Our glass-bottomed boat trip wasn’t scheduled until 1 PM so we had the morning free. I was tempted to take the tender to shore and from there on Le Truck to a beautiful beach as Arnie and Anita did, but we decided to walk around town with Kent & Alice. The town of Vaitape is a small somewhat messy beach town with colorful canoes hauled up on the shore and small bungalows surrounded by lush vegetation, all with the magnificent backdrop of Bora Bora’s famous mountains! We stopped at a Robert Wan shop, the famous black pearl outlet, and a charming sales lady persuaded me to buy a cluster of pearls on a leather cord. The shop even had a room divider made of long ropes of pearls! We returned to the tender wharf and met Curry, Eric and Lydia returning from a snorkeling expedition where they saw lemon sharks and swam with rays! The kids’ program is really amazing, fun and educational - we’re tempted to sign on as chaperones!
We returned to the ship and ordered room service as time was short. Within five minutes we had another large tray with tuna salad on a baguette, chicken matzo ball soup and a great salad delivered to our rooms!
We joined everyone for a tender ride back to the dock and transferred onto a small open boat with a canopy overhead. There was a bench around the sides that we sat on, facing the middle in which were large open-topped boxes with glass bottoms that we could lean on and look down into the water. The water was pretty cloudy as it’s been very windy lately, but when we got to shallower water over a coral reef we began to see beautifully-colored coral and schools of wonderful fish of every color and shape! Our guide handed out laminated fish guides so we could try to identify some of the species, but it was better to just gaze at the beautiful sight!
After an hour we returned to shore and I showed Ann and Hilary the pearl store and Hil found a lovely necklace also.
I found Bob back on ship and we went up to Deck 8 to see if we could find a Wi-Fi hot spot. We didn’t’ have success at that but did find Afternoon Tea, complete with scones and very good éclairs. We could have hung around for hors d’oeuvres and cocktails, but knew we’d ruin ourselves for dinner, so left to clean up for the evening.
Curry, Eric and Lydia were scheduled to take a boat to another of the ship’s private motus for star gazing, but the water was too rough, so the crew promised to turn off all the lights up on
Deck 9, and they had an early supper to take advantage of that. The rest of us returned to La Veranda restaurant and had an excellent dinner: crab cakes with poached egg, microtome tuna capaccio, broiled shrimp on whipped sweet potato, ice creams, strawberries and bottomless glasses of wine!
The boat gave a lurch about 10 PM and I went up on deck to see the lights of Bora Bora fading away as we set off south and east towards the center line for Sunday’s eclipse!
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