French Polynesia - Tahiti and Mo’orea

Well where do I start? I’m not going to write a really long bored because you’ll all be very jealous of our mostly lazy paradise experience, the part of our trip we have called the ‘real honeymoon time!’
We arrived into Papetee, Tahiti’s capital on Thursday 21st in the evening, however we did leave NZ on Friday 22nd in the afternoon, so we have just gained an extra day, does that mean we’re older now????? Funny hey!
We met a couple on our flight who was also heading to Mo’orea to camp at the same campsite as us tomorrow so we caught a taxi into town to find some accommodation with them. Was an interesting ride as we past plenty of transvestite prostitutes on the srteet corners and our taxi driver was loving it, riling them up in French! It made us laugh…good first impressions!!!! The next morning we woke up to beautiful blue skies and walked to the ferry terminal to catch the fast catamaran to the island just across the lagoon.
A few things you should know about French Polynesia….all the islands are extinct volcano’s and the coral reef which creates the lagoons is the outer crater rim, this enables the group of islands to be some of the more beautiful in the world…and we’d most definitely agree with that statement! Its also soooo French!! Haha, the buildings, cars and cuisine! And very few people speak good English, so we wished we’d paid a little more attention in school!!!! Also it is so expensive. Food, travel and accommodation were the most we had to pay out of everywhere. We were lucky we could camp on a few islands but just to give you an idea we were paying more than £20 for a tent pitch a night. So you can imagine how much some of the nice hotels start from!!!!
Anyways back to our fab paradise experience!!! Well we didn’t realise it was going to be so fab…..Mo’orea, a lagoon island with a 60 mile road that circumnavigates the island was an absolute delight and a lot cheaper than Bora Bora. Our campsite was on one of the best west coast beaches in Haurau Point. Our first look out into the lagoon provided a bit of a squeal from me as I’d truly never seen water like it before. I’ve most probably said before about so many places that the water was turquoise clear and beautiful, all of which is true but nothing can ever compare to lagoon water…it was like being in a swimming pool and so calm. Looking out 200m or so you could see the waves breaking against the coral reef which enabled the lagoon to be like a mill pond. Brilliant!
We also though our time on the island was going to quiet and laid back, sadly not! We met a whole bunch of people who were also on a budget like us and we all stuck together, enjoying meals in the kitchen at dinner time and playing with the stray dogs and 6 week old pup that lived by the beach. Christtour from Canada and Ben from NZ who we caught a taxi with the day before were at the campsite and we also got really friendly with Axel and Eva from Norway who were on a 12 week tour of French Polynesia! Yan from Holland was also great fun and had plenty of fun stories to tell us from his 18 month trip thus far! We had great fun and enjoyed everyones company.
As for what we got up to, we sure did have a busy 6 days. Yes we spent many ours relaxing on the white sandy beach with swaying coconut trees and locals playing the ukulele and singing from hammocks! Yes I know you can all imagine it and wish you were there too…it was perfect.
There were two motu’s (islands) within swimming distance of the mainland and on one day we swam over with Axel’s body board and had a look around. Well we thought our beach lagoon looked stunning, the motu’s lagoons was also amazing and so inviting! We snorkelled in between the motu’s and got to plenty of tropical fish and even 3 or 4 big stingrays! Sitting on the opposite island a stingray slowly glided past us really close to the sure, so we were able to get some awesome pics of him!!!! We really were having a great experience!
On a cloudier day Axel, Eva, Darren and I decided to take a hike into the Opahunua Valley. We hitchhiked the 5 miles down the road and started our walk from an agricultural college. Lucky it was Sunday as we’ve never seen so much home grown fruit and veg, so we did happen to find a few avocado’s, grapefruits (massive pamplemousse!!) pinepples, papaya and plenty of passion fruit! Honestly we found them all on the floor!!!!!!!
Our walk was pretty interesting, the valley and forest was so lush green and apart from getting lost it was great fun and we got some great views out to Cooks Bay and the mountains around. It was good fun and by the time we got back late we were all shattered, but that didn’t stop us having a few passion fruit vodka shots, highly recommended!!!!!
On our last day we took the very unreliable le truck (bus) to the other side of the island to see Teavaro Beach. First of all the popped into the tiny little airport to sort out our travel to Bora Bora as we couldn’t get on any cargo ships. After sorting that out we enjoyed a few hours on a beautiful beach and lagoon looking out over to Tahiti island. The sat by the Sofitel which was rather posh and had some nice over water bunglalows. It was lovely to see so much of the island, something we didn’t think we were going to do, but now so glad we did.
We said goodbye to everyone slowly over the week and definitely hope to make it over to Oslo one day. Yan set off for NZ afew days earlier and Christina and Ben were off to Vancouver to work.
We watched plenty of incredible sunsets from the benches of our Nelson Campsite which was right on the beach and we all fell in love with some of the dogs, especially 6 week old pups.
Darren learnt how to crack open a coconut and we loved eating fresh produce, pineapple, mango and grapefruit will never taste the same again at home!
We spent 6 wonderful days in Mo’orea and loved every minute of it. Our next destination….Bora Bora, the honeymoon island!