.92 milligals.

The beach hadn’t quite gotten into full swing at this point, as it was still before noon. The only breasts we saw weren’t worth it (think old and fat), so we took more pictures of the lighthouse and the reef life:

We continued on around the coast on the narrow road to the Arahoho blowhole, where the surf crashes against the rocks and you hear a giant vacuum sound coming from the cave under the roadway. Lots of fun to watch.

A short ways down the road from Arahoho is the turnoff for Faarumi Waterfalls. The road up there is entertaining in a small car with four large passengers, and we provided amusement for the locals as we went bumping and scraping our way over the series of Ford Fiesta-eating speedbumps. The waterfalls were incredible as was the trail up to them. We went swimming at the one at the end of the trail.

After cooling ourselves in the waterfalls and getting rained on, we headed back to the car to complete our circumnavigation of the island. We were all pretty hungry at this point, and I neglected to take any more pictures. We did make our way across the narrow ishmus joining Tahiti Iti to Tahiti Nui briefly, before settling on lunch somewhere past Taravao. Excellent Poisson Cru and Steak Roquefort.

Eventually we made it back to the ship, where “Triton”, a $50,000,000 m-m-m-mega yacht hailing from Bikini, was tied up behind R/V Melville, complete with a helicoptor deck, 2 jetskis, 3 mopeds, a motorcycle, three speed boats, teak decks, and stainless steel anchors. Not a spot on the thing - just gleaming chrome and stainless. According to Melville’s second mate Hookahjoe, it was some construction magnate and his hot debutante granddaughters, fresh from buying some resort in Fiji. Between them and the gleaming cruise ships, we could tell that the Melville was definately slumming the place up.