Jen and Jerry's Excellent Adventure

  Mo’ore’a Jen writes: Our ship anchored in Cook’s Bay (but we later learned that Cook never used this particular bay…rather the NEXT one over) This neighboring island to Tahiti is 18 miles by sea and takes almost 3 hours to navigate by ship.   We arrived at 8:00 am and enjoyed seeing volcanic mountains covered in greenery.   This island has more of the grass covered huts—predominantly on resorts as bungalows.   We took the second tender on to shore and waited and watched for about 10 minutes for our tour to arrive in a safari-type truck.   Pierre greeted us and introduced us to the two already in the back—a couple from the Seattle area who are in the islands for about 11 days for her birthday.   Pierre is a native to the island, learned his English by staying in New Zealand for two years, studying tourism.   He proudly drove us ahead of the tourist rush to the two main viewpoints on the island:   Magic Mountain and Belvedere Point.   (See photos)   The main road was in really good

  Tahiti Jen here: What picture forms as you think about Tahiti?   For me, I had pictured exotic flower- or leaf-based hair accessories, lots of music and dancing, lush greenery heavily blanketing the volcanic formations, and a small island “hakuna matata” atmosphere. My stereotypes are being upgraded.   The humidity and heat drenched us first.  (Yes, Iowa competes with this…but, sadly, not in late January.) Our ship docked on the pier of Tahiti’s metropolitan capital city of Papeete (pah pay EH tay).  A half dozen large cranes and stacks of containers dominate the shoreline to our left and the four-lane highway scurries small cars and scooters ahead and to the right as the greenery softens the ever-expanding business district.  We can walk less than a block from the ship and be immersed in local artisans selling everything possible made from sea shells, thumb through colorful fabrics whipping in the wind, and watch as they plait dried leaves into baskets, hats, and other des

  Rangiroa, French Polynesia The dictionary definition of an atoll is a ring-shaped reef, island, or chain of islands formed of coral.   Use Google Earth to get a sense of this unique structure that is Rangiroa. Rangiroa actually means "immense sky" in the local language.   Rangiroa is quite possibly the world's most immense natural aquarium, the largest of the Tuamotu Atolls and the second largest in the world.   If you want to see a place that is going to be impacted by global warming causing a rise in sea level, this is one of those places.  If sea level rises five or six feet, there will be nothing left. We had signed on to a tour of Reef Island, but the night before we arrived we were sent a message on e-mail that it was cancelled since we were the only two people who signed up.   They offered us an excursion to the Green Lagoon which was definitely going so we said yes.   The ship anchored and we found ourselves on the first tender ashore.   We were early for

  French Polynesia First, I strongly recommend that you watch—or re-watch Moana, the animation that features Disney’s   colorful depiction of Polynesian people, Polynesian myths, and of course the Polynesian greenery and aquamarine water.   Fans of Lin-Manuel Miranda will enjoy the music.   Upon researching this, I found that Moana Part 2 is in the works.   Go figure. Second, some items about French Polynesia found on a National Geographic website ( 5 Things You Didn't Know About French Polynesia): ·         The tiare apetahi, a rare version of the tiare flower (or Tahitian gardenia) only grows in one place on the entire planet: Mount Temehani on the island of Ra'iatea. The national flower is used in leis for greeting family and visitors, and many locals wear them behind their ear. Keep an eye on which side the flower appears: Tradition is to wear it on the left side if the wearer is in a relationship, and on the right if they’re single.   ·         In a drive around T

·     Catholic Church near a river which has sweetwater shrimp and eels. The church opened 1995.   This is the Marquesan cross used throughout the French Polynesian Islands.   Musical instruments in church are a conga drum (using skin of cow now; long ago made from shark skin, stingray skin or human skin), guitar and ukulele.  St. Joseph (with baby Jesus near) holds an adz because he was a carpenter.  The pulpit with the face of Jesus is made from  terminalia glabrata, a type of tree. Madonna and child is made from hibiscus wood.  Jesus holds a breadfruit since he is the Bread of Life.  (breadfruit is a staple in their diet that, like a potato, can be mashed, fried, au gratin, etc. and lasts for months).  Driving back into the capital, we toured the Catholic cathedral, whose entrance was built in the 1850s and the outside of the cathedral, opened in 1975 with stones from all of the Marquesan islands.  In the back yard is a statue of the missionary from France who later became bishop of

