Salut a tous!!!

After a great stay on Easter Island it was time to move on again. A real goodbye to the Spanish speaking world! A short flight brought us to a new world: French Polynesia (FP), simply THE dream destination and our first impression was...that it sucked!! Papeete, FP's capital, is horrendously ugly. The Japanese in WWII bombed it and the French did not do a good job rebuilding it. Another thing that struck us immediately was that it was ridiculously expensive. We knew it would be expensive, but prices just beat our wildest expectations, like we have never seen anywhere in the world (and yes, we are Dutch!)! The common argument is that it is so expensive because it is so remote.... We did not buy that argument, as we have been to many remote places in the world where prices were maybe 50% to 80% less than the ones in FP. No, the main reason for it being so expensive is that the economy is very much supported by France. Salaries for the municipal employees (accounting for 30-40% of the workforce) are equal to the ones paid in France with the difference that people do not pay income taxes in FP, resulting in very high net disposable incomes and consequently high prices. Wow, how's that for an economic analysis...are you bored yet?...;-)

Anyway, we immediately felt it in our wallet. Our first taxi ride from the airport to our hotel of around 7 minutes cost us more than 30 euros while we were used to pay max 3 euro taxirides in all of South America. The first two nights we stayed in a place called Teamo Hostel (http://chez.mana.pf/~tahitihostel/en_situation.htm), the only real low budget hostel in Papeete. We ended up in dorm paying 40 euros for the night while a comparable dorm room would have cost us maybe 15 euros in South America!! Initially, we intended to stay a few days in Papeete but after only one night in the very hot and very smelly dorm (Yuk, yuk, yuk!!! There was this guy with the most terrible body odour ever - and he did take 2-3 showers a day!!!!), we decided we had had enough of it and would leave as soon as possible!! But first we had to change our mind set. If you really want to enjoy FP you have to accept the fact that you will spend an awful lot of money, no matter what. So we swallowed hard and deeply a few times (we actually thought about leaving FP immediately and travel on to Fiji...), checked our savings several times and decided that we would double our intended budget for the four weeks we were going to spend there. That actually took a big burden off our backs and made planning our trip a lot easier (it's funny how the mind works, ey?).

The other thing that struck us in Papeete was the limited opening hours. It was sheer impossible to find anything to eat after 8 o'clock in this freaking town.... On the first night we ended up getting take-away pizza and we still had to wait more than 45 minutes for that. All shops start closing at 5 o'clock during weekdays and roughly everything is closed during the weekend. We really missed South America where almost every other person would run a little shop on the street, keeping the city up and running well after midnight!

There are two ways to travel to the different islands of FP. You can either take a boat or go by plane. Of course taking a plane is way more expensive. However, you have to keep in mind that FP is about the size of the whole of Europe (including the now bankrupt states of Eastern Europe)...so going by boat is not really an option unless you intend to spend a couple of days each time in cockroach infested bunkbeds...which just is not our idea of a holiday! After concluding that planes were our means of transportation, we had to set our itinerary. This turned out to be pretty easy. Visiting FP without passing through the well-known paradise islands of Moorea and Bora Bora is simply unthinkable. Furthermore as a diver you can not take yourself serious anymore if you haven't been to Tikehau, Rangiroa and Fakarava. So our choices had been made. It is actually rather simple to travel around FP as Air Tahiti offers so called air-passes (we got the red Bora-Tuamotu Pass), which gives you the possibility to fly to all these islands on one pass at a significantly reduced price in comparison to booking just one way tickets.

The following morning we got up to fly to Moorea, the bounty Islands where the actual Bounty and its crew spend a couple of years after the mutiny...It was going to be our shortest flight ever, circa 5 minutes from Papeete in a twin otter (6 seated tiny little cute aeroplane) to the airport on Moorea. We sat behind the open cockpit and witnessed how the captain landed the plane with just only one hand on the steering wheel...whuaaaahhh!!! From the plane we got a brief glimpse of what Moorea actually has to offer: beautiful bays, high mountains covered in forest and lush vegetation surrounded by the bluest of blue water!

