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Published: March 6th 2014
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After three weeks of visiting only small pensions we decided to go to the other extreme when we got to Tahiti, the Intercontinental where we stayed is the biggest of the resorts on the island, and one of the most luxurious. We had booked the room with my last remaining reward points from my stay in Harrisburg last winter, and even though our room was free we managed to get upgraded to a room with a ocean view, nice! As the rainy season was catching up with us and the weather was all but sunny, we spent a lot of time on our balcony enjoying the view towards the neighboring island of Moorea that you could actually see through the rain every now and then.
Our stay wasn’t just rain and gloom. Our first morning the rain had stopped and the sun was out, so we walked around checking out the property with its fish filled artificial lagoon, pools with sand beaches with bars you could swim out to and other over the top luxuries. We also had time to enjoy some sun by the pool before the rain started again. For the evening we had booked tables
at the hotels fine dining restaurant, supposedly the best restaurant in French Polynesia, and it was good, not Michelin star good but definitely one of the best dinners we have had in some time.
Our last island in French Polynesia was Moorea where we again downgraded to a normal pension. The first two days we just sat inside reading, it was raining so much the lawn had turned into a large pool. The pension was not very well situated, and there is basically no public transport on Moorea, so we rented a car for one day to drive around the island and get to all the nice beaches. The beaches and the snorkeling was ok, however not comparable with what we have experienced earlier on the Tuamotus or even on the Leeward islands. If we ever get back to French Polynesia we will definitely be heading straight for the other islands…
French Polynesia came roughly half way through our trip, and was a kind of holiday from the holiday. After looking over our shoulders all the way through South America it was nice to take it easy and just enjoy the sun and the warmth for
some time. It was also a good time to think through what has changed since the beginning of the trip. One of the bigger changes is that we have left out meat from our menu, after a book on factory farming we both felt we only want to eat meat we really know where it has come from. Another change is a much more relaxed attitude about everything (at least for me, Johanna claims to have been relaxed also before the trip…), during our trip we have noticed that things tend to take care of themselves and that what you can plan for is quite limited. Our interest in the countries we have visited has grown a lot, and also our understanding of them and their culture. In addition to that it feels much more possible to travel e.g. to South America or Tonga for a summer vacation, the world feels smaller. And last but not least, after the stargazing in San Pedro we are almost every night locating the constellations we know in the sky and feeling we should get to know some more of the stars!
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