We’re there or here now…

 

The ten hour flight seems so long ago, now that I am sitting on our little patio in a tropical garden here on the island of Moorea. The morning air is thick and filled with the early morning sounds of tropical looking birds. Pink, red, yellow, and bright orange flowers are in bloom all around and finally the dueling roosters have taken a break and no doubt are sharing credit for finally bringing up the sun and then me out to this patio.

The airport in Papeete was madness. We deplaned down a set of roll away stairs on to the tarmac to the sounds of a Tahitian trio singing a welcome song, before passing through the doors into the dimly lit customs area. Like all airports this one was undergoing a construction project that a poster informed us that you would find the size of the customs and immigration area reduced in half due to the new improvement project.

We herded ourselves into appropriate pens and were presented with forms to fill out before entering the country. Usually this is done on the airplane but apparently the forms were not available to Honolulu Airlines. The customs agents were surprised too. And since it seems most travelers don’t carry pens, the half size room was now full of the sounds of most of the world’s languages. Those without pens trying to secure one and those with pens that needed guidance from someone on the other side of the room as to where they were going, had been, and what’s their passport number.

I said dimly lit. This only added to the confusion since many people couldn’t see to read the form. Some savvy world travelers had small pen lights they produced to help out. For me a pair of 1.25 reading glasses was sufficient but my neat draftsman quality printing suffered badly. Didn’t matter in the end. Customs agent only wanted to know how long we’d be staying. I directed him to the two spots on the form listing that as 42 days.

The Tahitian agents in the baggage claim area were helpful. As the bags started to hit the revolving carousel they quickly lifted them off and started stacking them in neat rows with a narrow aisle between each row while people were jockeying for position around the conveyors. This shifted everyone’s attention to the small area between conveyors to retrieve their bags from the neat stacks. Everyone was funneled into the one spot and this was when the madness started.

People attacking look alike, thick, black bags while others rolled away small refrigerator size metallic cases. The rows of bags collapsed filling the narrow aisles between. I was lucky having seen our bags just as the agent got his hands on them. I saw Robin coming through the crowd with a luggage cart. How she got as far as she did I don’t know but now other people were starting to do the same stacking them full of what seemed to be all their life’s possessions now with nowhere to go. We started off but since we only had two bags and I could carry them both while she had the two carry-on packs, I abandoned the cart. I told Robin if we wanted to ever get out of here we would have to go European and to follow me. I used crowd moves I learned earlier when I first saw our bags and had endured many of those same moves in trying to get there. I successfully got us to the exit door and the Tahitian night using tactics that would be less than polite by American standards but seemingly raised no exceptions in the frenzy of this crowd.

MINOTT was printed in neat block lettering half way down the page on the day’s arriving guest list at the Papeete hotel we booked so many months ago. The lovely girl at the desk with the white floor behind her ear welcomed us to Tahiti. The Minnows (French pronunciation) had arrived.