Thursday, July 8 - Exploring Taha'a

The Society Islands are all surrounded by lagoons bordered by barrier reefs, creating the ribbon of turquoise and white that you can see from the shore. The islands of Raiatea and Taha’a are very close together and have a common barrier reef, so when our ship set sail at daybreak this morning, she crossed the narrow channel between the islands and circumnavigated Taha’a staying within the lagoon. On the north side of Taha’a the ship anchored off the tiny town of Patio.

Our Taha’a tour is leaving at 8:30 AM so we ordered room service for breakfast and on the dot of seven we got a knock on the door and the waiter came in bearing a huge tray with coffee, croissants, scrambled eggs and juice. Just great!

We assembled by the piano bar on Deck 5 for check-in and then shuffled down to Deck 3 to board a small bouncy tender for shore. We arrived at the town of Patio and were greeted by some locals playing ukeleles and singing Tahitian songs. These people turned out to be our drivers and we all loaded onto Land Rovers with open tops. Hilary, Ann, Kent and Alice joined Bob and me and we took off down the coast. We were totally windblown and disheveled, but it was fun. We stopped at a vanilla farm and saw the vanilla orchid vines growing up stakes surrounded by coconut shell compost, and a table piled high with wonderfully smelling beans!  We bought a glass tube of ten vanilla beans for ten dollars.

We continued on to a black pearl farm. Black pearls are usually pewter colored with tones of green, blue and yellow, and are called “black” as they are grown in Black-lipped Oysters. The farmers open the shell of the oyster and plant a piece of shell from a thick shelled mussel from the Mississippi river. It takes about 18 months for the pearl to develop and then it is removed and another piece of shell is implanted. An oyster can produce four pearl before it is too old and then it is eaten!

We were given papaya, coconut and delicious bananas to eat and then returned to the port and the ship.

While we were touring, the ship was setting up a picnic lunch on its own private motu, an island in the barrier reef. We put on our suits and went back to Deck 3 and got on the tender once again and took a very wet ride to a beautiful island, surrounded with crystal clear water and full of coconut palms. We got there at the end of lunch service but managed to get hotdogs, salads and two very large coconuts with the tops hacked off and filled with pina coladas! We tried to find the others but we were being buffeted by trade winds and just settled down on two chaises with a wonderful view of the ship and Taha’a. We walked around the motu and finally ran into Hilary, Ann and Arnie. Hil and I swam, without our snorkels but saw wonderful corals and large black sea urchins.

The water temperature was 84 degrees! We took the tender back to the ship, cleaned up and went up to the pool bar for Tequila Sunrises, listened to a very good rock band and watched as the ship set sail for Bora Bora.