French Polynesia, Bora Bora: Those Sharks are not Vegetarians!

Many people have heard of Bora Bora being a tropical paradise in the middle of the southern Pacific Ocean. After spending a week on the South Pacific island, we can lay claim to the fact that it was, indeed, a place of paradise, having thoroughly enjoyed our time there. For the most part, it was the paradise we had heard of, but as budget travellers, there were some things that we found to be unparadisal, if that is even a word. We faced many challenges adapting to the French Polynesia lifestyle when we arrived on our first island to explore, Moorea; therefore, we won't harp on much about the obstacles we faced, since we want to let you know about the brilliant week we had on our second island, Bora Bora.

Chez Rosine Masson was the cheapest pension, aka guesthouse, on the island, and also the place we chose to stay for the week due to our tight travel budget. At 7202 CFP (Polynesian Francs) per night for two people, which equated to £43 ($86) per night, we were able to stay in a private room inside the small guesthouse. Staying in a dorm room there would have cost pretty much the same as the private room because the price of one dorm bed per person was 3500 CFP. With a private room, we were able to ensure that our things were locked away properly whenever we left the guesthouse, which wasn't actually that often, but enough to give us the confidence that our things weren't left out in the open. Just before we left Bora Bora, we found out that Rosine, the owner of the guesthouse, was a well-known member of Polynesian society.

The blood was to attract the sharks and stingrays that we'd soon be feeding and swimming with whilst capturing photos and videos of them

Rosine Temauri-Masson was the wife of Jean Masson, a famous French artist who died in 1973. She had 4 children from this man, though they had never married; the wedding came later. She was his model and also his pupil, learning how to create her own style of watercolour and other paintings whilst he painted some of his best work, nude portraits of her. By the way, we think that the nude modelling for her husband was something that she remembered quite well, as she managed to flash her bare top a couple of times whilst taking care of things around the grounds of Chez Rosine Masson.

All of Rosine's children have grown up and some have kids of their own now. When the last of the children had moved away from home, she wasn't sure what to do with the large house she owned on the beach at Matira Point, a house that was situated behind her main house and art studio, where her children had lived. She decided to turn the house into a small "pension", as the French call a guesthouse. The pension was a lovely two-storey home with 5 private rooms and one open dorm room with three beds.

A couple of the private rooms, like ours, were located downstairs and there was a bathroom with a toilet and cold water shower on each floor, as well as a hot water shower outside the house. Downstairs, there was a common room and large kitchen with full facilities that all of the guests used to cook their meals, since it was too expensive for backpackers and budget travellers to eat out often on the island. Even cooking our own meals was too expensive, with items such as bread or milk costing over £3.00, or $6.00!

At the back of the pension was an outdoor seating area with a couple of long tables lined with benches on both sides, and a couple of single beds for people to lounge around and read or nap whilst taking a break from the sun. At the foot of the patio, a small beach area with a couple of plastic sun lounge chairs was positioned right next to the water. The sandy beach continued into the lagoon and that was a nice little spot for cooling off after spending some time in the sun.

The views from the back of Rosine's pension were spectacular. Across the lagoon was a private motu, or small islet, with several bungalows built on stilts in the shallow lagoon, and a long stretch of pristine white sandy beach lined with coconut palm trees. That was the quintessential picture of Bora Bora in our minds and it was excellent to wake up and behold such a picturesque view. The beach continued on either side of Rosine's place and we spent a lot of time walking along the beach and swimming in the lagoon around Matira Point during our time there. On a couple of occasions, we spotted some stingrays swimming along the shallow waters, but that was nothing compared to what we saw, and fed, during our lagoon trip around the island in the middle of our week there. You'll have to read further down the page to find out more about that!

Rosine had a flourishing art career after her husband died; the value of his paintings also increased tremendously at that point. After his death, she raised her four children on her own and earned an income by selling his remaining artwork as well as her paintings. She has had several art exhibits and, during her first one in Auckland, New Zealand, she sold all of her paintings! Besides New Zealand, she had also travelled to India, Indonesia, Chile, Brazil and Los Angeles. Many of her husband's paintings and her own were hanging inside Chez Rosine Masson and it was special to see this during our stay there.

One of the highs of Rosine's career was when the Polynesian government asked to commission one of her paintings on a stamp. She didn't get paid for the commission because the government told her "the recognition would help her career" (typical). She not only didn't receive any money for the stamp, but they also ended up spelling her maiden name wrong, by spelling "Temauri" as "Temarui". At least she can say that one of her paintings was represented on her country's stamp, which is still a pretty impressive feat, if you ask us!

During our stay at her pension, we found Rosine very nice and extremely helpful, motherly to an extent. We both really enjoyed the relaxing week we had on Bora Bora and would highly recommend her place to anyone visiting the island. Hotels in Bora Bora were ridiculously expensive and even mid-range hotels asked for way too much money, so pensions are the way to go if you don't have the money to splash around. Plus, with a pension, you almost always have free use of kitchen facilities to be able to cook your own meals.

