The first leg of our return trip took us from Sydney, Australia to Papeete, Tahiti on Air Tahiti Nui. My assessment of Air Tahiti: looks nice but watch out for the "vegetarian" prawn spread on the crackers.

Once we arrived at the airport in Tahiti a bit of theater ensued. We are here solely to change planes. We are here for all of 3 hours. But still we had to exit the "secure" area, claim our luggage, go through customs and immigration, walk approximately 10 metres, and spend 30 minutes in line to recheck our bags.

I made a mistake. I stuffed a bottle of water I'd gotten on the plane back into one of my carryon bags and forgot about it. On going through security an agent asked me to remove the bottle of water they'd seen in the xray and drink it. All of it, in front of her. No pouring it out, no throwing it away. Luckily it was a small bottle but it was really the capo-de-tutti-fruity-tahiti for me. I cannot wait to be back on the plane out of here.

At least there is wifi or something resembling wifi here. It has the typical boneheaded filterwall running which apparently expects all web sites to be of the form www.<em>something.com</em>. Can't go to nytimes.com but can get to www.nytimes.com and so forth. The filterwall is easily bypassed with ssh though. The process seems to be that they write down your name and boarding information then manually activate a code on the system and give you the code (the access then works for up to an hour). Which means the wifi is not anonymous, which means that all of the cussing I did with domain names will show up against kamml's boarding information (since she got the first code). If only one of us is allowed off the plane in LAX that'll be one potential reason why.