Sunday 23 April ~ Happy St George’s Day! 🏴
It rained all night but we didn’t get the massive storm that was predicted so when we were called at 8 am we confirmed we were joining the tour. It immediately lashed it down 😆. Armed with a change of clothes and an umbrella we headed off just as it stopped raining and we’re picked up by Heiura, one of the waitresses from the Yacht Club (who recognised us! 🍹🍻) – we had a chat later and she has three jobs. Just like living on Stewart Island or in the Hebrides; it’s the way of survival in the isles.
There were four others with us – all French – and we set off around the island. You can follow us on the map above!
Our first stop was next to the Yacht Club which clearly we already know very well! We took a ‘beginning of the tour’ photo.
We then headed north to Lake Fauna Nui (also known as Lake Maeva) which is in fact an inlet from the sea. We went to a vanilla plantation (I didn’t take any photos) and learned all about how they make vanilla. It smelt very pleasant but we got bitten a lot. 🦟
We continued to Maeva which is a really important place for all Polynesians who used to come and bring tributes in the form of a rock from their own island to place on the marais which are sacred temples / meeting places, etc. There are about 300 around Maeva (dating back 850 to 1,500 years) which shows how important the area was – about 30 have been restored.
We learned about their legends and history, how Miro cut the original Huahine island into two with his canoe, that there are three other gods Taʻaroa, Tane and Tu but Huahine is special in Polynesia as it’s the island of women (that’s the translation). The last human sacrifice was in 1875. They only sacrificed people from other islands and only then to ensure success in war with other islands, particularly Tahiti apparently …She assured us that they had not been cannibals, despite what other islands might say about them 😳!
We moved on to see local fish traps, no nets, just clever use of rocks – the setting was stunning. Only people from that village can have the fish, people from other villages can ask nicely ahead of time and if there’s surplus from the village requirements then they can buy them. I like that. It’s not about making a buck but feeding your people.
Next stop was at Faie to see the sacred (and rare) blue-eyed eels. They have been habituated to humans for hundreds of years. They are 1.5 – 2m long and live in small caves and holes under the bridge and come out to feed in the fresh waters of the river. Locals and tourists often feed them with bits of fish. Unfortunately we didn’t see their eyes so I’ve taken a picture from the internet. The other picture is mine. We didn’t get close so all we saw were bodies swarming underwater but at least I got a head shot, just about.
We headed inland across the mountains towards Bay Maroe, went through jungle, stopped and took some pictures and ate the most deliciously sweet grapefruit whilst Heiura made us all Hakus out of palm leaves. Fantastic!
Then it was down to the bridge, across to Huahine Iti (meaning small) and sadly we said farewell to Heiura before getting onto a boat with I’m quite a few other people and off we went on the sea part of the tour. We had our own ukulele player keeping us entertained with traditional tunes. You can see him at the back.
We had an average (not much to see) fairly swift snorkel in Maroe Bay and saw a rock that represents part of the god Miro that he left behind to apologise to Huahine for cutting their island in two. I won’t say which bit. It’s in the photo above.
We then went to Motu Murimaroa for lunch which was yummy. Here we are coming up to it, not sure why I didn’t take any pictures whilst on it! We chilled there for a while.
After another half hour on the boat we had a fantastic snorkel near Haapu. We couldn’t believe how many fish there were, how many different types, how colourful the coral was and how clear the water was – Craig said it was much much better than the diving!
As we headed back to Fare after a great seven hours the heavens completely opened so Captain conveniently dropped us off at the Yacht club pontoon and we ran it, soaked through in seconds. Apart from a few drops of rain during the first snorkel it had held off all day so we were really lucky. I changed into dry clothes and we had a couple of drinks. The sun came out accompanied by a rainbow then there was a bit of a sunset so we took one last photo of us at the Yacht Club and said thank you and farewell as it was our last visit there.
We headed home, had a mish mash dinner consisting mainly of cheese and baguette (nothing wrong with that!) and we’ll have a fairly early night as we leave at 10am tomorrow for the airport and Bora Bora.
We’ve loved this island, the people, the chilled vibe, the sense of community, the views, the Yacht Club… 😆 We’re really glad this was our first island. Hopefully we’ll love the others too. Probably for very different reasons as we have a feeling that Huahine is a very unique special (and still quite un-touristy) place. 💜🍹🌅🏝️🐡
💃🏼🪩 MORNING DISCO 🪩 🕺
When Heiura was telling us her name she said the best way to remember it was to sing the song ‘Hey Ya’ by OutKast. It’s another tune we used to play on Lego Band Hero with Hannah, Jake, Evan and Cassie so I’m very happy to play it as it now has two great memories attached to it. I cannot believe this song is 20 years old! It’s from 2003. I still think of it as being fairly recent but I guess it is in comparison to most of the songs I play 😆.
