WEEK 5 May 3rd - 10th
We came to Tahiti because we had to re-provision. When we arrived in Tahiti for the first time we thought it was really nice and we didn’t know why everyone said that it wasn’t very nice, but when we came back from the Tuamotus we thought it was quite built up and it was really busy.
It is good that it is quite built up because you can re-provision and you can get more parts for the boat, But it is also quite bad because it isn’t as nice as the other islands.
Tahiti is quite a large island compared to the other islands in the South Pacific but it is still smaller than West Sussex. It is a big oval shape. It is very green with trees and plants. It has a lot more mountains and hills than the Tuamotus. It has a big airport at one end of the island.
The next day we went swimming over on the reef and there was a cage with some Black Tip and some Nurse Sharks (up to eight feet long). We swam next to the cage and saw a dozen sharks
The next day we refuelled and went to Moorea, a short journey of only an hour. Moorea is about 53 km around the edge and is very hilly with some quite dramatic peaks. Some of the hills are almost vertical. Moorea is very lush with many beautiful trees. We were anchored in a lagoon called Opunohu Bay. There were tall hills on all sides of the lagoon. They stopped the rain clouds reaching us because the clouds have to climb up over the hills and then they drop their rain.
The lagoon is very calm since it is protected by a reef. There are lots of fish and we saw some large stingrays, a spotted eagle ray and both a black tip and a white tip reef shark. The water is so clear you can see over ten metres to the bottom.
There were some jet skis. When we arrived we saw some young children learning to sail in small catamarans.
9th May 2007.
The next day after school we hired a car from a nearby hotel. We first drove up a steep hill to a lookout point where I could see two bays, both Opunohu and Cook’s Bay. You could see all the cliffs and hills around the bays and there were lots of colourful trees and plants. Next we went to see the remains of some old temples deep in the forest. Before the Europeans came in the 1700’s bringing Christianity, the locals had their own goods and built temples to them. The forest was very humid so it was nice to find a small river flowing through it. The path was muddy so we washed our feet and flip flops in the cool water.
The next day in the evening we went to Huahine.