A Society Island Excursion With Your Intrepid Tour Guide, Jerry!

Cruisers gotta cruise. This truth about the nomads that make up our community is one reason why we weighed heavily the decision to go through the time and effort to extend our allotted 90-day visa to a full year in French Polynesia. This island group is touted as the gorgeous cruising grounds that will never be equaled as one sails west around the world. Added to the need to accommodate the looming Pacific cyclone season by finding a safe harbor, such as that offered up by the Marquesas, we got the long-stay visa and made plans to spend a year in this expansive island paradise. However, cruisers tend to migrate at different paces, and we land on the quicker end of the spectrum. Since arriving here May 11^th, we have explored 3 of the 5 island chains of French Polynesia, traveling from the far southeast Gambiers to the far west Societies.  It has truly been a breathtakingly beautiful adventure. 

Anyone who has been dumped before might guess however that this paragraph is setting the reader up for a “But…”  We recently have made a decision about our next steps, which I will share at the end of this post.  But first, put yourself on our boat as we take our kids and their plus-ones through the Society Islands!

Your journey begins in Tahiti. After weeks scouring four small stores for meat packaged without parts best identified by an orthopedic surgeon in the Gambiers, you have spent many a delightful afternoon wandering the well-lit aisles of multiple humongous Tahitian Carrefour grocery stores, pinching yourself that you can now once again lunch on a decent ham and cheese sandwich, and then collapsing once back on the boat from all the visual stimulation. You have done your laundry in an actual laundromat and indulged in something other than steak frites at a restaurant. You have identified the best produce stalls at the Papeete market, the best food truck by the cruise ship dock, and where and how to get rid of your trash. (That last bit is one of the more challenging tasks one faces in French Polynesia.)  You have soaked up Polynesian culture via live music, museums, gardens, waterfalls, parades, dance festivals, traditional sport competitions, rooftop bars, driving tours, and shopping.  You are surprised to find that the most urban location in this island chain can still be incredibly charming, with its flower markets, warm Polynesians that don’t seem to resent speaking English (“This is your island, too,” our tour guide told us), and beautiful seaside parks. After your kids arrive in stages, you tear yourself away from the security of the Marina Papeete (and all those Carrefours!) and head west.

You are excited to go back to Moorea as it was your first international tropical destination over thirty years ago. You sail past thatched huts on stilts over the water to anchor in a bay surrounded by green-bedecked volcanic hills that seem frozen in time at the moment they violently erupted out of the water.  At sundown you sit on the roof and drink in not a G&T but the intense floral aroma flooding the bay from the hills. You discover a public beach with a reef packed with colorful fish, hike past irrigated pineapple farms and content cows to a sweeping hilltop view, and sample sweet and tart jellies made from the varied fruits of the island.

Reluctantly moving on too soon, you later learn that you just barely missed having your dinghy pushed off into the sea by an angry local and having a flier taped to your boat, telling you to go away.

You enjoy a calamity-free overnight sail, appreciating the rarity of doing an inter-island offshore free from commercial fishing boats, pearl farms, and cargo traffic. Upon arrival, your seasickness is forgotten. You grab a mooring ball by a motu surrounded by an expanse of shallow reef and spend a water day kayaking the protected waters. You encounter helpful locals when you accidentally back your dinghy into a corner of the reef.  One day you rent a car and explore the island.  On this tour, Huahine fills all of your senses. You feel the slickness of the sacred eels, smell the rich scents of the vanilla farm, hear the delightful sounds of the beautiful vanilla farm tour guide practicing her English with a Tahitian accent, view the panoply of colors and structures of the seashells lovingly catalogued in the shell museum, and taste the subtle stickiness of Polynesian star apples. Perhaps because it was favored by some influential figures in the past, such as the archeologist Dr. Yoshiko Sinoto and the cultural icon, painter, and musician Bobby Holcomb, Jr., Huahine also provides intellectual stimulation, educating the tourist in a sophisticated way, beginning with its well-maintained marae and ancient Polynesian fish traps. You lose yourself in a peaceful cultural museum, perusing the respectfully arranged objects and dive deep into their history through beautifully written guides and placards.

You can tell a lot about a place from the quality of its placards.

Mel

After all of these experiences, Huahine replaces Mo’orea in your heart.