  Thursday, Jan. 20, 2022 Jen here: We have one day—a partial day—on the Big Island on the coast of Kona (the coffee comes from here).   Some passengers disembarked as soon as we landed at 7 this morning, to get out on tours to see the Volcano National Park or take an historic tour of the nearby village.   Jerry and I had scheduled a whale watching tour (with a group not through the ship’s tours) for the early afternoon, discovered it was to get back to shore at the same time as the final tender* was to return to the ship. We warned the ship of a possible delay then hiked off to find the company on land and see if we could negotiate a possibility that wouldn’t cause us to miss the tender and thus the ship.   Nope.    They were sympathetic to our timing, but already had 83 others booked.   They refunded our money.   We chatted a while and learned that ours was only the second cruise ship they’d seen in two years.    As we wandered the shops along the coast, it was apparent that Co

Today had an ominous start to it.   The ship was sitting at anchor just off the island of Maui, just like it was supposed to be.   The cruise director came on the intercom as expected but the announcement was surprising.   The port authority which is in charge of the ship operations while in port, in this case our first tender port where the ship is anchored offshore and uses its lifeboats to move passengers between the ship and shore, was not ready for our arrival.   It was expected to be a couple of hours before they would actually be able to accommodate us.   We decided to eat breakfast in the dining room since we were in no hurry as the tenders would start by removing people who were signed up for ship tours first.   We saw whales from our breakfast seat.   I went to the deck to do some phone checking and found passengers were abuzz trying to figure out how the delay could possibly have happened.   (answer to this later) Something was definitely up according to these passenger sleu

 The clouds were heavy on the island of Kauai as we left for Waimea Canyon, often called the Grand Canyon of Hawaii.  We found the turnoff to the canyon and joined a line of cars which was soon bumper to bumper crawling up the narrow road in pea soup fog.  The road continued to rise and if anything the fog got heavier.  We twisted and turned slowing to a near crawl of ten miles an hour, not having a clue how far we had to go, not having any idea of what was beyond the edge of the road, not having any idea of the path the road ahead would follow.  Our only awareness in the fog was the bumper of the car a few feet in front of us.  The bumper led us to a parking area where people were parking so we did the same.  We joined the rest of the visitors in a forlorn walk towards a purported overlook.  It was less than 100 yards to the overlook according to people returning so we went too.  We reached a barrier and looked out our ten feet or so, saw nothing but white, and returned to the car.  W

 Jen here on Monday, January 17, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Many of you have a vacation day today and some time in the snow.   Enjoy.   Our morning began by lazy-ing in bed and turning on the TV to watch the ship dock in Kaua’i on a brilliantly colorful day.   I ran up on deck and made a few phone calls—we’re 4 hours behind Central Standard Time, then off to breakfast on another deck.   Imagine our delight when we saw a humpback whale in the distance cavorting and blowing and staying close to the surface.   In these winter months, they are known to congregate in these Hawaiian waters.   We will take a whale watching tour ourselves in a couple days.   Stay tuned. Today we are on the island Maui and we will return to this island in two days but on the other side. For today, we had not scheduled a formal tour, so we waited a while before disembarking, using the computer to find maps and some ideas for walking or hiring Uber.   For the past several weeks we had been kicking ourselve

  As planned we awoke about 5:00 AM Sunday to walk to our tour’s pick-up point an hour away.   Everything went as expected.   We arrived at the MacDonalds across the street from the pick-up point a little earlier than expected so we decided to eat inside.   I’m sure you are all wondering why we would eat at Macky D’s when we have all the food in the world available.   Can you say timing?   Earliest available breakfast aboard ship is 6:30. That would not work at all no matter how we chose to get to the tour.   Why did we walk?   It was EARLY Sunday morning.   Do we want to rely on a taxi or an Uber to be available when we need it at 6:30 on Sunday morning?   If they don’t happen to be around at that time what will we do if we leave with too little time to walk it?   No doubt that would lead to a lot of stress if we were relying on the unknown.   Easier and less stressful to just take care of it ourselves.     To eat inside of the fast food restaurant, we had to show our vaccine cards.  

  We turned the tv on at about 5:30 am, Saturday, and left it on the ship camera so we could see the sun come up and also see when we came in sight of the lights of Hawaii.   Couldn’t see much until 6:30 when we could see some lights in the distance.   Beautiful sunny morning as we approached Honolulu.   Turning to the news, imagine our surprise when the first thing we heard was that Hawaii was under a tsunami alert.   Welcome to the watery world of islands.   Quite a different warning that all our Midwest friends are experiencing today with a foot or more of snow.   Turned out to be nothing here, but it was an interesting way to wake up.   We arrived at Honolulu on time and were cleared to go ashore by about 8:30.   We were supposed to take our cruise cards, government picture ID, and our individual QR codes which were sent to us after we filled out special forms online which are required by the state because of Covid.   The form was a way for us to request an exemption from quarantin