The stingrays come so close to shore that you can pet them without even dropping your plastic cup of rum punch.
When we learned that in order to fly from Australia to South America, we´d have to stop over in Tahiti, our first reaction was not "oh no, is there no direct flight?"
I always thought that the problem for Tahiti was not that people don´t want to go there but that, as Captain Bligh learned, they don´t want to leave. I was wrong. Only 200,000 tourists go to Tahiti each year, roughly one tourist for each resident. Almost 7 million go to Hawaii - six tourists per resident. (The highest ratio in the world? With 200 visitors per resident, Venice is essentially a theme park.)
What this means is that Tahiti is relatively unspoilt.
I should be precise. Firstly, the name of the country is French Polynesia and it consists of 118 little islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Most people live on the island of Tahiti, which is the largest and most famous - French Polynesia is often referred to as ´Tahiti and her islands´ - but it is not the prettiest and a lot of visitors skip it altogether. Many of the other islands have white sand beaches and are surrounded by lagoons. Of these Bora Bora is best known and it´s covered in luxury resorts as you would expect. But other travelers told us that Maupiti, just west of Bora Bora, is just as beautiful and almost deserted. We spent most of our time on Moorea, a 30-minute ferry ride from Tahiti, but still underdeveloped.
Secondly, relatively unspoilt means almost destroyed by contact with Europeans, colonized, used as a test site for nuclear bombs, and now desperately seeking mass tourism, but not as spoilt as you might think, because they haven´t succeeded. It means relative to Ko Phi Phi or Ibiza or Cancun or Bali.
It does not mean cheap, which is odd, because when demand is less than expected prices ought to be low. Why I am not sure, but I think the reason is that half of the government´s revenue comes from France.
Tahiti was a subsistence economy until the mid sixties, when France, which had just lost its colony in Algeria, suddenly remembered that it owned a little paradise in the Pacific and could blow that up instead. France started paying a very large amount of money to Tahiti each year in return for testing nuclear weapons on some of the more remote atolls. (Quiz: how much would you ask for?) This went on for thirty years in the face of mounting international protests - you may remember that the French secret service blew up a ship belonging to Greenpeace - until tests finally stopped in 1996. The French decided to go on paying Tahiti a large amount of money, to help them ‘adjust’ their economy.
It appears that a lot of that money has been poorly spent, if not squandered. The tourist market is not as big as it ought to be and other sectors are struggling. I think that much money has to have fostered both corruption and inflation, so that everything costs more than it should. And it can´t help that half of all imports come from France; the next biggest source is New Zealand (less than 10%). Tahiti is effectively a member of the EU, but it´s hard to imagine that getting a lot of cheap butter from the other side of the planet is better than trading with your neighbors. Unless trading with France is the price of getting the subvention.
But it is beautiful. And relatively unspoilt. And it´s only two and a half hours further than Hawaii if you are flying from the US. Go.