Jen and Jerry's Excellent Adventure

  Raiatea Second in territory only to Tahiti, this green island has towering mountains the tops of some we didn’t see.   Clouds lazily hovered over them and sometimes provided cloud cover for us.   Today we took a tour offered through the cruise ship, so we were with 28 others, this time on a giant motorized outrigger canoe.   At the bottom of the gangway we were met by musicians as we have been at every island so far and another costumed native handing out the national flower of French Polynesia the Tiare flower or Tahitian Gardenia.  This group had a youngster too cute to not take a picture of.   Our tour guide was barefoot, clothed only in a wrap to his thigh, tattooed everywhere except half of his face, had his hair pulled back and gathered with a leafy tie.   He welcomed us as we disembarked the boat with a horn and a conch shell—both instruments he blew into and whose sound resonated for miles.   The huge conch shell turns out to be a...

  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.   (Se...

  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...

  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....

  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 ri...

·     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...

  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 t...