Saturday 22 April
It was our first day without the need for an alarm in quite a while. Nice. Once the rain gave up we headed into town, chatted to our dive gang who were hosting an Italian TV crew for two days; they were filming underwater stuff for a documentary about FP. Hopefully we can find and watch it when it’s ready. We had lunch at a great food truck and bought a couple of things in the supermarket in case we’re housebound tomorrow as a storm is forecast…Here’s the food truck eating area; totally delightful! It’s right next to the sea (the next picture shows our lunchtime view).
We met some chickens on the way home. I mention this for two reasons. One, I’ve been taking chicken pics which my niece Hannah has particularly enjoyed! Here she is Han – Mme Huahine avec les petites!
Secondly, you can’t buy eggs here. Unless you order a burger with an extra egg. None in the supermarkets, none on the market stalls, none on menus. I mentioned this to Carina and she said that very occasionally one lady in the market has a few eggs to sell but they’re gone within a few seconds of her setting up stall. I find it very interesting that eggs are reserved for burgers in the restaurants! There is also no chicken on any menu we’ve seen. I’m sure it’ll be different in Bora Bora where everything you might possibly want will be available at an exorbitant price. This one looked very happy with her chicks. Long may she remain off a menu.
When we returned home it rained a bit but not much so Craig went out with Dronie (unfortunately he didn’t get to use it) and I did some washing. Woohoo! At one stage I got a massive shock. Our garden is completely enclosed once the gate is shut. So how did this big beast get in?! 🤔
He seemed perfectly at home and I was very intrigued as to how he’d managed it so I messaged the owner asking if it was his dog. As soon as I pressed send he got up, marked his territory a few times and disappeared! Bernard messaged me back to say it was his dog and he’d just found a massive hole under the fence where the cheeky one had clearly got through 😆.
We met up on the beach near the posh hotel. We as in me and Craig as opposed to me and Bernard’s dog!
There were two puppies playing next to us for a while; clearly the dogs wanted to be near me today! I took a pic as they wandered off in search of food.
After a while it looked like we were actually going to get a sunset so Craig went in to the hotel bar to get us a drink and we sat on our beach towels (thank you Phil, Matt and Evan!) to watch it.
I took these palm pictures on the short walk home from the beach – new moon!
We ate at home this evening. Craig’s not feeling 100% so he’s in bed early trying to sleep and I hope he’ll feel better tomorrow. The tour guide is calling me at 8am to confirm if the weather is good enough to go on our island sightseeing trip. The storm is due any time now but the forecast looks much better then it did when I looked a few hours ago – ie start raining / storm at 10 pm now on Saturday night, finish raining at lunchtime Monday! If it’s safe we’re going! We’d really love to see more of the island than Fare. We did try today once we saw the rainy forecast for the next day or two – Craig called the two hire companies on the island; both closed. Fingers crossed for tomorrow!
💃🏼🪩 MORNING DISCO 🪩 🕺
In honour of our first – and pretty good I’d say – sunset here’s the great Level 42 with the brilliant song that made me fall for them, ‘The Sun Goes Down (Livin It Up)’ (1983). I just noticed – they must be friends with Tom Petty as they don’t seem to be fans of the letter ‘g’ either! Saw them twice in the 80’s, not seen them since despite the fact they have played a couple of Let’s Rock dates. Unfortunately not ones I could get to. Maybe one day… Mark King is always my bassist in my dream band line up. Always. I hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane and I hope you enjoy a beautiful sunset somewhere soon.
Thursday 20 ~ Friday 21 April
I’m apologising in advance for the lack of photos. I didn’t take my phone diving (clearly) and it was dark when we went out for dinner both nights.
I wasn’t sure how I’d be with the diving. I’d emailed ahead to let Carina at Pacific Blue Adventures know about my foot and she assured me they’d do everything they could to help me and make sure we had a great experience. We turned up at 8.30 am (this is late for morning diving so we knew we were with a chilled crew!), completed our paperwork and suited up. We got on the small boat with three other people and headed off…
Here’s a pic of us on our way (from Craig’s phone).
