Advertisement
Published: September 4th 2008
Edit Blog Post
We were woken by the sounds of people going for breakfast again around 8am, and by 8.30am I’d dragged Matt out of bed so that we could go and see how expensive breakfast was in the bar. The lagoon looked very inviting even at that time in the morning when it was sunny but not too hot.
We ordered a couple of crossiants and coffee each (£8 in total) and we made a pact to go and buy more bread so that we didn’t have to spend this much for breakfast again. Although we’d been missing coffee, this was more like thick sludge so we both struggled to drink it.
Mid morning we headed down to the beach and spent a bit of time laying in the sun before jumping in the water to cool off. It was lovely and warm in the lagoon and we just lay in the shallows for a while enjoying floating sentation. We moved our loungers into the shade then to cool down a bit and lay reading when I heard a loud splash from the distance and looked up. Out beyond the reef I saw a big spray of water, like something big
had hit it. A second later come another and this time I realised it was being caused by a whales tale. It was clearly smashing the surface of the water and making water shoot up into the air. Then it did it again, and again. By this time most of the people on the beach were looking out in disbelief. Matt wished he had his video camera with him but unfortunately we’d left it in our room so he ran back to get it in the hope that the display wasn’t over. We thought that the whale must have been trying to stun something it wanted to eat. After the big splashes we saw the whale spray from its blowhole again a couple of times before vanishing. Unfortunatly by the time Matt had brought his camera from the room it had gone.
In the afternoon we walked to the shops. On the way we were trying to figure out what made the holes in the ground that were all along the sides of the road. They were proper little tunnels - like you’d imagine moles to make - all over the place. It wasn’t long before we saw a
massive crab running into one. From then on we saw crabs everywhere running into their holes as we came close to them - they’re obviously very shy and try their best not to be spotted. Last time we’d walked into town we hadn’t noticed one, but now we knew what we were looking for we saw lots. I made a pact not to walk back in the dark as these crabs were too big to step over - not at all like the ones on the beach at Raro. As Matt put it - these ones could take your toe off!
There were lots of black pearl shops on Moorea but as I’d already bought mine on Raro we didn’t bother looking at them too much. We nipped into the supermarket and bought some bread and more crackers then headed on.
What neither of us like about Tahiti is the fact that the beach is only a few metres away from the road, and all beaches are public, but the roads that access the beaches are all private property. This means that you can’t get down to the beach without trespassing once you’ve left your hotel. The other thing that is annoying us is that the Cook Islands is such a friendly place - everyone says hello to you and everyone is there to help you if you need it, but here nobody even looks at you, let alone says hello. I think it’s because of the language barrier - nobody knows what nationality you are so they don’t want to say hello in the wrong language. We think that English tourists are a real minority here as most are French or German (this was obvious when we went to the hotel book shelf and kept picking up books we fancied reading only to realise they were all in another language!) Since we’ve been in Tahiti (4 days) we’ve not met anyone else from England, US, OZ or NZ. We’re beginning to miss having conversations as most people we’ve met don’t know very much English at all and our French only stretches to the basics (although I‘m surprised at how much GCSE French we‘re both remembering all of a sudden).
Whilst I think French Pol is more beautiful in some ways than the Cooks (the interior is more dramatic with it‘s towering peaks, lush greenery and the lagoon which seems to have more depth to the shades of green and blue) I'm missing the friendliness of the locals there.
After an afternoon walking around the shops and galleries we headed back to our hotel via a pizza take away stall by the side of the road. We were starving so bought two take away pizzas as we didn’t know how big they’d be, and took them back to our room to devour with our cheap boxes of French wine. We managed to eat one and a half, although Matt almost choaked on the olives as they still had stones in. Later I had to sneak out with the boxes of leftovers to throw them into the beachside toilet bins - otherwise our resident geckos and ants would have had a field day in our room munching the remains of our dinner.
We drank lots more of the awful boxes wine and had a quiet (but cheap) night in our room.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.174s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 6; qc: 51; dbt: 0.1255s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb