A Few Relaxing Days in Outback Nigeria?

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So having not been anywhere near an airport since we came back from last year’s lap of the globe, we’re now off again. And a very exciting sojourn it will be too. By far the most notable event along the way will of course be our beloved daughter Emma’s wedding to Canadian fiancé Michael up in the Rocky Mountains on 29 June. We’re then continuing on to Europe, and at the end of that Issy’s signed herself up for a 20 day art tour through the Greek Islands, with me tagging along for the ride. She’s a talented artist, but I find even stick figures a challenge, so as long as they don’t ask me to model ….

Airports seem to have recovered a bit in the intervening period, with health checks and vaccination certificates now thankfully seemingly a thing of the past. What hasn’t changed however is the time honoured process of boarding by rows, with the guys up the back getting on first. I only mention this because as we go to board Issy cheerfully pipes up that she saw a TV show recently about this very issue, which questioned the wisdom of the current practice. It seems that if the guys up the back happen to be a bit on the weighty side, there’s a significant risk of the whole plane tipping over backwards. … and to think I’d been feeling quite relaxed about things up until now.

We’ve got our eldest son Scott for company on the way to Canada, and youngest son Troy will be joining us there just pre-wedding. We’ve decided to kangaroo hop our way across the Pacific to break things up, and first stop from our home in Melbourne will be Papeete. At our Auckland stopover Air New Zealand in its infinite wisdom gets us all to board and then realises someone’s forgotten to put in the fuel, so we have to sit in the cabin staring out at the tarmac for an hour, going nowhere. The natives are now getting decidedly restless. Who thought that was a good idea? … and on the subject of airline torture, why do all airlines insist on parading us poor cattle class sods past the luxury of the business class recliners on the way through to our chicken coops up the back. That’s probably enough ranting for now.

We thought we were going to Tahiti, but the maps on all the in-flight entertainment screens constantly show us hovering somewhere off the coast of Africa as we chart a course towards what looks like the back blocks of Nigeria. Hopefully the guys up the pointy end are getting their directions from other sources. This really isn’t the relaxing start I’d been hoping for….

It’s 5am and we feel like zombies when our heads finally hit the pillow in Papeete. We’re then up a few short hours later for our half hour ferry ride across to the neighbouring island of Moorea. Issy’s looking decidedly comatose; I wonder how much of this she’ll remember. She and I came here and then went on to Bora Bora to celebrate our twenty fifth wedding anniversary back in 2014, and Moorea’s spectacular rocky peaks certainly don’t seem to have lost any of their grandeur in the interim.

The lady who picks us up from the ferry terminal tells us that she went to Brisbane for a visit just before the pandemic started. In her eyes the most remarkable feature of that particular event was that she managed to make it back to Moorea without getting taken by a shark or dying of snake bite. She assures us that there are no dangerous creatures in Moorea. I remember very vividly us going swimming with sharks when we went to Bora Bora and being assured that we were quite safe. So what is it exactly with Aussie sharks and their voracious appetites for human intruders into their domain? All the people here look way less angry and more relaxed than the folk back home, so maybe it’s the same for the sharks?

We settle into our two bedroom lagoonside unit. If the idea of coming here was to relax I‘m pretty sure we’ve found the right place.

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Comments

[RENanDREW]

On the road again...
Just realised you're travelling again! Hope all goes well on your kangaroo hopping adventure to Canada :)

[DaveandIssy]

On the road again
All going well so far thanks. Arrived in Canada yesterday.