Unfortunately it was the rainy season, so shortly after our arrival, it started to rain and the island turned into something quite different: misty bays, high mountains hidden behind grey clouds and a hint of forest through the heavy rain. Mmmm, this was not what we signed up for! Fortunately, we had quite a nice apartment in a place called Albert's Motel in Cooks Bay (http://ile-tropicale.com/motelalbert/us-presentation.html), which although a bit old and up for a makeover offered great value for money. As it continued to rain for almost 4 consecutive days, we ended up spending a lot of time here...

Albert's Motel is the also place where we had the now infamous 'Cockroach Incident'. It goes as follows. During our second night in Moorea and after a day of just rain, the sky got greyer and the rain showers intensified to a point where we thought that we would never ever leave our little apartment. We were actually praying that a big landslide would not erase our bungalow from the face of the earth... However, as morning came, we woke up to a little drizzle, giving us the opportunity to go out and to discover the island. Mischa stepped into the shower (not wearing her flip-flops or glasses - normally, she is not completely at her qui-vive in the morning) and turned on the tab when suddenly....everything around her began to move. We found out that around 50 cockroaches in different sizes had crawled up the sewer pipe into our shower, probably because the rainwater flooded the sewage and forced them to do so. Of course, total pandemonium broke out!! She started screaming and shouting and calling her hero (this is of course Thomas), who also started screaming and shouting like a little baby. We went for the insect repellent and tried to kill the nasty bugs, but only managed to get them even more energised. In fact, they were crawling up the shower curtain and out of the shower basin, running into the room at this stage. So there was only one thing to do: kill them, kill them all, one by one with our Havaiana's flip-flops!! It was quite a spectacle, we kept banging away for ten minutes or so trying to get them, running frantically after them all across our apartment, shouting 'no, no, no!!!'. In the end we got them all but we both ended up with a severe posttraumatic stress syndrome.

This of course had only one cure: diving! Moorea itself is not very interesting for divers. The corals are basically dead and the water is polluted by the silt that is washed down from the island thanks to erosion caused by deforestation and palm plantations. However there is one great lure and that is that dive centres conduct shark feeding. Now you can have all kinds of moral issues regarding shark feeding (with which we of course totally agree!), however it does attract sharks and is just good old fashioned FUN! We actually found a diving operation that does not feed sharks, but as the animals are so accustomed to being fed, they will respond to the sound of the boat engine and approach divers the moment you hit the water. In this particular case they were Lemonsharks. Pretty big dangerous looking bastards, which swam around us during the whole dive. Lots of fun!!

While on Moorea, we also noticed that the financial crisis had hit home. In fact, two huge hotels in Cooks Bay (The Holiday Inn and Club Med) closed down due to an immense slow down in tourism. Many locals told us that if nobody would buy these hotels that they would inevitably run into financial trouble. Everybody was very concerned about the future. Obviously, FP has a marketing problem since almost all the tourists that we encountered on the islands were French! No Americans, no English, hardly any Germans (which you normally see everywhere), almost no Dutch (quite unique since Dutch tourists are infesting the world all over), no Italians...no, only French! Of course that does not work in these times of crisis and it gave us the idea that we probably had some bargaining power, which would help us talk down prices of the hostels we would be staying at. And with success, we negotiated quite a bit in the weeks thereafter getting 10-20% or sometimes 40% of the offered prices anywhere we went. The fact that Thomas is almost fluent in French did help, since almost no-one speaks good English and everything had to be organised by telephone given that internet is nearly non-existent and again ridiculously expensive in French Polynesia...

Our next stop was Bora Bora.

