World CIRC - Day 125 - 126 May 12th to May 13th Opunohu bay, Moorea, French Polynesia.
Nina
Steve and Lynda Cooke
Mon 16 May 2016 23:48
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17:29S 149:51W World CIRC - Day 125 - 126 May 12th to May 13th Opunohu bay, Moorea, French Polynesia. Turquoise water, crystal white sand. Big Puffer fish and Cow fish swimming round the boat, with sharks, eagle rays and sting rays skimming underneath. We took the dinghy across to the beach to tie up, and walked up the road to a little shop, where the Polynesian lady sold us internet connection cards (almost useless!) and some French bread. We then continued up the road to a little créperie, where we had to sample the lovely French ladies cooking, with chocolate and fresh banana, and vanilla and ginger ice cream toppings. She told us about the Tropical gardens just across the road, so off we set. The hill up the mountain went straight up. I don’t know exactly how steep it was, but we had difficulty walking up the concrete road, and a car and motor scooter that making their way up to the little restaurant really struggled with the rate of climb. Good exercise, but bad in flip flops, which is what we are living in these days. The walk was through gardens full off tropical fruit. Pineapples, lemons, limes, bananas, papaya, guava, passion fruit, together with roses, tiares (the national flowers), gardenias, hibiscus, bougainvilleas, bromeliads, corydelines, probably forgetting others as well. The lady looking after the shop was so friendly and lovely, cutting up fresh pineapple to make us fruit juice, and adding fresh papaya if wanted. Behind the shop was a large greenhouse, where they grew vanilla, and the rows of vanilla plants were huge and neat and green, but had just been harvested, so we didn’t find any new flowers, but the shop had jars of freshly dried vanilla pods, thick and fat and huge and fragrant, for sale. The trip back down the hill was worse than the trip up, but we made it, thinking how difficult it would have been if it had been raining! Lynda and Karen scrumping some limes and passion fruit on the way down. We didn’t pick a pineapple, deciding it would be too difficult to smuggle down the hill. |