Leslie and David's Wanderings: 29 March 2024 Moorea, Society Islands, French Polynesia

The ship moved overnight from Raiatea to Moorea. We took the first tender into the dock and met up with our Alto Offroad Safari Tour. There were three pickup trucks with bench seats in the bed of the truck for the tour. There were 3 couples in each truck bed from the ship. So, we had two tour guides and one new guy. We got the new guy truck! They took us around the island to all the major sites, including a Vanilla Plantation, Eel Fish, a pineapple plantation, an overlook into the bays below high on the mountainside, a 1500 year old Polynesia Religious Temple, then to a Black Pearl jewelry store. The vanilla plantation was on a hillside and enclosed by netting to help protect the plants. It takes five years for a vanilla plant to produce ripe beans for the market place. There was a great look out from this site as well. Then they took us off pavement to a shallow river where one of the guides got the Eel Fish to swim up stream to him. They look like their salt water cousins. From there we continued off road to a pineapple plantation in the valley between the rugged volcanic mountains. The plantation is on government owned land and the islanders have to rent it from the government in 99 year leases. The pineapple plants grow low to the ground. From planning, it takes a year to mature and flower/pollinate, then three to four years for the pineapples to form and grow to maturity and ripen for harvest. They drove back on to the pavement and took us to the very end of the road at an overlook high up on a mountainside. This was a popular with the tour companies and the locals since the view of the two lagoons (one with our cruise ship in it) and the Mountain in between was spectacular. Then we went back down about a mile to a 1500 year old Polynesian Temple where they made offerings to their gods. The islanders are mostly Christian now, due to missionaries in the 1800s, with several different Christian denominations. But some islanders still come to this temple to make offerings to the “old gods”. Then they ran us down to a jewelry store that specialized in the locally harvested black pearls. They took us to a roadside overlook where you could see the tiki huts over the water for the Hilton Hotel. Finally, we were taken back to the pier where we took the time to see the open air shops along the pier before boarding the tender for a very sweltering ride back to the ship. The ship pulled out of Moorea at 5PM and made the short run over to Papeete Tahiti and docked by 7PM. We decided to use the night to get some laundry done since we figured most of the passengers would be packing to disembark in the morning. What we did not count on was all the folks wanting to dry their bathing suits before packing them. Dryers were at a premium. But we got it done so we are good for cloths for a week or so.