It is said that Bora Bora is the most beautiful island in the world. That's a lot of BS! However, the flight into Bora Bora is quite spectacular and from above it definitely looks awe-inspiring. The airport is on the outer ridge surrounding the island so you have take a 15 minute boat ride to the island itself. Most hotels are located on Matira Point. This is also the spot where all those famous photos and films of Bora Bora are shot. And although it always looks great in those shots when you are actually standing on the beach and walking around at Matira Point you may feel like you have been famously fooled. In fact, there are hotels and hostels on every stretch of beach around you and there is really nothing, nothing, nothing idyllic about the place. It's basically packed to the brim. Furthermore, the streets are filled with stray dogs which will seriously harass you all the time making you mad with anger and annoyance. Thomas got attacked by two stray dogs from behind and they almost ripped his T-shirt from his hunky chest. Really scary! Luckily, our hostel Pension Maeva - Chez Rosine Masson was absolutely fantastic. Right on the beach with its own little stretch of sand where you could relax or have your diner while watching the sunset. Just great!!

The weather turned out to be way better than on Moorea as well. Then again, as a side effect the place was infested with mosquitos with the picture below showing Mischa the morning after!

Stupidly enough we chose Bora Bora as the place were we would go onto the internet to buy a new camera with underwater case (so we could once again make all those beautiful underwater pictures - remember: our camera broke down in Ecuador!). In about a month time we would meet Marco and Nik in Sydney. So we had limited time to buy stuff and get it to them before they would leave Amsterdam. Bora Bora left us two options: 1. go to the nearest hotel and pay 20 euros for an hour of internet usage (about 1-2 dollars in South America... moan, moan!!) 2. rent a bike for a day and bike down to the main village at an hour drive to use the internet there at a price of around 15 euros per hour. We chose the latter as it would also give us the possibility to explore the island. However, internet in the village was soooo slow that we spend almost 3 hours just TRYING to buy a camera and an underwater case and eventually failed at it. Problems with the connection, our paypall account and the online sites we were using resorted in us just sending emails to the helpdesks and asking them how on earth we were going to get this done within the given timeframe! Frustrated we cycled home...The next day we went to the Marriot which had superfast internet and got everything sorted out in 30 minutes...grumble!!

After Bora Bora, we took a 1.5 hours flight to a little paradise island called Tikehau, with 300 inhabitants, in the Tuamotu Islands archipelago (no internet, banks, ATM or anything here!). Funnily enough, there were only 10 passengers on the twin turboprop aeroplane which can carry more than 50 normally and when we touched down on Tikehau, we were the only people getting off the plane. A bit of a strange idea to have an aeroplane land just for you!! We had booked a nice hostel called Pension Panau Lagon, where we had a beautiful little bungalow right on a stunning deserted beach.

The thing here was that we could only book half or full pension given that there is precisely one little shop on the whole island and no hostel or hotel offers kitchen facilities. Panau Lagon is were our negotiation tactics quite severely backfired. We were able to talk the price per person down from 75 euros per person per night to around 50 euros per person per night, not realising that this would result in them cutting down on the quality of the food, which SUCKED!!! On the other hand, we felt quite safe at Panau Lagon, given the fact that the 'father of the house' was the local police chief....

Tikehau is famous for its diving, so we quickly contacted the only diving operation on the island where the very friendly French divemaster Thierry booked us for the next day. The diving was ok, not great but still much better than on Moorea. Nice corals and lots of fish. This was also the first time that we came across a first glimpse of the French or CMAS way of diving. For example, the surface interval between the first and the second dive was only about 45 minutes, while Padi advises 1 hour or more. Later on we talked to divers that told us that their surface interval was only 30 minutes. Now this in itself is not necessarily more dangerous if you take the short surface interval into account during your second dive, but it just showed us that things were done just a little bit differently here. One of the main perks of diving with Thierry was that the dive school was actually located at the Tikehau Pearl Beach Resort (www.pearlresorts.com/tikehaupearlbeachresort/main.php), the best and most luxurious 5 star resort on the island. After the second dive of the day, we could stay over at the hotel for lunch and just hang around the pool for the rest of the day. And so we did!! Here we were on a paradise island spending a minimum on lodging during the night while living the life of the rich and famous during the day. Excellent!!

