French Polynesia.

Tahiti

I already blogged a little bit about these places on a previous blog, but now that I'm working on our trip in chronological order, I will blog about them again! After five days at sea we arrived in Tahiti. I was expecting it to be a little bit of paradise, you know, the way you see it in the movies or on postcards, but it definitely wasn't. The beach that we eventually found reminded me of the "beach" at one of the lakes (or "lakes", rather) that we used to go to in Nebraska. We swam for a bit until something in the water was stinging us and we couldn't figure out what it was, so we hopped out, took the bus back to town, and got back on the ship. Unfortunately because our next port of call was only 18 miles away, we didn't leave Tahiti until midnight!

Moorea

Moorea was absolutely pristine! One man that we spoke with, also one of the few English speaking people ont he island, said that they maybe get one cruise ship each year. You could tell that they aren't very used to nor prepared for tourists. After our little shark and sting ray feeding excursion (I won't be doing that again as I was screaming bloody murder haha) we got back to downtown (if you can even call it that) and decided to try to hitch back to the shore to get back to the ship. Cramer and Andy stood on the side of the road with their thumbs out and these two girls in a hippie van stopped to pick them up. All was going well until we learned they spoke zero English and we spoke zero French. I couldn't stop laughing when we had to charade "big boat", "water", and "swim" to them. It wasn't working very well, but all of the sudden the girl driving had an ah-ha moment and got us right where we needed to go!

I took this from the tender on our way over to the shore. Pretty, huh? Our ship looks tiny!

Andy feeding a sting ray.

Bora Bora

The morning we got to Bora Bora there was a torrential downpour. We tendered over to the island hoping to wait it out, but it just poured harder, so we went back to the ship. About an hour or so later, the rain stopped and it turned into a beautiful day. We didn't really feel like doing anything, but I told Andy we had to at least get a picture with the sign, so we tendered back to the island for long enough to take a few shots.