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Published: September 4th 2008
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Our room doesn’t have very thick walls so I was woken at 6.30am as people started going for breakfast. I managed to doze off but every now and again I’d be woken by someone else opening their sliding door. By 8am the cleaners were into the rooms vacuuming. Although breakfast wasn’t included in the rooms, it seemed that everyone at the resort was heading to the bar. When the cleaner had finally made it to the room next door at 8.30 I thought it was time we got up.
I dragged Matt out as we’d decided the night before to walk to the shops to see just how far away they were. The lady on reception had said they were ten minutes away but we had stopped believing people as so many times we’d been told it was a ten minute walk when it was actually more like 30. With a sense of skepticism we set off to find some breakfast. We were surprised when in ten minutes we did actually get to a row of shops. Most were tourist shops but in amongst them were a couple of stores selling food.
We spent £20 buying a few basic
bits of food (including cartons of red and white wine!) and set off to explore some more of the area. There were quite a few different places to eat and we scoped out some recommendations from our guide book.
Then, boiling hot and starving, we headed back to our room. It was 10am by this point and the sun felt at its strongest so we shouldn’t really have been attempting a long walk, let alone a long walk with 6 bottles of water and two litres of wine!
We got back into our room and devoured a baguette (this one cost almost £2 - four times more than the one from Papetee yesterday) with butter and jam, followed by a stack of Tuc crackers which were a bargain at 90p for a small pack (the fact that I'm not joking should emphasise how expensive it is in French Pol).
Matt felt the sun was too hot to even think about going out again so we seltted in to read our books, then after a while finished off the rest of the bagette for lunch. I can see we will be eating a lot of bread and jam
The beach at Les Tipaniers
That is the beach bar on the right of the picture and the dive shack is the small cabin on the left. this week. We couldn’t even afford crips this time (they were over £4 for one large bag!)
Around 2pm we headed to the beach and grabbed a sun lounger right by the sea. We lay and enoyed the view of the blue lagoon for a while before deciding it was time to go snorkelling together.
We waded in backwards in our fins and started swimming towards the coral. The water wasn’t deep at all and actually became shallower the further we went out in places. The current started pulling us over some low lying coral and dragging us further into the shallows. I paniced and tried to backtrack but as we were swimming together it was difficult to find room to turn around as I had the jetty on the other side of me. I just managed it and started swimming back the way we’d come. Matt followed but I wasn’t sure if he’d realised why I was suddenly leaving. I kept trying to swim and even wearing fins the water was pulling me, so I had to put my hands onto the bottom of the sand to try to push myself, but the sand had bits of dead coral in it and it cut into me. Pushing on the ground did the trick and before long I was back in a safer part of the lagoon so stood up to see how Matt was doing. He wasn't far behind me. We made a note not to go to that part of the lagoon again.
I warned him not to go near the coral as my finger was stinging and bleeding. We started again and this time went around the coral as much as possible, or made sure that the water was deep enough over the top. The number of fish we saw was amazing. We probably saw at least forty different types of fish between us - parrot fish, angel fish, sgt majors, trigger fish, stone fish and lots I can’t name. This was the best snorkelling location we’d been to on the trip so far.
There were a few hairy moments when we set off snorkelling over gaps between the coral and realised we were stuck, and at one point the current pulled Matt’s leg into the coral slicing it open in two places and making it bleed. But by the end of it we’d learnt what we felt capable of and what to avoid and none of our injuries were too bad.
We were just starting to think about going back to the shore when Matt motioned for me to look down. I ducked under water to see at least two hundred sergeant majors (black and white striped fish) swimming by. It was amazing and from the surface you would have had no idea at all they were under there.
We headed back to our loungers and then lay to read out books. The sun had finally calmed down and there were a few clouds so the heat was bearable for a change.
In the evening we decided to go back to the main restaurant for one more night. We’d already realised that no matter where we ate - restaurant or take away - it was going to cost around the same here, and there was no way for us to cater for ourselves as we didn’t have cooking facities. We had to accept it - this was going to be an expensive three weeks in Tahiti.
After dinner we took some wine down to the beach and watched the stars from the sun loungers again. Tonight there were no shooting stars, but there were some very active fish and at one point about fifty fish all jumped out at once making us jump too.
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