Unfortunately, that night, the wind picked up quite dramatically and it started raining. It continued to do so for the next 3 days and nights and we literally spend 3 days in bed hanging about and reading books, there just was nothing else to do on the whole !@#$%^& island... We were invited by Thierry and his wife to drink an aperitif and did spend a lovely afternoon and evening at their home, talking about diving and all the little funny things the locals do! When the night was over, we cycled home in the headlights of their squad, as it was too dark to see the road (and the entire island for that matter)!!

Our next island was Rangiroa. This was the place we had been dreaming of in the last year. Known for its world-class diving, we were bound to see lots of sharks, mantas and dolphins - bring it on! We booked a room in the Rangiroa Lodge (http://www.rangiroalodge.com/) located right on the beach and right next to the diving operation.

We ended up diving 7 days in a row and really did some of the most spectacular dives we've ever done.

On the first dive, our dive master Rafael took us to Avotoru pass. Diving in the Tuamotu Archipelago is mainly done in the passes to the atolls where you have very strong currents when the tide comes in or goes out. This attracts lots of wildlife. Rafael took along a couple of fish-heads, which he hid under the coral. Soon, 6 huge Silvertip Sharks appeared, attracted by the smell and just trying to get hold of the fish-heads. They kept on circling us, coming so close to you, you can actually touch them...and they are huge (3-4 meter)!!! Then after about 30 minutes we drifted off over the coral which was in a fantastic shape. A great start!

The second dive, Rafael surprised us when he asked us if we wanted to go see ' The Wall of Sharks', which (surprise, surprise!!) is located at 60 meters (!!!) in the infamous Tiputa Pass. For the crazy French, 60 meters is nothing.... For us, being Padi divers, 60 meters is simply a no go depth. As the divers amongst you will know, you have to realise that nitrogen narcosis kicks in at around 30-35 meters and gets increasingly worse as you go deeper, creating tunnel vision and making you lose judgement which can result in a feeling of carelessness and ease which has made divers spit out their regulators to take a nice deep breath of...water...resulting in...death! Moreover, oxygen turns poisonous at around 50 meters, which can cause sudden spasms which result in a total loss of control and eventually...death. So obviously Thomas immediately said: SURE, why not!! Mischa, always the wiser in our relationship thought differently and shouted out: NO WAY!!! A long and vivid discussion including arm throwing and finger pointing followed...yes, tears were shed...

After a while we agreed that doing these long deep deco dives would be an important addition to our experience as divers and eventually make us better divers. Furthermore it was the only way to see 'The Wall of Sharks', which by now sounded more and more appealing. We told Rafael that we would love to do it but slowly build up our depth experience. So during our first dive, we went down to 45 meters (our record till then had been 40 meters and something) and hung about 10 meters above the rest of the group. Mischa, as always a bit more scared of new things, consumed way more air than normally and had to face the embarrassment of - as an instructor - requiring the octopus of our diveguide Ornela to get back to the surface (Mischa says: 'the shame, the shame', while Thomas needless to say continues to rub it in). Furthermore...no sharks...In fact, there was no current at all keeping the sharks away at depth. Over the next days, Rafael made it his personal project to teach Mischa how to feel relax at depth. Raphael, being a free diver for years, introduced the Japanese torpedo (arms stretched in front) and manta ray (arms wide to the side) position under water to limit one's air consumption. We had the best time ever.... Copying these two positions under as well as above water! Every day we went deeper and deeper until finally we did one dive of around 55 meters every day feeling totally at ease. The current also picked up as the days went by and finally we saw 'The Wall of Sharks': hundreds and hundreds of grey reef sharks swimming up and down in the blue...magical!

Nevertheless, the regular dives were also great. We saw Mantas on almost every dive,we saw the spawning of surgeonfish, the corals were in fantastic shape, the fish abundant and the group with which we dived (mainly German babyboomers which were a lot of fun to be with) was great!

