Detailed Photo Review of Paul Gauguin 10-Night Cruise 9/6/17 Plus Moorea Pre-Cruise

[FLbeachbaby]

Your review is so amazing I will just chime in occasionally with our experiences. Using PG air and ATN we received no information about how/where/when to check in. They could improve on this especially for first-timers. Also ATN DID weigh our carry on's but maybe it was because we were all carry on. Luckily we met the requirements even though several folks have said they didn't weigh in LAX. They also weighed them in PPT which was another cluster- but I'll wait for that nugget.

[deladane]

Keep it coming!

 

Our bags were weighed by air tahiti...so better to be within the allowance.

 

LOTS more to come!!

[deladane]

Hi deladane! You two looked A.M.A.Z.I.N.G at your wedding!!! Again, thanks to you, we are researching a similar cruise. Hopefully, we'll have as much fun as you two look like you're having. Can't wait to read and see more!

 

Aww, thanks Trip! I hope you do end up cruising to FP as I know you would find it as beautiful as I did (and then I will get to read another one of your awesome reviews as you recount your time there hehe)

[deladane]

Your review is so amazing I will just chime in occasionally with our experiences. Using PG air and ATN we received no information about how/where/when to check in. They could improve on this especially for first-timers. Also ATN DID weigh our carry on's but maybe it was because we were all carry on. Luckily we met the requirements even though several folks have said they didn't weigh in LAX. They also weighed them in PPT which was another cluster- but I'll wait for that nugget.

 

Wow, crazy that PG couldn't give you any info about logistics about your flight, considering they arrange the air travel for most of their passengers on every cruise. It's not like this is their first rodeo! Interesting point about weighing your luggage- if you get to the checkin counter and do not check a bag because you only have carry-ons, then it makes sense that they would weigh your bags because they probably suspect you went over your limits. I still don't know how you managed to do this vacation in just carry-on bags, considering my electronics and chargers weighed nearly to their limits! If I did things your way, I would have had to wear all my clothes layered on top of each other when I checked in so my bags would be light enough (since ATN said nothing about weighing the passengers... just their luggage! haha)

[deladane]

ATN starts boarding their planes one our prior to departure, and they were right on time. DH was able to pick up the bottle of duty free rum he bought as he walked onto the plane. They deliver it to your seat if you miss the cart as you board, so no worries, you will get your liquor eventually!

 

The plane itself really set the tone to start a vacation in FP. The seats are brightly colored and the flight attendants greeted us with fresh flowers (something we would find many other times throughout our trip).

 

 

 

 

Each seat is supplied with a blanket, pillow, and an amenities kit including an eye mask, ear plugs, moist towelette, headphones, and cozy socks.

 

 

In a world of upcharges, we were happy for the freebies. The seats themselves were standard width for coach seats, and we thought the leg room was fine, but we also appreciated having our own row with no one in a middle seats, and we suspect that made it feel a little more spacious. One thing I did find was that the seat cushion was so thin that I could feel the metal beams underneath. I opted to sit on my pillow for the entire flight and that solved the problem for me. Each seat also has a personal entertainment screen with about 45 movies to choose from, plus music stations, a flight map, and a few other options.

 

 

We had loaded lots of movies on our tablets but didn’t need to watch them with so many movie options on the plane. There was also a USB port located just below the blue light on the right side of the screen so we could charge our devices during the flight.

 

The plane pushed away from the gate at exactly 11:40pm as scheduled, and we took off a few minutes later. To stay true to the clock, I will end this post here and pick up with a new post just after midnight! Since I only used 5 of my 6 photos in this post, you get a bonus artsy edit of one of the photos I took outside of our hotel in Moorea…

 

 

Brief side note: For some reason, there is a glitch with Cruise Critic. I pre-type my posts in Microsoft Word and then paste them into Cruise Critic (it only took one time for a message to get deleted in the process of posting it and me losing an hour's worth of work for me to learn that lesson!) Anyway, there is a weird glitch where the spaces between random words gets deleted and the 2 words merge into one. Everytime I paste my next post, I need to re-read it in the preview screen to catch these errors (even though it looked just fine when I typed it originally in Word). I am trying to catch them all before I submit my posts. I apologize if I miss a few and if that makes it harder to read my posts, and it is very tedious on my end so it will also delay my posts, but such is life!

[mjthecruiser]

Hi Dana,

I am loving your review since it let's us relive our wonderful trip. Thanks for setting up the tour with Ato. That is one of my favorite days ever!

Say hi to Jason. Your photos are gorgeous. I don't know how you can pick.

[deladane]

Hi Dana,

I am loving your review since it let's us relive our wonderful trip. Thanks for setting up the tour with Ato. That is one of my favorite days ever!

Say hi to Jason. Your photos are gorgeous. I don't know how you can pick.

 

Funny you say that- I am trying to pick out the best photos, but once we get to some of the port days, I think I will end up posting more photos than I am omitting bc they are all so beautiful!

