Oct 3, 03:30 PM by Steve | Day 9: Moorea
Posted in Honeymoon & Vacation
Today Kim woke up after much sleep feeling much better. We started Moorea off with a tour around the island in a bus. Like the other similar tours that we took, we were again the youngest by far. The driver was great though; he was native to Moorea, but his grandparents had come over from Switzerland, and one of his parents was native. His family has a lot of tourism businesses (e.g. Albert Tours) and many of the other vehicles were driven by his brothers or other relatives. He took us up to Belvedeer point, on narrow windy road. It was quite impressive that he was able to get that huge bus up that tiny little road. One biker was quite shoked when he came around the corner and almost ran into us…
After the tour, we had to get back to the ship to change and grab our gear for snorkeling. We were in quite a hurry because the first tour ran half and hour late and we had to wait some time for the tender. But we made it back to shore on time, and actually ended up waiting for someone on the tender following ours. This snorkeling trip was similar to the one in Bora Bora, first we went out to a spot to swim with stingrays. We anchored off the Beachcomber resort, and were in for a suprise: sharks! There were a bunch of sharks swimming around right off the shelf where we were watching the rays, so we got a double treat of rays and sharks. They were small sharks and not agressive so we were assured that they would not be a problem. They swam around minding their own business and we all got lots of neat pictures and stories to tell out friends.
The next stop was off a motu for coral gardens. At this spot we saw a barracuda and more rays. Again lots of bright fish and interesting coral textures. Steve got lots of pictures and video with his camera in the underwater housing; he filled up a 256MB card at each spot. We think that snorkeling, especially these last two days were the highlights of the trip. It would have been nice to go SCUBA diving as well but we had a great time.