Despite there being horrendous swell on the surface which meant it took ages and a real struggle to get back onto the boat afterwards the dive itself was great. Chilled, easy, calm. The visibility wasn’t amazing but there was plenty to see close up so that didn’t matter. We headed back to shore for our surface interval, ate some tiny sweet delicious bananas, had a good rest and realised we were alone with Jordon our dive master for the next dive. He gave us a choice of three dives. Craig let me choose. I chose one where the boat didn’t leave the mooring on the harbour! We simply walked onto the boat, suited up, fell backwards into the ocean and dived. I’d chosen the harbour walls and pier so we could do some muck diving. There’s all sorts of tiny unusual creatures in the muck on the harbour floor (I know it sounds disgusting but the dive was magical) and on the coral that grows on the pillars. My favourites are nudibranchs which are colourful soft mollusks that are usually pretty small, there are loads of different ones, I’ve found two online I saw on the dive but I saw over 40!
So beautiful. We saw lots of tiny things plus two octopus; one was swallowing a massive fish it has just caught. I tried not to watch him for too long as no one likes being stared at by a stranger whilst eating!
A great day of diving and my foot was fine, hoorah! We were back by 2pm, chilled a bit then headed out for happy hour (my one drink from the limited choice was a very strong mai tai, no wonder it’s restricted to one!) and an early dinner before properly catching up on our sleep.
The next day we dived three times! The first was a relaxing deep dive through archways with a shark or two and plenty of coral alive with fish. The second dive was entirely different. Thank goodness Jordan knew I might need help.
He took five of us to Avapehi pass, it’s the dive that divers come to Huahine for. On a good say it’s a fairly pleasant dive but you can only do it under certain conditions and we were at the very edge of those…We had very poor visibility, the current was so strong we had to basically crawl as close to the bottom as possible for a couple of metres, let go, be flung a few metres by the current, try and grab onto something (without damaging coral) on the floor, hold on, fight the current, try not to panic or think “I could be flung miles away by this scary current”. Wow. I kept myself calm and managed on my own for ages but it was tough going. Imagine swimming into a blizzard. Craig had to drag me along at one point and then Jordan grabbed me and took me the last few metres to the edge of the pass where the five of us hung on for dear life! A few sharks flew by us very quickly which we could hardly see in the gloom so Jordan decided to call it a day as two of the divers were quickly running out of air. We let go and flew off quickly then we were away from the current and could slowly ascended to the surface. As we did so I saw the most ginormous trigger fish on the bottom, thankfully about ten metres below me; they’re vicious aggressive territorial buggars who regularly attack and seriously hurt divers. Here’s one…not pretty at all!
I’d describe the dive as an exhilarating struggle! It was a good work out for my legs and lungs. This is cheating but apparently this is what the pass looks like on a good day…
Ha! Not quite the experience we had. Not to worry, we’re diving a lot in FP including at three more passes so I’m sure we’ll see stuff then.
We had a two hour break and were assured the final dive would be a relaxed lagoon experience. It was like swimming in an aquarium. Good visibility and tons of sea-life clustered around coral bommies (outcrops of coral reef, often resembling a column, that is higher than the surrounding platform of reef). Amongst all the tiny colourful fish I saw an unusual lizard fish nestled in a mini cave, a magnificent lion fish and a mini conga eel. Definitely not my photos!
We saw a massive puffer fish and a few of my my favourites… tiny gorgeous box fish – I saw both these types.
Craig and I held hands for a while as we always do on our last dive somewhere. Usually he’s off a few metres below, above, behind or in front of me on his go pro taking pictures so we like to take a moment to share the experience. 🧜🏼♀️🧜🏼♂️ 🐡
It was a perfect dive to say farewell to underwater Huahine.
We went home, showered and went back to the Yacht Club for happy hour and dinner. There was a local band playing (Friday night!) and the place was packed. Our timing was good though as a couple left just as we arrived so we had a table by the ocean. The cloud cover meant we couldn’t see a sunset, in fact we hadn’t seen one since we arrived. I started to wonder if it had sunsets! About five minutes after we’d finished eating it stated to rain very heavily. Everyone crowded inside together, it was a great atmosphere. I could hear some people saying that they were leaving when there was a break in the rain as it was due to rain even harder later. We followed suit and made our way through puddles to get home. We’d been back about an hour when it really began. A proper tropical thunderstorm which lasted until just after 10 am the next day and there’s more forecast. I knew we’d get some as it’s the wet season for another couple of weeks but we couldn’t make the trip later as Craig needs to be back at work early June. It all adds to the adventure!
💃🏼🪩 MORNING DISCO 🪩 🕺
I’ve chosen a song I don’t really know very well but I often sing one line from it (in my head) whilst diving: “this must be underwater love”. I’ve just found another apt couple of lines of lyrics from the song too – “After the rain comes sun, After the sun comes rain again”.
