ONE LEADING guidebook to French Polynesia warns that the region is “easily the most expensive corner of the South Pacific,” adding “you’ll have a much better time……if you accept this and lower your value-for-money expectations while doubling your budget.”
Travel writers. What do they know?
Expensive or not, the region was not on my travel radar until I received a proposal via homeexchange.com, from a French family hoping to swap their three bedroom bungalow on Tahiti for our Santa Monica home for two weeks in April. Noodling around the web I was as quickly beguiled by the region as Fletcher Christian and his mates. I also liked the prospect of refreshing my schoolboy French and using the arcane local currency, the French Pacific Franc (xpf). Less beguiling was the prospect of $800-a-night overwater bungalows and $15 sodas. But I love a challenge, and figured that by combining a home exchange on Tahiti with budget lodgings on the outer islands I could at least beat the travel department of my local Costco, which was offering a miserly six nights in Moorea and Bora Bora for a jaw-dropping $4000 per person.
Covering a vast area of the South Pacific – about the same size as Western Europe – Tahiti is comprised of 118 islands and atolls broken up into five distinct – but distant – archipelagoes. So it makes sense for visitors to choose one particular area, naturally we chose Tahiti and surrounding islands, specifically Moorea, Bora-Bora and Huahine.
Which is how our family of four (two fortysomethings with a 13 year-old son and tween daughter) found ourselves at Tahiti’s Fa’aa Airport at dawn on the first day of spring break after a painless eight hour overnight flight from LAX.
Five minutes from the airport was our base, an airy modern home with tile floors and large sliding doors framing a compact pool. Its elevated position on the northwest coast meant the house enjoyed cooling trade winds and gifted us an alluring view of Moorea, reposing just 11 miles across the romantically-named Sea of the Moon.
Since our hosts’ petite Renault Clio was included in the swap, we toured the island during the day buying inexpensive casse-croutes (baguette sandwiches) for lunch, returning late each afternoon for a refreshing swim and dinner on the terrace. We were helped by a sprawling outpost of the French supermarket chain Carrefour just five minutes away. My kids, committed Francophiles already, loved the bakery with its wonderfully crusty baguettes and the well-stocked charcuterie department. On Tahiti at least, feeding the family wouldn’t be a budget-buster.
The problem was that the island’s busy northwest coast was far from a South Pacific idyll. The roads were frequently jammed and choked with diesel fumes and the only freeway for two thousand miles just happened to be five minutes from the house. Add the constant barking of neighborhood dogs and the persistent 5am crowing of a local rooster and my crew quickly became, er, mutinous.
Which is why after five days we decamped to Moorea. Less than one-eighth the size of Tahiti, blessed with jagged volcanic crests, lush vegetation and ringed by an impossibly clear lagoon, Moorea is intoxicating. The car ferry from bustling Papeete took just 30 minutes and we booked in at the Club Bali Hai, fifteen minutes from the sleepy wharf at Vaiare. A chic resort when it opened in 1982, these days it has a pleasantly relaxed, down-at-heel vibe. Our oceanfront bungalow with air conditioning and spacious bathroom slept four comfortably for $168 per night. Ten paces from our door lay Cook’s Bay, a sapphire-blue, deepwater sound fringed by lush, vertiginous peaks with a deserved reputation as one of the world’s most picturesque anchorages.
The hotel has limited wi-fi, a small pool and the Blue Pineapple café, with an unbeatable waterside location but a tired menu, the cheapest offering on which was an industrial tasting croque monsieur and fries for $9.
Inexpensive dining choices are not plentiful on Moorea – we had four acceptable pies for $60 from the nearby Allo Pizza, and one mediocre meal at the neighboring Restaurant Aito for a spiteful $225. On the plus side of the ledger our unit had kitchen facilities so we economized by breakfasting on strong French coffee, yogurt, juice and croissants from the local market, enjoyed al fresco on the front deck amid the rising scent of the vibrant frangipani. And we were delighted by a small roulotte (food truck) near Vaiare, manned by a cheerful Frenchman with the unlikely name of Peter Poulet, serving huge and tasty veal baguettes with fries for about $4.