 

I agree that Fakarava was one of my favorite days ever as well! So glad you are enjoying the review... it will take me a while, but eventually I will get to the cruise portion! :cool:

[Janthere]

Hi Dana - I have some photos of you and Jason that i need to send you - can you pls let me know how to contact you?

 

PS I love that we are on page 7 of this thread and you havent even got to Tahiti yet! :-) Lots of helpful details for everyone considering doing a trip like this.

[deladane]

Hi Dana - I have some photos of you and Jason that i need to send you - can you pls let me know how to contact you?

 

PS I love that we are on page 7 of this thread and you havent even got to Tahiti yet! :-) Lots of helpful details for everyone considering doing a trip like this.

 

Haha you are too funny, but I did warn everyone from post #1 that this would not be a brief review ;p

 

I would love to see those photos (and I actually just came across a fun one that I want to send you too!) My easiest email address is deladane at aol.

[deladane]

01 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

 

About one hour into the flight, the flight attendants handed out immigration forms. I guess it is better to fill this out early on in the flight while you are still somewhat lucid, instead of waiting for the end of the flight after getting nearly no sleep and not remembering your own name!

 

0025 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

 

Next, the flight attendants started food/beverage service. “Dinner” (can you really call it dinner when you eat it at 12:45am??!) was surprisingly tasty, although the portion was tiny. They served a vegetarian pasta salad with feta cheese, olives, and tomatoes, a roll, a wedge of spreadable brie cheese, fruit salad, and a small cup of red velvet cake (which was 75% frosting and 25% cake haha) We were literally the last row on the plane to be served, so I am not sure if other rows had a choice of entrees, but we were happy with what we got.

 

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They also served drinks, including wine, so we opted for sparking wine to continue the celebration.

 

0026 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

 

I usually change the time on my watch to match the local time of my destination to help ease the process of jet lag. The 8-hour flight passed quickly, despite my inability to sleep, and before we knew it, it was 3am (in Tahiti… it had been over 5 hours since they served “dinner”) and they were serving breakfast! This time around, we knew for sure that we were missing out on something by once again being the LAST row on the plane to get our food. We saw the flight attendants ask the rows in front and behind us which they preferred (eggs or pancakes), but when they got to our row, they just handed over 2 trays and walked away. We ended up with one of each, so I took the eggs (which was really a cheese omelet with ham and potatoes), and DH took the peach pancakes. Both trays were lukewarm but edible. Luckily we packed a few ClifBars in our carry on bags as a back up!

 

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We asked if we could have champagne to make mimosas with our orange juice, but were told that they stop serving wine one hour after dinner is served. Oh well, by this point we were nearly done with our flight and we landed in Tahiti a few minutes early at 4:45am.

[deladane]

Once we landed in Papeete, we exited the plane down a flight of stairs to the humid pre-dawn morning air. We were officially in French Polynesia!!

 

 

We walked along the outdoor corridor to the airport entrance where we were greeted by 4 Tahiitian singers (wow, they have an early shift for work today!)

 

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We waiting on a short line and were through customs, immigration, and claimed our luggage by 5:30am. It felt so good to finally not be in a rush after all that running around we did in LAX! Now we had a few errands to run in the airport prior to leaving. I have an ATM card through Charles Schwab bank which allows me to take out money from any ATM worldwide, and they credit me back for any fees charged. PPT airport has an ATM down on the far right side where I was able to withdraw cash in their local currency (XPF). They also have a currency exchange desk so you can use that if you don’t have an international ATM card.

 

 

A side note about currency: At the time of our vacation, the exchange rate was very easy to convert…$1.00 USD = 100 XPF. All we needed to do to convert prices listed in XPF into terms we could understand was to move the decimal point over by 2 places. Most vendors would take USD but not everyone took them at a 1:100 rate because some vendors (especially in the more remote islands) didn’t have much use for USD and preferred to be paid in their local currency so they charged more if we wanted to use USD. Since the exchange rate was so easy, we opted to spend XPF cash whenever possible. We also had a credit card with no foreign transaction fees, so we used that to pay for our hotel, car rental, grocery shopping, gas for the car, and a handful of restaurant meals. Here are photos of the front and back of the denominations of XPFs… I thought they were so cute and colorful and loved the pictures printed on the bills!

0090 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

 

 

[deladane]

Our next errand was to buy a few postcards and stamps to mail home to our families. While we were spending most of our time in Moorea, we wanted to get a postcard that said “Tahiti” on it (let’s face it, most people don’t really know where Moorea is, but everyone has heard of Tahiti lol). There is a small gift shop at the airport where we could buy postcards for 100XPF ($1) and they also sold stamps for the same rate as the post office at 140XPF ($1.40). The cashier was even kind enough to ask me where I was mailing my postcards so I would have the proper postage (spoiler alert: we are back at home now, 3 weeks after mailing the post cards, and everyone received them this week! Not too bad for mailing something halfway across the world!)

 

Trying to fight off the jet lag, DH bought some coffee at the one place to buy food. We planned to also buy something for breakfast here but there were slim pickings and the baguettes looked stale. Instead, we shared a Clif Bar and told ourselves we could eat a better breakfast once we boarded the PG! Also of note, the airport does have wifi available, but it is not free and we did not want to pay for it (we would have free wifi once we got to our hotel in Moorea) so I’m not sure about the prices.

