Papeete, French Polynesia · Oceania

5 ideal things to do in Papeete

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked February 19, 2025

1. 01

   The Marché de Papeete first thing

   Central Papeete, two blocks back from the waterfront·Early morning; Sunday at dawn is the big one

   Papeete's market has stood on this site since 1869 and runs over two floors — fish, breadfruit, taro, vanilla, tiare flowers and monoi below, pareos and carving above. Sunday morning is when the whole town turns up, very early, and it is finished by mid-morning. I have never yet managed to leave without a handful of vanilla pods I had no plan for, and have stopped treating it as an accident.

2. 02

   Dinner at the roulottes on Place Vaiʻete

   The Papeete waterfront, beside the ferry quay·Every evening, from about sunset

   Every night the vans pull onto the square by the harbour and set out plastic chairs: poisson cru, grilled tuna, chow mein out of the Chinese-Tahitian kitchens, crêpes at the far end. This is where Papeete eats, at a fraction of what anything with a lagoon view charges. After a week of resort half-board it was the first meal in French Polynesia that tasted like a place rather than a package.

3. 03

   Te Fare Iamanaha — the Musée de Tahiti et des Îles

   Punaauia, on the west coast about 15 km from Papeete·Half a day, on the way to or from the airport

   Polynesia's national museum sits on the water at Punaauia and covers the archipelagos properly: navigation, tapa, tattoo, the marae, the missionaries and what their arrival cost. If you are about to spend a fortnight looking at a lagoon, spend a morning here first — everything you then see on Moorea or Huahine stops being scenery and starts being a place with a history. I did it on my last day, in the wrong order, and have regretted it since.

4. 04

   The Opunohu valley marae and the Belvédère on Moorea

   Moorea, 30–45 minutes by ferry from Papeete·A full day; take the valley in the morning

   Ferries run across several times a day, and the road up the Opunohu valley from Cook's Bay passes a series of stone marae standing in the trees — Titiroa among the banyans, the terraced Ahu-o-Mahine a few hundred metres on — before climbing to the Belvédère, where Mount Rotui sits between the two bays. Everybody stops at the lookout. Far fewer stop at the platforms, which are the reason to come up the valley in the first place.

5. 05

   The end of the road at Teahupoʻo

   Tahiti Iti, roughly 60 km from Papeete·Southern-hemisphere winter, when the swell arrives

   At the end of the south coast road on Tahiti Iti the tarmac simply stops at a river mouth, and the wave everybody has seen on a screen breaks a kilometre offshore over shallow reef. From the shore it is a white line and a sound like a door slamming in another room; boats go out when there is swell. The village behind it is a quiet strip of houses that has been asked to host the world's attention and appears, as far as I could tell, entirely unbothered.