In some hotels, you may be expected to buy your meals in a hotel restaurant or cafe, which would not be very cheap. We didn't eat out once during our week on Bora Bora. In fact, during our two weeks in French Polynesia, we only ate out a couple of times: once, we shared a Panini and Croque McDo at McDonald's (no burgers! a strange tale in itself, but found inside the Moorea travel journal) inside the international airport, and, another time, we ordered food from the Sofitel Tahiti Resort restaurant, which we had to do because we had a normal hotel room there without any kitchen facilities.

Now that you know all about the place we stayed, you may want to know how we got to Bora Bora. The easiest way for us to get to the island was by flying on an Air Tahiti - not to be confused with Air Tahiti Nui - flight from the main island of Tahiti; we had purchased our flights back in April while we were travelling around Southeast Asia. Since we could only reach Bora Bora from Tahiti, we made Bora Bora our second island visit during our time in French Polynesia, visiting the small island after spending a few days on the large island of Moorea, also accessible from Tahiti, but by ferry as well as by air.

When we left Moorea, we had to stay overnight in Tahiti because our flight to Bora Bora left early the next morning. We were scheduled to fly out of the international airport in Faa'a (pronounced fah-ah-ah), a small village on Tahiti that was located five minutes from Papeete, the town where our ferry from Moorea had arrived. After spending a couple of hours in Papeete, we ended up travelling by a local bus (£1, or $2, per ticket, one of the only things in the country that was cheap!) to Faa'a. We found a nasty and dirty pension called Fifi's that was conveniently located right across the street from the international airport and actually within our travel accommodation budget, so we snapped up a couple of dorm beds very quickly.

When we left the next morning, the flight was short and easy, taking just under an hour, with amazing views below us of the lagoon circling the island, the mountain in the middle of the island and the coral reef breaks around the island lagoon. We could see that the water was a brilliant shade of blue or turquoise, depending on where we looked. As the water became shallower, it changed to a light turquoise colour, while the deeper sections of the lagoon were coloured a beautiful bright blue. When our small airplane landed at the airport, we were corralled onto a free airport shuttle boat that took us to the pier on the mainland at Vaitape village. We caught a taxi there quite easily and arrived at Chez Rosine's fifteen minutes later.

With a week in one place, one of the longest periods of time that we have been docile since starting our trip on 3rd January, we were granted a lot of the relaxing downtime that we wanted to experience in the South Pacific. Below you will find a list of the activities that comprised our days on the island, summed up because there is only so far we can go with writing about some of them. The more interesting and paragraph-worthy activities are detailed below this list.

What we did on Bora Bora to write home about:

1. Read a lot of books

2. Watched several DVD movies

3. Swam in the lagoon

4. Walked along the beaches at Matira Point

5. Improved our French conversational skills since everyone on the island, including other tourists, spoke French

6. Met fellow backpackers and travellers, including Magali and Christelle who we are still keeping in touch with, and some Germans and a couple of French guys

7. Walked to the supermarket every day to stock up on more expensive groceries

8. Cooked meals (Kyle offered to give Dan a break and cooked all of the meals so he could catch up on reading books)

9. Played with Rosine's many pets (8 cats, 3 kittens, 2 dogs) despite them being covered in fleas. We only got really close to a few of the cats, who tended to hang around us all day and evening, probably because we fed them leftover tuna mayonnaise whenever we made sandwiches

10. Played Wheel of Fortune a lot, a computer game we bought in Los Angeles for the laptop

11. Attempted to get some exercise by starting a hike to the top of the mountain in the middle of the island, to gain views around the lagoon, but found out that it was not possible due to a washed out and impassable trail

12. Backed up and labelled photos, and added travel journal entries to the RealTravel website inside an office at Maitai Polynesian Hotel, where Catherine, the general manager, kindly offered us the use of her computer internet connection for the week, for free!

13. Appreciated all of the different species of brightly coloured flowers on the island and enjoyed their smells

Missing out on fitness (reference item number 11 above), we decided on another day to hire bicycles and ride them for over 30km around the main island. On the day we chose to do that, the weather was gorgeous, with a clear and sunny blue sky, as well as plenty of heat to fry eggs on the small paved road circling the island. We took the small road because that was pretty much the only one on the island, but it wasn't worthy of any praise on our part because it was very unkempt with many potholes and bumps, which were not pleasant to ride over on basic bicycles. The bicycles, by the way, had no gears to change our speed, but they did have French style baskets on the front for us to put our wine, bouquets of flowers, cheese and baguettes in after going to the grocery store, like you see people doing in movies about France.

The bicycles cost 1500 CFP per day, per person. That amount was £9 each, or $18, which was extortionately high for our budget. If you remember from our stories in Southeast Asia, we paid less than £5, or $10, a day to rent a scooter, so forking over double that amount was really painful. We can't even bear to tell you how much the cost of renting a scooter in French Polynesia was, as we might cry and cause the laptop keyboard we are writing on to sputter and malfunction from getting wet. By the way, it wasn't just the roads that seemed unkempt on the mainland. There were several buildings that looked like they were either in the process of being shabbily built or being lazily torn down. At least when we cycled around the island, we almost always had views of the beautiful motus in the distance, which were well-maintained and enabled us to forget about the poor mainland upkeep we witnessed.

