After 3 nights we left Huahine and arrived in Bora Bora, the halfway point of our trip.

Bora Bora is by far the most picturesque of the islands. I hate airports, and even the Bora Bora airport is magical.

Here's the drill. Land in the middle of a sea green lagoon (the most beautiful water of the trip to date). Watch rich people walk by. Breathe in the freshest air in the world. Wait for a yacht to take you to the mainland.

All in all it's a pretty unforgettable first impression.

However, as we got our things and walked to the dock, I began realizing that we'd been pretty spoiled in the resorts, and that maybe we were in for a wakeup call. 

Upon arrival, we noticed some pretty high end yachts waiting at the docks with the St. Regis, Four Seasons, Sofitel logos. On each boat, tour guides were waiting to drape tourists with leis and shell necklaces, and two strong Tahitians were standing by to carry baggage.

We started walking in that direction, but quickly realized that with our non-resort status, we had to take the bus alongside the locals and other non-millionaires.

Of course, the "bus" to go into Bora Bora was also a yacht, there was just a little more guesswork required on our part to figure out what to do, and where to go.

I was a little bit apprehensive as we went to the hostel, as hostels on other islands were definitely not “honeymoon material.” But, I hoped for the best, and tried to appreciate that we had an opportunity to really interact with the locals, and get a dose of reality on Bora Bora.

All-in-all, the inconvenience is a small price to pay for the amount you save by staying at a hostel. (Nights at the St. Regis START at $1000 a night, and even the ride to and from the airport cost 7500 CFP - or the price of three meals - or about $85.)

Hanging up in the Te Tiare Beach Resort, Huahine.

By our last day in Huahine, I still didn't know what to think of the local culture, and the relationship between the Tahitians and the French. It didn’t seem like the French had a lot of influence culturally, with large groups of Tahitians still living on family land with all their relatives, bartering, fishing, and never leaving the island.

It was clear from the moment we arrived at the airport (a single room with a beer stand in the middle of a field with a weekly flight in and out) that Huahine would be the most "real" and "real different" place we visited, so I tried to learn as much as I could while there.

Although we didn't get as involved with the locals as I might have liked, we did learn a little bit about the local politics. For example, the day we took the lagoon tour we learned that our guide was a member of the "Beautify Huahine" movement. He wore a shirt with a political expression on it that meant “Ha’apo is my village and I want to keep it clean.”

It was funny to think that even in the cleanest, most remote, emptiest places, people worry about garbage in the streets and pollution! When I thought about it more, I remembered seeing some French guys pouring gasoline in the ocean when refueling the boat, so I'm glad there are people who care about the environmental impact of that behavior - even in the middle of nowhere.

The other thing we learned was that the current president of Tahiti is really pushing for Tahitian independence. Apparently the import/export ratio is dramatically in favor of the French and he thinks they would do better on their own.

The independence-loving side of me thought this made sense, but all of the Tahitians we met said the president was crazy. The reason they gave was the amazingness of French healthcare. Apparently, if something happens to you on one of the islands, you’re flown to the main island, Tahiti. If they can’t fix you in there they fly you to New Zealand - all on the French dime. So I guess that’s the reason why the Tahitians have the best standard of living of all the people in the South Pacific.

 

So, now that I have a nice video camera, I will have to hone my video skills for future trips (what I'm saying, is that this video sucks.) But if you can deal with my terrible shooting skills, here is an idea of just how remote Huahine is.

Here is video of:

Landing at the airport

Taking the boat to the resort

Morning at the Te Tiare

Walking down the street in Fare

Hanging out at the bar

Sunset on our resort deck

Dinner at the resort

I am pretty notoriously terrified of fish. I don’t even like to get in lakes unless I’ve had a couple of drinks, and being out in the South Pacific means being out in the middle of the ocean. On your own it can be pretty terrifying, especially if you poke your head down there to see just how many animals there are. But when you’re with a group of people and a marine biologist says “We’re going out to see the whale—hurry! Get ready!” or “Come on! Let’s feed the sharks” or you briefly remember how much freaking money you paid to be in Tahiti in the first place, you sort of stop thinking and just go with it.

We had been worried we wouldn’t be able to book a tour in Huahine, because—literally, there is one tour company on the island, and they can’t go unless at least 6 people sign up. But, our second day in Huahine we got to take the lagoon tour (which I would recommend you do on every island) so I guess enough people rallied.

All the lagoon tours follow a similar format. You get on a boat, drive around the lagoon to see places of interest, snorkel in a couple of cool unique spots, eat lunch on a motu (little island off of the main island) snorkel again—or feed sharks or visit a pearl farm, or all of the above—and then go home.

Our lagoon tour in Huahine was strange . . . and I feel that the strangeness was a reflection of how non-touristy the island was. First of all, the guide didn’t seem like he liked any of us, and had a really weird way of dealing with people. (This made me particularly nervous because we were supposed to be getting in water with sharks, and that seemed like a bad idea if our guide didn’t like us.)

Our tour guide was a big Polynesian between 30-40 years old, and his side-kick—this old French dude—was a bit leery. When I boarded the boat the French guy helped me in and mumbled something under his breath at me, which I always find creepy.

The Polynesian introduced himself, indicated that the tour would be in French, and had Dan, myself and a German girl (the only non-french speakers) move to the front of the boat. I caught him saying in French that the French speakers would have a better view from the back of the boat and everyone laughed. I must have made a facial expression because he looked at me and said, “You speak French?” And I said, “Enough to understand that—” And he just turned around.

