Island hopping

Monday 19th March 2007
Packed up the room this morning ready for the boat trip to Moorea, but decided to explore Tahiti first. We got the hotel shuttle bus into Papeete early this morning and had a good look around. As the hotel is about a 20 minute ride from the town we saw a bit of the lovely island on the way. Papeete is the only city (town, for us – the whole population of French Polynesia is 250,000 and that includes all of the islands) and it comes as a real surprise after the tranquillity of the hotel. It is a lively, colourful, bustling town with a large port (everything imported to French Polynesia – which is most things except fruit! – comes in here), a great ‘indoor’ market,a large shopping area and traffic jams! As our hotel was between the airport and the town, we hadn’t seen it the previous couple of days. We wandered around the market, the shops and had drinks at the port before booking our ferry for this afternoon and returning to the hotel on the shuttle. We lazed around the lagoon for a bit, then taking a taxi to the port for the fabulous hour-long boat ride to Moorea (we’d chosen the slow ferry to sit on deck and enjoy the trip – the ‘express’ is an all-enclosed catermeran). The first hotel had arranged a taxi to meet us at the port to take us to the second hotel, right round the other side of Moorea, about a 45 minute, slow drive as the roads are tiny. The Lonely Planet says Moorea is the picture of everyone’s vision of Tahiti (the collective name for the islands in French Polynesia) and it’s not wrong. Towering, steep mountains covered in forest and tropical plants at the centre, with a beautiful coastline for the full 60km around the island. We covered half of the island by car on the way to the hotel and it is truly beautiful. Very Caribbean in fact, but I guess it’s not surprising that tropical islands resemble each other. The Intercontinental Moorea is another delight. Beautiful rooms, beach onto the sea this time, as well, as a much more extensive lagoon where there are dolphin and sea turtle sanctuaries, within the hotel grounds. The lagoon is created around this part of the coast by being separated from the sea by a large reef (not quite the Great Barrier where the Continental Shelf divides) where you can see the surf breaking. A gin and tonic on our terrace (duty free from Auckland) preceded a very nice hotel dinner and quiet stroll through the grounds. Wonderful.