After riding around the island for a couple of hours and making it two-thirds of the way back to Matira Point, we had an accident. There was a steep hill and we started racing each other to the top, knowing that there was no way we would make it to the top without having to stop to walk our bikes the rest of the way; however, the key was to cycle as far as possible before stopping. We were both putting all of our weight into it and with Kyle's weight exceeding Dan's by almost 20kg, his chain couldn't hold the pressure and decided to snap. This meant that for the rest of the journey around the island, Kyle had to hold on to one of Dan's handlebars and steer his bike while Dan cycled as hard as he could to move along an extra set of his bodyweight plus 20kg.

We finally made it back to Matira Point with Dan exhausted and Kyle rested. When we asked the woman who had rented us the bicycles for a discount since the last hour and a half was miserable (for Dan), she got a confused look on her face and no discount was applied. Perhaps that was something that happened regularly, or perhaps we should have used the phone number that was printed on the booking receipt that we were given when we picked up the bicycles, requesting someone to come and pick up the faulty bike. We'll never know...

One of our days on the island was spent touring the lagoon in a speedboat with ten Japanese tourists, a Japanese French-speaking guide named Kanae and a Polynesian boat driver named Jay. How we got to that point, we have no idea, because we had just asked Rosine to book us onto a lagoon cruise with her son's company. We debated over whether or not a boat full of Westerners would have been more fun than the Japanese boat and we decided that we had more fun with the Japanese and the funny tour guide and boat driver.

What really made us laugh was that every time Kanae told the other tourists something in Japanese, she turned to us and told us the same thing, but in French with a strange and strong accent. She didn't speak any English, so we were fortunate to find out that Jay and a couple of the Japanese tourists on the boat spoke English quite well. Despite a coconut show presented completely in Japanese, which was like watching an amusing Japanese TV game show, we were able to follow the day's activities without any problem. We almost felt like celebrities because many of the tourists on our boat wanted photos of us or with us.

Jay drove us around the island's lagoon and made a few stops along the way, so we could snorkel and see what marine life existed below the surface of the beautiful water. The first stop we made was definitely the most exciting. We stopped in an area called the lagoonarium, which was a shallow part of the lagoon with a sandy floor that had small pieces of dead coral on the bottom. Jay pulled out a large bucket of fish and started ripping them in half before holding them under the water. The blood was to attract the sharks and stingrays that we'd soon be feeding and swimming with whilst capturing photos and videos of them with our digital camera.

The next stop we made was to look for some enormous manta rays, which tended to use one of the deeper channels in the lagoon. Jay stopped the boat in one of the bright blue sections of the lagoon and we jumped out of the boat with our snorkelling gear to see what we could see. We couldn't see anything because the water was so deep. That freaked us out a little bit at first but, after a while, we grew accustomed to the fact that we could be eaten by a shark where we were snorkelling (don't forget we had just fed large sharks pieces of fish dripping with blood and guts). We didn't see any manta rays and felt a little cheated and rushed, but had to get back onto the boat.

The last snorkelling stop we made was at a coral garden, but the water was a little deep and it was hard to get close to the coral and see the fish up close without swimming down under the water with our snorkelling gear. There wasn't a lot to see there, either, but it was okay because the main reason we went on the lagoon tour was to swim with stingrays and sharks, and to visit a motu.

We went to a private motu for lunch and the coconut show was held there whilst the food was being prepared. Two long picnic tables were set in the shallow water of the lagoon and we ended up eating our barbecue lunch in the water, which was a really unique experience. The food was great. There was barbecue tuna, a raw tuna Polynesian salad, several fruits and, of course, sliced baguettes. There was time before and after lunch to walk along the motu's pristine beach and stare out across the lagoon at the main island. We had to stand and gawk at the complete beauty of the motu's long, white sandy beach.

Rosine was really sweet when we left the island. She gave both big hugs and the customary two kisses, one on each cheek, as we waited for the shuttle bus that would take us to the main village where we could catch the airport shuttle boat. We started to get worried when the shuttle hadn't turned up, since we only had about ten minutes to get to the airport shuttle in time to make our flight. There was no need to worry; Rosine ended up driving us to the shuttle boat terminal and she didn't even charge us for the journey, which worked out extremely in our favour!

The flight back to Tahiti was another short one, just under an hour. During the flight we looked out the window of the small airplane to see the different French Polynesian islands we flew over, such as Huahine, Moorea and Tahiti itself. The flight was sort of "no frills". We didn't get anything to eat and the flight attendant only gave us a small glass of pineapple juice served from a carton to drink, with no refills. We aren't really that picky, but we had paid just over £200 ($400) each for our flights and would have appreciated a bit more for our money. When we arrived back in Tahiti's international airport, we headed straight to the local bus once our backpacks were brought out on the revolving conveyer belt in Baggage Claim. Ten minutes later, we were checking into Sofitel Tahiti Resort, which was just down the road.