Monday August 19 – Bora Bora

This island is absolutely stunning.  It has been described as a jewel.  The emerald green island is surrounded by the turquoise sea, which in turn is surrounded by coral reefs which are described as a string of pearls.

I did a tour of the island in Le Truck.  This is a colourful bus with open windows for fresh air.  One of the passengers lost his hat through the window but a good Samaritan chased after our bus and retuned the lost hat.  This is island life for you.

We saw the bread fruit hanging on the trees.  This was the food that Captain Bligh had come to acquire to feed the English slaves working on the sugar plantations in the Caribbean.  We also saw kapok trees.  We went to Bloody Mary’s Restaurant and Bar with its wall of fame that highlights notable celebrity patrons.  We saw the condominiums owned by Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson.

The most interesting part of the trip was seeing the crab holes.  At first I thought this was a boring stop but when our guide threw some bougainvillea and some leaves over the holes, the crabs came out to collect their food.  They would have been the size of a child’s hand.  Our guide told us that the locals love to eat them but they are too small at the moment.  Hence  they keep feeding them until they increase in size.  The crabs were interesting.  They would pull the flowers to their hole but another crab would come and grab the potential food source from his rival.

We had a pareo demonstration:  How to tie them in five different ways and also how the locals do the tie dying.

Bill went swimming with the sharks and the stingrays.  I thought he was very brave after Steve Irwin’s experience but he survived and enjoyed the experience.  He said the stingrays were like little puppy dogs coming up to you for a feed.  They felt like velvet to touch.  They were told not to touch the sharks and the sharks would leave them alone.  Such faith!  Bill here. We went to two snorkelling locations. Both beautiful but different. At the first, the bird and stingrays came around to be fed by the three local guys who ran the excursion for Princess while the black tip sharks circled ominously but seemingly not interested in proceedings. The second location had the most beautiful coral and a huge variety of sea life. The crew kept us all entertained with guitar and ukulele melodies on the way home. The colour of the sea is the vision that will always be engraved in my memory.