We booked a ‘motu’ trip today. The motus are the tiny islands out in the lagoons and so a boat from the hotel took us out (six of us – including a Spanish couple from ‘Barthelona’, with a man who could have passed for Fawlty Towers Manuel, he was unintentionally funny) and we started by ‘feeding the rays’.
I was a bit nervous of these when we were in Tahiti – they were swimming around the lagoon in the hotel – but everyone reassured me that Steve Irwin’s death was a freak accident. And indeed, they are very friendly. If you lay in the water they climb (or swim) all over you. We then did a couple of hours snorkelling around the reef and again, although there is much less variety of fish and coral than the GBR it’s still very beautiful, and easy snorkelling. In fact, if you hadn’t seen the GBR you would say it’s amazingly beautiful. I think we’ll see lots more turquoise water and coral in the next few weeks, but we never tire of it.
This part of the trip would be no good for anyone who doesn’t like sunshine, hot weather, water sports and lazing around. We like all those things, so we are ok. We then had a lovely barbeque lunch with a demonstration on how to make poisson cru the local delicacy – raw thinly sliced white tuna, marinaded in lime juice, mixed with cucumber and grated carrot then mixed with fresh coconut milk (the demonstration included how to pick, strip and break a coconut into two neat halves). Delicious. For anyone who remembers This Life (brilliant TV series of ten years ago with a ‘reunion’ programme at New Year) then they will understand when I say the coconut man 
was the image of Ferdy, but with a sexy French accent. What else can paradise deliver? (Sid says through gritted teeth: ‘Just like Ferdy, he’s probably gay.’) Anyway, it’s just started raining here (at about 4.30 pm) for any of you who are getting too envious.
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