After visiting Papeete in the morning we have planned to visit the Museum of Tahiti and the Islands in the afternoon. For that we need to take our car and drive a few kilometers to the museum. However as usual on the islands a few kilometers take a long time with a lot of cars always going in the same direction as us. But soon we reach the museum which luckily has lots of parking and now it is time to visit this famous museum with artifacts from all the archipelagos in French Polynesia.
Entering the museum the first exhibits are focused on the creation of the islands and we really enjoy the presentations showing how the volcanoes created the various archipelagos. And Tahiti especially is built out of two volcanoes joined together by a narrow strip of land.
Of course a lot of focus in the museum is on boats and boatbuilding and exploration given that the French Polynesian people explored and colonized a huge area of the Pacific.
That is shown graphically in another interactive exhibit showing how they expanded step by step through the many archipelagos reaching South America through Easter Island, New Zealand and Hawaii at the end of their expansions.
And then it is time to explore the rest of the museum with the many exhibits divided by the five archipelagos and by topics. Each archipelago has their own idols/tikis and it is interesting to see how they diverged across islands.
There are lots of special artifacts, many of them related to fishing but the more interesting ones are related to the religion and pictograms, lots of pictograms are done on bark cloth, the paper of choice before paper was introduced to French Polynesia.
That is not to say the fishing exhibits are not interesting. There are differences in how people were fishing across the archipelagos, some with traps, some with spears and some from boats but mostly a combination of all of them of course.
There are also lots of clothing artifacts showing the differences across the islands and archipelagos. And of course there are some petroglyphs, the more we travel the more we see that every culture has used petroglyphs at some point or the other.
Another thing that we learn is that many chairs were reserved for chiefs and the higher the chair the more important the chief. Which seems interesting and something that we keep in mind as we sit our way throughout French Polynesia in the next days.
There are some really impressive 19th-century Marquesan wooden tiki figures that are one of the highlights of the exhibit. They are quite special and we spend a lot of time admiring them as we move through the museum.
Another major section is dedicated to warfare, as they moved from island to island there was lots of fighting between clans. In fact Polynesian warriors were quite famous and they killed quite a few explorers throughout the years, most famously Cook in Hawaii.
And of course after the years of expansion throughout the Pacific they met with European explorers. And missionaries of course who came to proselytize the islands with armed support. And then of course the various conquering armies with the French ultimately prevailing and conquering the area now known as French Polynesia.
The most impressive artifact by far is an A’a deity wooden sculpture, it looks really weird and impressive both from the front and back. This is the piece that we are drawn to multiple times as we make our way from one end of the exhibit hall to the other.
There are also a few headdresses some made of feathers and some more ominously out of human hair. Hopefully given freely but who knows.
We also enjoy the many instruments on exhibit, music is important to the native French Polynesians but ultimately the major attraction throughout are the tikis and the differences between them across the archipelagos.
Outside is a small garden with birds and bananas and other fruits that we cannot even identify. We spend some time looking for any interesting birds but nothing special here so we go outside again. Here we find one more interesting exhibit, an anchor of Cook’s ship found near Tahiti during a 1979 documentary. It was lost or jettisoned by Cook near Tahiti in 1773 so it is quite surprising that they were able to find it, or maybe not so much if they knew where he anchored.
We take another look for interesting birds but first we see only the common ones like Zebra doves and especially Red-vented Bulbuls.
But then beneath a flowering tree we notice a flock of birds that seem just enough different and they are, red-browed Finches, one of our targets here on Tahiti.
We end the visit with a walk to the ocean enjoying the beautiful views and the sun falling towards the horizon. It seems we have time for one more visit today so why not end the day with a visit to an actual historic sight, an ancient marae?