In addition to all the above, Tiputa pass is also world renowned for its school of resident dolphins, which live here all year around. In fact, we would either see themjumping in front ofour boat or in the waves that were created by the ingoing tide as we went for another dive.Very often we would hear them under water and on one magical occasion we actually ran into them underwater and they came up to us to play. Now this is about as rare as seeing pigs fly...so we felt very lucky.

If anything, we decided that this would be a place were we wanted to come back to fordiving.

Too soon our time was up in Rangiroa and we had to fly on to the next destination: Fakarava.

Originally we had not intended to go to Fakarava but on Easter Island we met a dive guide who had worked there and had told us that we absolutely had to go there, or regret it for the rest of our lives. On Rangiroa this was confirmed by basically everybody we encountered. So our expectations were pretty high. The first 3 nights we spend in a very nice, clean and friendly hostel called Relais Marama (www.relais-marama.com). Obviously, being a small incesty island, the owner of Relais Marama was also the father in law of our diveguide at Te Ava Nui (http://www.divingfakarava.com/). The last 3 nights we spend in a more luxurious hotel, pampering ourselves for a last time at Pearl Guesthouse Havaiki (www.macrohead.com/Havaiki/), which also housed a pearl farm and whose owner was happy to show the guests the process of pearl farming.

The diving was mind boggling. As compared to Rangiroa, the corals were in even better shape and there was way more fish. Also, we saw once again mantas on almost every dive. We will not even start telling you about the famous 'Grotte de Ali Baba'... On our last diving day, we took a 3 hour boat trip to the South Pass in Fakarava. This is the narrowest pass of any atoll in FP and known amongst the diving community for the best shark dive in the world. Although we had an excellent first dive (seeing a group of more than 100 grey reef sharks), the conditions for the second and presumably more spectacular dive were not that great: murky waters and very little current. However, it did give us an idea of what could have been: over 400 grey reef sharks passing through the channel and all around us and fantastic corals of a quality not seen anywhere before. We were told that if the current is stronger you can have up to 1000 sharks in the pass, blocking the views like a regular wall. We will come back for sure to see that!!

Although diving on Fakarava was great, there are certain dangers that lurk in the deep. After our excellent trip to the South Pass, Mischa had a small minuscule black dot on her biggest toe. Given the size of the thing, it was given no second though. The next day however, she was not able to move her toe anymore and her little foot hurt like hell, up to the point were walking from our little hut to the restaurant seemed like a marathon. Some little bells started ringing. It was when we saw the veins in her right leg swelling and turning red, that we raised the flag! By chance, one of the people staying at Havaiki was the head of the biggest medical emergency unit in Papeete and a well trained doctor (keep in mind that there is no doctor on the whole island and medical assistance is at least a few hours away...). She looked at Mischa's toe and after feeling her leg and groin concluded that she was bitten by a vicious animal who poisoned her and the poison was slowly but surely moving towards her hart..... brrrrr!!! That of course freaked the hell out of Mischa!!! She needed to start taking antibiotics as soon as possible. If no results were seen after 1-2 days, the doses needed to be increased.... more brrrr!! Of course, being well prepared world travellers, we were equipped with a 5-day antibiotic treatment - which turned out to be a correct one - and Mischa was thrilled that she could take the first tablet. Her toe felt already better the next day and her health was completely restored after 5 days. Mmmm, so much for the ocean.

After 4 wonderful weeks, our trip to French Polynesia came to an end. We returned to Papeete with amazing memories and the promise that one day we will return. In Papeete we stayed in Teamo once more, but this time opted for the air-conditioned and more luxurious double bedroom, which was a bit more expensive than the dorm but oh so much more comfortable!!

After three weeks of hardcore diving, we really felt like diving a lot more. So Fiji, here we come!!!

Grands Bisous!!

Mischa and Thomas