Moorea Island, Tahiti

How cruel to sail across the vast Pacific Ocean to stop in tropical Tahiti for only one day. We ferried straight to Moorea Island, some 40 minutes from Papeete. Meg had sleuthed out a dive shop and they drove us around coast of the island. We gazed out to the intense teal colour of the shallow reef and craned our necks to marvel at Moorea’s cliffs, jagging vertically up from the dense tropical jungle. It might just be the most perfect tropical island I’ve seen in my life. It was about to get better.

French Polynesia is expensive. At $80 a pop we decided on just one dive. We quickly geared up, were given our briefing in a thick French accent and hummed 500 metres off shore to our dive location. From the boat, I caught sight of a menacing shadow. ‘Don’t panic’, we were assured, ‘they don’t bite’. Should I trust a Frenchman? Why not, he still had all his fingers! We descended to about 15 metres and looked out through fantastic visibility. And then the scene just unfolded. One blacktip reef shark became two, then five… until there were maybe 12 around us. We watched, mesmerised, suspended above the reef. Some weren’t interested in us, another swam straight at me before darting away at the last moment. Others passed over me and I touched their bellies. I glanced to my right and only an arms reach away was another, just cruising, like he was my brother. This was some mad-cool shit. And there was more to this dive than just sharks; large schools of surgeon fish, caves with lion fish and an aggressive trigger fish. I rued not being able to borrow an underwater camera case for this, my best and longest dive (56min). (see videos here)

Hez and Julia with Stingrays

Back on shore we had only 2 hours before the last ferry. Missing it would mean a costly private plane back to Papeete. Our gang were keen to check out Stingray Point so we ran down the road, rented some tandem kayaks and headed out to where the reef meets the channel. We dropped our kayak’s anchors on the shallow sandy bottom next to another boat and grabbed our snorkels. In seconds we were surrounded by a dozen curious Stingrays. Just getting out of the kayak, I had to check not to step on one. The friendly rays, about a metre in diameter, didn’t mind us touching their velvety wings. They were obviously used to people feeding them fishy snacks. Awesome snorkelling.

We cut it fine and just made the ferry. I wish we missed it. We’d only been on Moorea some 6 hours and there wasn’t a whole lot going on in downtown Papeete. I drank my beer and looked at the Hinano girl… Moorea would’ve been a great place to be stranded.

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