Throughout the first half of the morning no one said much on the boat. We went from site to site by boat (and by “site” I mean landmark or interesting hill, because there are no structures.) There were 4 villages like Fare on Huahine, and some are only accessible by boat. But, even if you made it to one of the villages, there wouldn’t be anyone there.

As we passed one part of the island, I heard our guide say that Huahine means “sex of women” (vahine is woman in Tahitian). It is named this because in a particular bay, one of the sides of the mountain looks like a naked woman lying down with her mouth open, and the other side has a big penis-shaped hill. As I heard our guide explain this in French, I remembered reading something about it in Moon Tahiti, and went to take a picture. I heard him say something mocking-sounding about a photo, and everyone laughed, and I couldn’t help but think he was taking a jab at me. He then gave his spiel in English about what the mountain meant, and said to me specifically in a really derisive tone, “Go on. Take a picture.”

As we continued our tour, I noticed a guide had a shirt with Tahitian writing on it, and when I asked him what it meant. I thought it was a friendly gesture on my part but he turned around and said “It’s political. I will not talk about it.” Later, at our first snorkeling stop, the German girl asked how long we’d be snorkeling and he wouldn’t tell her. He said at one point in an unfriendly voice, “Don’t think. I will think for you.” I started feeling like, no matter what we said or how hard we tried to be friendly, this guy did not like us English speakers. Which was completely counter to anything we had previously experienced on the islands. By the time we got to lunch, I felt pretty uncomfortable. But then over lunch, he suddenly opened up. Apparently his “ex-step father” was the president of Tahiti 30 years ago, and he owned 3-4 houses on the island. He taught our group how to make poisson cru, the local specialty, and started talking with Dan about his 4-wheel drive, with tinted windows and an awesome sound speaker. He also made a lot of Asian jokes, which seemed odd and out of place, but at least showed he was trying to joke around with us. . . The whole thing was so bizarre, and made me wonder why he was doing tours in the first place.

The creepy old French dude, who had been sort of useless all day, finally revealed his purpose at the end of the tour, when we realized he was the guy that fed the sharks. So I guess that worked out too. By the time they dropped us back off at the dock of our resort I felt like everyone was getting along, but I was ready to be back on my own turf (if our beach bungalow counts as “my own” turf.)

Upon reflection, I think that is one weird/interesting thing you have to accept about traveling in distant, foreign places. People might not always like you—no matter how nice you are, and how much you want to understand and get to know their culture. I guess in some places, my very existence could be offensive, and that’s something I need to accept. In this particular case, I wasn’t sure what we finally did that turned him around, but I was glad it worked.

Clearly, there were just too many people hanging around. . .

Not much.

If it's dawn you hear roosters, but once they shut up it's pretty quiet. It's pretty much trees in the wind, birds, and then nothing. You don’t even hear waves because they break on the coral about half a mile out.

It’s crazy how loud the quiet can be. And although I feel so comfortable in a group of strangers, the isolation can be unsettling.

For example, in Fare (the "major" village in Huahine) there was a hike we could take as recommended by Moon Tahiti. The directions to get there were simple - Walk two dirt paths north of the total station, and turn inland."

It was really hot and we were in flip flops, but the Te Tiare boat wasn't coming back for an hour and a half, so we were sort of stuck in Fare, and I wanted to see the vanilla vines, pineapples and coconut plants anyway.

We turned down the road and started walking in past a few plots of land with plant husks and junk in the front yard. It was pretty empty and quiet as we walked inland, and we only saw one person - a guy with a pick up truck who dumped hundreds of coconuts in his yard to husk and clean.

Throughout the walk, the craziest thing to me was how quiet it was. The other thing that kept freaking me out was the realization that we were pretty language-handicapped, and pretty alone.

The only other time I’ve been so far off the beaten track was when I used to visit Victoria, Mexico with my church group (the middle of the Mexican countryside.) In some ways, the little town of Fare reminded me of that location, but back in the Mexico days I was with a group of 100+, I knew Spanish, and wasn’t really allowed off the beaten path.

The entire time we were on the islands, I always got nervous when walking into the jungle. I always felt like such a loser for being so anxious in Paradise. I would normally force myself to tough through it, but in Fare, as we sort of nervously walked down the road, it started raining—totally out of the blue.

So instead of walking into possible adventure that day, we we walked to the first little bar out of the Pension and drank Hinano until the boat returned.

As I said, the third island we visited was Huahine, a really really small island with about 6000 people on it.

To illustrate its size: we had planned to take a tour the first day, but our hotel concierge couldn’t get enough people together (6) to justify running the boats. And it wasn’t just that she couldn’t find enough people in our hotel - it was that she couldn’t find enough people on the whole island.

So we spent the first day in Huahine relaxing at the Te Tiare, our small, independently owned bungalow hotel (who generously upgraded us to a beach bungalow from a garden bungalow!)

Dan and I are really not “relaxation” people, and it was a good exercise to do nothing for awhile. However, it always amazes me how long days last when there isn’t much to do.

By the time 11am rolled around, we had been to the breakfast buffet (a MUST at Te Tiare because it's a great deal with the meal plan, is high quality, and there is nowhere else to eat), we swam, played ping pong, read, wrote, laid by the pool . .

By noon we had decided to take the afternoon shuttle bus into Fare, the biggest village on the island.

Once we got there, we realized how little the biggest village actually was. There were literally, maybe 8 buildings. A mobile station that smelled like a septic tank, a bank, a church, a liquor store, a grocery, and a couple of hostels with bars in the back. A local was sitting in the ocean, naked, washing himself. It was the smallest town I had ever been to, and I realized that the guidebooks aren't lying when they tell you, "Huahine is completely off the tourists' track."

That's even an understatement. I would call it, The Middle of Nowhere.