A few days later you find yourself arriving in Bora Bora after a lovely trauma-free spinnaker sail. You pick up a mooring outside the Bora Bora Yacht Club (oooh-la-la!) with a great view of an iconic mountain peak. Like Raiatea, it is hard not to notice the scope of the charter business here, and you are occasionally distracted from your sunset viewing by the need to critique the mooring ball hookup techniques of the charter boats zooming way too close. The explanation for the nostalgia that hits you as you view the mountain is found when you learn of the transformative American presence here during WWII. You rent a car and drive American-hewn roads and look at American-installed cannons. The driving tour teaches you that there are really two Bora Boras these days. One is an insulated, glittery, high-end resort island, offering complete guidance through a highly curated and sophisticated experience.  The other is the grittier, neglected side, with ramshackle houses, slowly disintegrating abandoned hotels, poorly marked hiking trails, and overgrown marae. You walk into the town by the yacht club and see these two worlds intersect, searching for souvenir shops while shielding your eyes from the clouds of dirt stirred up from the unpaved shoulder as cars race past on the 80-year-old road. In town, juxtaposed between piles of trash and the chain-link fences surrounding the cluttered remains of dilapidated buildings are “art galleries”, actually shops for Marquesan wood carvings, and surprisingly high-end pearl shops, requiring special appointments to go to the pearl AND diamond room.  Perhaps they give you a good dusting off first?  You nevertheless have a delightful time in the shops deciding between the tiki-shaped soaps and the Bora Bora seasoned salt. All over the island you see construction crews furiously upgrading the roads and infrastructure in an attempt to merge the two Boras.

Realizing that Bora Bora is probably a spectacular experience for the resort attendees and a less compelling place for a cruiser who has worked their way (and bled money) through French Polynesia already, you spend some delightful boat days in a lovely setting playing games, swimming, and enjoying your guests before putting them on planes at the American-built airport and heading back to Raiatea.

You visit Raiatea twice.  On your approach from the east, you fly your spinnaker, triumphantly overcoming the Spinnaker Trauma experienced months ago when the halyard snapped and the sail dragged under the boat. After sorting out the complex geography of Raiatea/Tah’aa, resembling what looks like a semicolon that’s been eaten by a paramecium with only a few pores for passage, you find a mooring ball in the blue lagoon between the two islands, a lagoon with such staggered and varying depths the seafloor likely resembles one of those laser-cut wooden lake souvenir cutting boards from space. You and your guests go on a snorkel excursion, zipping across the lagoon in a powerboat with a marine biologist, explore a healthy coral garden teeming with fish, and hover in awe over your first-ever live sea anemone. You end up surrounded by 10 black-tipped reef sharks that you swear are putting on a performance, behaving more like trained circus dogs than formidable ocean predators.

At a later point in time you anchor in a muddy bay in the south. You and your family dinghy along with some cruising friends down a river, taking an inland river tour for the first time since the Caribbean. Your eyes, used to seeing shades of blue from below to above, almost fail to process the browns, greens, and jewel tones flooding their fields as you glide past fecund jungle, explore a well-presented botanical garden, and fulfill the petting demands of the garden watchdog. You journey across the river and encounter a vigorous older man who visibly pulls his energy from the earth as he escorts you through speed-dating the results of his fruit-farm labors. Under Andre’s guidance, and literally under Andre as he scrabbles over your head through the trees, you begin to appreciate the subtle differences in the taste of the fruits of each of his lychee trees. You are astounded by all of the textures and flavors the botanical world uses to protect its seeds, and encouraged by Andre’s reassurance, you defy your instinct to not eat the teeny tiny pepper or the fruit that smells like it has a bad case of gas gangrene. 

You recover from tasting that fruit, and after some socializing on your own boat and others, you decide you miss your blue visual palette and thread your way through abandoned monohulls and charterers into a gusty anchorage near Raiatea’s western reef, processing your experiences with your keels floating just 2 feet above the sand.

Next Steps

Did you enjoy your tour?  Like selecting a puppy from a litter, the islands look similar on the surface, but a little play tends to reveal personalities as distinct as their names.  For the curious, here’s a wonderful video with instruction on how to pronounce these beautiful island names.

At this point, our daughter Allie is the only guest that remains. She will be with us until she flies off to study abroad in England in early September. With each passing day, cyclone season approaches, which typically begins Nov 1.  However, if we experience the strong, “Super El-Nino” that is increasingly predicted, cyclones can occur as early as October, and they are more likely than typical to reach as far east as Tahiti. This means: no more putting off a cyclone season plan. As much as we have enjoyed this group of islands, we cannot see ourselves turning around and heading almost a thousand miles back east to the Marquesas and staying put for 5-6 months.

So where do we now plan to ring in the new year? A whole new country with new experiences – a place with plentiful cheese, boiling mud pools, and funny-looking birds…

New Zealand!