Mooreans believe the most environmentally friendly way to dispose of trash is to burn it at sundown, when offshore winds are strongest. So at dusk I would grab a cold Hinano, settle down at water’s edge and contemplate smoke drifting across water, spellbound as the island’s peaks turned from dark purple to deepest black, while distant Tahitian drums consummated a magical South Seas moment.
Three days later we took the short prop-hop to Bora Bora, whose staggering beauty and tiny size – just 11 square miles – ensured the sternest test of my austerity plan. I avoided a couple of backpacker joints in favor of the Rohotu Fare Lodge, a shady retreat in the shadow of Mount Otemanu on the island’s west coast. Rohotu has four traditional bungalows, only one of which sleeps four, which I grabbed for three nights at $238 per night. By Bora Bora standards, a bargain.
Rohotu is the creation of Nir Shalev, a gregarious Israeli who first washed up here as a backpacker two decades ago. These days he is the proud proprietaire of a rustic but comfortable hideaway set in a lush grove of native shrubs. Each unit has a thatched roof, with marble and tile foors, mahogany and teak furniture and a four poster bed with a very effective mosquito net, plus a well-supplied kitchenette with stove and large refrigerator. Bora Bora may have world class diving and snorkelling, but my kids were happiest enjoying the hammock and small book collection at the lodge’s open air ‘library’ just steps away from our bungalow.
Thirty minutes’ flight south east of Bora Bora lies placid, rural Huahine. Just 75 sq km in size and easily toured in three hours, it was by far the least developed of the islands we visited and where the heartbeat of the old South Seas can still (almost) be heard.
Fifteen minutes outside the tiny main port of Fare is a well-maintained dirt road where we could take our rental car – carefully. Three miles further down lies Pension Tupuna, set at the bottom of a steep driveway on the sleepy shores of Bourayne Bay.
Tupuna’s traditional bungalows provided our most rustic experience; post and beam construction using refashioned driftwood and bamboo for the walls, woven pandanus leaf roofs, and river rock and mortar in the bathroom. Everything is built by the owners, Parisian Franck Soutillard and his Tahitian wife Loretta. Tupuna reposes unruffled amid coconut palms, mango trees, fragrant hibiscus and bougainvillea, abutting a deserted lagoon which stretches at a knee-high depth for perhaps 400 yards before dropping off to deeper water.
The pension is off Huahine’s main grid so visitors should expect a bucolic vibe. Those with little tolerance of critters should bring plenty of bug spray and be diligent about ducking under mosquito nets at dusk. And generator-powered showers mean neither powerful water pressure nor constant heat. On the plus side expect a breathaking location where the riotous, aromatic, vegetation is pruned daily and the paths are neatly kept and swept. The nightly rate for our four-person bungalow was 12000xpf ($126) with breakfast included – French coffee and warm homebaked bread served with home-made confiture of mango, guava and banana, and assorted fruit from the garden, typically watermelon, papaya, coconut and star fruit.
Huahine provided the perfect coda to our trip. We spent peaceful days reading or splashing in the lagoon, repairing at sundown to our mosquito nets to savor the reef’s distant rumble or marvel at explosive midnight thunderstorms, knowing that a plangent rooster cry at 5am (again!) would mark one day closer to our return home.
French Polynesia as a whole gets as many visitors in a year as Hawaii does in a week, which means you are virtually guaranteed an unspoiled, relaxing, and authentic experience. The flip side is that you’ll need to be more adventurous and tolerant. English is widely spoken in Tahiti’s northern coast, less so the further south you venture. On the outer islands, expect English to be spoken only at hotels and larger restaurants. Everywhere you go expect roosters every sunrise and barking dogs at dusk.
Including all flights, the final tab for our 16-day ‘economy’ trip to the Society Islands topped out a little north of $10,000. Not a cheap vacation, but not enough to throw the captain overboard, either.
– Neil Fletcher
FRENCH POLYNESIA: How to Get There, Where to Stay, What to See
