We spent the night moored up in Tahiti and then left at 5.30am for the island of Moorea which is only 15k away. We were advised to get up early as the sail into Moorea was meant to be worth the early rise.
Not too sure if Fras felt like that!!!
We were rewarded with a lovely sunrise and……
with this gorgeous, intense rainbow as we sailed past the island of Moorea.
This was our reward which was fabulous. We managed to find our way onto the very front of the ship which is usually secured. We think maybe they opened it up specially for this arrival but very few people took up the opportunity to make it down.
We found where the ships spare anchor is kept and….
the ships bell. We have confirmed age of the ship of 1993 so that makes her 26 and she is looking her age a bit but it is a great size ship if you are ever going to do a cruise.
Very rarely do you ever to get take a shot like this looking back up towards the bridge. As we had some spare time to fill in, we did a wander around and thought might be nice to take a few shots of the ship.
This is Deck 6 which is also the Promenade deck. Four times around equals one mile and at times is a very busy place. It tends to also be where they have the life boats and the tender boats.
Because the islands are so small with little infrastructure, we often have to tender in. We are not sure, but a lot of people seem to winge about tendering in. At the most it takes maybe 25 minutes which considering how long you have at port is nothing. It annoys us in that some people just want to find something to winge about.
So we had a tour arranged which as far as we knew was just snorkeling on the coral but it turned out that it included the stingrays and sharks again. This time there were a lot more!!!
The tour operators have given names to the stingrays and they showed us Wendy who was with pup. The guide was feeding them so of course they were following him and flapping up against him for more food.
As to the sharks. This time there was a plethora of them and they were circling around everybody with menace, or so Di thought – even Fras did not appear that comfortable. Di needs to honest up now and admit that she did not get in the water during this part of the trip. It was good though just to watch from the boat and see everyone’s reaction if they were surprised by a ray coming up behind them and touching them. It is true, you can walk on water.
On completion of our snorkel trIp, we went back on the boat and had lunch and a shower and then went back out to have a look around the rest of Moorea. Unfortunately the clouds had socked in the mountains otherwise we were going to hire a taxi and head up to the Belvedere lookout where you could get spectacular photos of the vista.
Instead we went for a walk and found this chap selling coconuts for $2US so had our first fresh coconut. The liquid is almost clear and we found very filling. He then opened up the coconut for us and we got to eat the pulp. When you eat the pulp of a fresh coconut, it is soft and almost like a jelly – the texture takes a bit of getting use to.
We made our way back to the ship and then got the fun job of doing our washing. These laundry’s on board such long cruises are a godsend. We spent the rest of the evening listening to a few talks and then couldn’t keep our eyes open enough to finish watching the movie Moana.
We convinced our room steward not to put chocolate in our room each evening as we didn’t like the waste of throwing it out and we wanted to reduce the temptation- we think he thought us a bit strange. So tonight we have a squid – 13/13. This means we are half way through the cruise.
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