If someone blindfolded me, spun me around 30 times, stuffed cotton in my ears so I couldn’t hear any of the announcements, and then put me on a plane to Tahiti, and once I got there drove me up into the hills near the airport, and covered my eyes when we drove past the political signs about separating from France, I wouldn’t have had any idea where I was.  I wouldn’t have known where I was in part because the only flights from America land at night, but even if they waited until morning and removed my blindfold so I could see lots of brightly colored houses with sheet metal windows I might have thought they’d taken me to Haiti and flown me around for 12 extra hours just to confuse me.  When I saw stray dogs and cats walking around at the hotel, and if I never looked at the stunning scenery, I might continue to think it was Haiti, and would continue thinking that until I got breakfast and noticed it was the cost of Lasik® surgery.  

Tahiti, as it turns out, is very expensive.  It is expensive in the ways you’d expect, such as overpriced hotel rooms and restaurants, but it is also expensive in other ways too, such as in the way that a Kia Sportage sells for $50,000USD.  In addition to being expensive, it is also confusing, in the way that a bottle of water that is imported 14,000 miles from France costs roughly one US dollar.

After our breakfast incident my wife and I decided that we were either going to have to eat caffeine pills to curb out hunger or cut our trip to three days.  Since we'd just flown 16 hours we decided to walk 20 minutes, past the political signs about separating from France, to a grocery store that also sold Kias for $50,000 and where we had to pay 100 Pacific Francs, which is roughly 11 dollars, to rent a shopping cart.   

Shopping was basically a good experience aside from the part where I realized I was supposed to have weighed produce at the produce station after I’d just waited 25 minutes in line and I knew everyone was talking about me in French while I ran all the way across the store and had the lady weigh my two apples and four oranges.  Our trip was successful in that we’d procured several days of breakfasts and lunches for roughly the cost of a croissant and a container of un-refrigerated yogurt at the hotel and were carrying them in plastic grocery bags which also cost 100 francs apiece.

It goes without saying that any territory worth its weight contains people who are willing to bend rules, even if they are silly rules passed by France that is half a world away, and it is through those people that one can occasionally find a deal.  The first real bargain we found was when we rented a scooter.  For reasons which remain unclear, the process of renting a scooter in Moorea is regarded similarly to an illegal arms deal in the United States.  We consummated our deal from the back of a white windowless van in a parking lot near our hotel.  I paid cash up-front for use of the scooter, which was called a “Stalker” and which, if I’d had the stones to put it on a ferry and take it back to Tahiti, would have been worth at least four grocery bags on the black market.

The next deal we got was in the purchase of a black pearl, which might not have actually been a deal, but which felt like a tremendous bargain based upon the information supplied to us by a somewhat intoxicated friend of a pearl merchant who couldn’t remember the name of his aunt who he was certain lived near where we were headed on the last week of our trip.  The merchant informed us he had been drinking and was not actually working, but assured us that we could shop all around Tahiti and not find comparable prices. I liked the guy and he was correct in so far as the prices everywhere, including hotels that sell breakfast for ninety dollars a person, were roughly half of what he was asking.

Since they’ve already got France telling them what to do I don’t suspect Tahiti wants my advice about how to reduce its prices, but if I ever meet the finance minister it’ll be hard not to suggest arming checkout clerks with a produce scale as a good place to start.  For now I'll just focus on paying off my trip, which will be far easier to do once I get this cotton out of my ears.