It’s pretty groovy! It’s ‘Underwater Love’ (1995) by Smoke City and is categorised as trip hop acid jazz bossa nova. Wowsers. 😳
Wednesday 19 April
We time travelled today!
We left Auckland at 7.10 pm and arrived in Tahiti at 1.50 am 17.5 hours before we took off! We’ll be sacrificing a day on the return journey…
So, this bit wasn’t planned very well. By me. Shocking I know. I wanted to get a direct flight from Tahiti to Huahine on the day we arrived and the only one was at 7am. Not too bad I thought; five hours in the airport until we take off. It was hot! So different from NZ which had been lovely at 20 degrees – this was 28 (at 2am!) with 80% humidity so very different. Craig had a snooze and I read my kindle. I took some money out and as soon as the airport started coming to life at 4.30 am we bought an FP (I’m not going to write French Polynesia every time!) sim for Craig’s phone, a coffee and a Chocolat chaud. We then checked in and got on our 45 minute flight which was nice and easy. Arrived and were out of the tiny airport with our bags within three minutes (a new record). Our pre-booked driver collected us. So far so good. I’d been awake for 23 hours at this point. He took us next door to where we’re staying, to where the owners lived. We arrived at 8am. They explained they needed to go out but we could leave our stuff until next door was ready so we awkwardly tried to quickly put shorts on and change our tops in their garden! We set off too quickly with just one towel, some suncream and my handbag. It was all a bit rushed. They promised to call when our house was ready – hopefully before 2pm. It turned out to be 1.55 pm.
We were hot, tired and disoriented and spent much of the next six hours trying to stay out of the sun. We went to say hello to our dive crew, had a soft drink at The Yacht Club and charmed our way into the bar of a posh hotel and bought another soft drink each that we stretched to an hour and 40 minutes! The only shade on the beach was under a tree swarming with ants. We sat there for 45 minutes; my legs are covered in bites. If we’d been less rushed leaving their place it would have been absolutely fine but we were unprepared for the temperature change (over 30 in the day) which floored us and we were exhausted! Regardless, we were greeted by absolute beauty!
That black dot in the water above is not a seal, it’s a dog!! Hopefully you can see him in this close up.
The Huahine Yacht Club that we stopped at has since become our ‘local’. Here it is below.
Here’s our first beer!
We eventually got into our lovely two bedroom home. It’s the only place in FP that we’ve got our own place. It’s great. We decided to try and stay awake and eat at a sensible time so we could acclimatise quickly as we were diving the next day. We had a lovely dinner at the Yacht Club, found out for the next day that happy hour is between 5-6 pm which we’d been too late for and you’re allowed one drink each! Went to bed and slept for seven hours.
A bit about Huahine…
Locals pronounce it as “Hoo-a-he-nay” (as do we) and the French call it “Wa-e-nee”. Either way you have to speak some French to get around here as not everyone speaks English. I like that. All you can hear is French everywhere interspersed with Polynesian. Fab.
It’s one of the lesser known and less visited Society Islands, which include the more famous Tahiti and Bora Bora. I wanted us to experience different islands whilst we are here and this one looked stunning, quiet and had good diving. It’s really two islands connected by a bridge and they’re quite different from each other. We’re on the northerly one – from here the southern one looks extremely hilly and typifies what I thought a Polynesian island would look like. We have a tour booked for Sunday that will take us around both by land and sea. Scattered across the island are over 200 ancient Polynesian temples, dozens of which have been excavated and restored. Known as marae, the largest concentration is found around the village of Maeva. We’re staying in Fare the “capital”, a small town with the most enormous supermarket I’ve seen in months! Supermarkets aside it’s your basic paradise – beautiful scenery, beaches, jungles, ruins, lagoons, and volcanoes, along with friendly locals all of whom greet you as you walk down the street. A great start to our Polynesian adventure. Oh, and our place is called Fare Kahaia which means Home of the Kahaia tree; it’s flowers look and smell beautiful – I’m wearing one I found under our tree in the picture on the home page updates.
💃🏼🪩 MORNING DISCO 🪩 🕺
I’ll run out of songs with paradise or heaven in them soon enough but as I’ve not started yet here’s a great one to start with; Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven is a Place On Earth (1987).
Lizzie and I saw her at what was then the Hammersmith Odeon in 1988. We had a great time – we were on the very back row and got told off for dancing on our seats! How can you not dance to Belinda’s songs?! Rude. I didn’t see her again until my first Let’s Rock with Phil in 2016. She didn’t seem to have aged much and her voice was great.