May 1, 2022: Moorea
The difference between Moorea and Tahiti is huge, amazing considering they are so near to each other.
For comparison, here is what Tahiti looks like from the ferry:
Tahiti is much more developed, much more built-up than I had ever imagined.
And this is our first view from the ferry of the island of Moorea:
We left a humming metropolis to arrive at a dock with a small store across the street from it. A couple of hundred yards down from that was the car rental: just a little building with a small parking lot. Inside the building were two women handling the rentals. Outside was an old-style ticket dispenser, like you would see at an old-fashioned butcher’s. Behind the car rental place rise huge, verdant mountains. You can get misty-eyed just thinking about the sight.
Our car, a Renault Clio, must be the smallest they make. I didn’t want to embarrass it by opening the hood. But it was comfortable and cute, and was all we needed for driving around the island. Top speed limit, 60kph/37mph.
But who would want to go faster and miss this scenery? We saw places along the road marked Scenic View (yeah, in English, but also vue panoramique). I don’t remember stopping at any of them in particular. Here’s why:
We stayed at a really nice resort, the Manava Beach Resort and Spa: lovely infinity pool, beautiful grounds. It is on the site of the first resort to introduce “overwater bungalows” that you see in many vacation brochures. Since we were going to be on a cruise in a few days we took a “garden view” room. From the beach we saw beautiful sunsets, and in the other direction those famous mountains.
The place’s main entrance was set back from the road, but if you walked down their drive and turned off before you reached the road you came to a food truck, or rather a permanent structure that a food truck pulled into every night. That’s where we ate dinner, or across the street in a similar place that had a widescreen TV running Polynesian MTV. This is where the locals eat, in Tahiti as well as on Moorea.
One morning we stopped for breakfast at the mall just down the street, at the patisserie there. You would have thought you were in France: the croissants and pains au chocolat were simply excellent. No exaggeration.
That little orange car was like the one we rented.
During the day we would drive around the island, literally, stopping whenever something caught our eye.
Near the top of Mt Tohiea there is a vantage point called le Belvédère, reachable by car.
It overlooks famous Cook’s Bay, on the right, and the larger Opunohu Bay on the left. There is a tiny white, triangular dot in the picture that marks the spot where our ship would later be moored.
On the way down the mountain I saw the remains of a number of marae. These stone platforms and paved rectangles are all that remain of sacred pre-contact sites, and once had longhouses erected over them.
One included a walled-in area that was described as a place where one could go to simply relax and be at peace. It now had a variety of trees growing in it, and even now gave that impression.
We stopped at a beach along Cook’s Bay along with some other travelers.
And watched the weather rolling in. Amazing.
There is another beach, called the public beach, on the other side of the island. While we were walking around there we saw a group exercising, doing situps and pushups at a designated spot on the shore, then continuing their calisthenics in the water.
Exercising in the water is nothing new, but seeing exercise bikes planted in the water was, to me.
On our last day in Moorea we took one last drive around the island before the 11:30 the ferry back to Tahiti. We spent the afternoon and overnighted at the Intercontinental to wait for our cruise to begin.