 

We waited until after 6:30am to get a taxi so we could avoid the overnight surcharge (I think it ends at 6am but we wanted to play it safe since we were in no rush at all). There was no line at the taxi stand immediately outside the front of the airport, so we walked right up to a taxi and were told it would cost 2100 XPF ($21) to get to the ferry terminal including the fee for our luggage. The taxis in Tahiti do not have a meter, so it is always wise to discuss the price before getting in the car. Our taxi driver was very friendly and answered a few questions during the 20 minute ride.

 

When we arrived at the ferry, we were greeted by a man from the tourism board and he explained how everything works. He said the dock workers do not speak English so he was there to walk us through the process of getting our tickets, finding the waiting area, and knowing which ferry to board.

 

 

 

As we stepped out of our taxi, he the dock workers placed our large suitcases in huge bins that would be loaded onto the ferry and returned to us once we arrived in Moorea. As it happened, we were the last bags thrown on the top of the pile, so I could see them when the bins were lined up in the loading area (ours are the big blue bags on top of the further bin)

 

 

The next ferry was with Terevau at 8:10am and cost 1150xpf ($11.50 USD). I was able to buy both of our one way tickets with my credit card. I did not buy roundtrip tickets because there are 2 ferry companies that run the ferries for different prices and we didn’t know which ferry we would take on the return trip.

 

Side note: There are 2 ferry companies that transport tourists and locals (along with commercial trucks filled with shipments like gasoline and produce) between Tahiti and Moorea. Terevau runs a smaller, older ferry which costs slightly less money at 1150xpf per ride, and is a faster moving ferry with about a 30 minute journey. Aremiti runs a much larger, newer ferry, equipped with free wifi and a snack booth, but it moves a bit slower and takes about 45 minutes to travel the same journey. Both ferries have bathrooms on board, and both have websites where you can look up the ferry fares and schedules. For some bizarre reason, they often change their schedules so make sure to check the times in the week before you leave because the time of our ferry changed by about 30 minutes at some point along the line (Albert’s had warned us this was likely to happen and that we should reconfirm our timing with them in the week before our trip). Another weird issue is that the two companies run their ferries at nearly the same times! They only run a few ferries per day, so it would be more helpful if they spread out the times so passengers could catch a ferry when needed. Instead,they cluster their times so there are a few ferries in the morning, and then again late in the afternoon, with nothing in between. We took an 8:10am ferry on Terevau, and the Aremiti ferry was at 8:30am that day. Had we missed those ferries, the next one wouldn’t be until several hours later. Definitely check those schedules and plan accordingly!

 

The tourism guide then lead us upstairs in the elevator, and showed us the shops and restaurant where we could wait since we still had about an hour until boarding time. We ordered a couple of croissants and made use of their free wifi while we waited to board the ferry.

 

 

Boarding started around 8:05am and we were on our way shortly after that.

 

 

You can see a small outside seating area at the back of the boat. If you can bare the wind, lack of shade, and occasionally getting splashed with water, then I would recommend sitting out here for beautiful views of Tahiti for the start of your journey.

 

 

[deladane]

some of my photos won't load so I am deleting this post

[deladane]

 

The ferry ride was extremely choppy and windy. People were stumbling all over the place as they tried to see the view from one of the sides of the boat. Luckily, we had great seats at the back and could enjoy the views safely from our seats!

 

 

 

That’s Moorea in the distance to the left of the ship:

 

 

We arrived in Moorea around 9am and walked off the ferry to be greeted by Sandy from Albert Tours. We had pre-arranged to rent an automatic car for the duration of our time in Moorea (it’s been years since DH has driven stick shift so we were happy to pay the added cost for the convenience of an automatic car), and that included the transfer from the ferry to their office. We assumed it would just be the two of us, so we were a little surprised to see a large bus waiting to pick us up! It turns out that Albert also provided transfers for about 10 other people on the ferry to some of the hotels on the island. Once we were all loaded on the bus with our luggage, we made the 15 minute drive to their office.

 

Our rental car was a nearly-new Hyundai hatchback with less than 500 miles on it. Kaha was very helpful in getting all the paperwork completed and showing us around the car. He even mentioned that we are not allowed to pump our own gas in Moorea and the attendants will help us when we need to fill up. These photos were taken in the parking lot of the Lagoonarium, but this was our rental car:

 

 

Within a few minutes, we were off on our way to start our Moorean adventure. Our first stop was a supermarket. We had originally planned to go to Carrefour as it is very close to the ferry terminal and we assumed that Albert’s office was near there too. When we saw how far we drove to reach Albert’s office, we asked Kaha to direct us towards a different supermarket, and he recommended the Super-U on the south end of Cook’s Bay. That was on our way to our hotel so it worked perfectly, and we arrived within about 10 minutes.

 

 

 

Super-U was a great find! We spent over an hour walking up and down every aisle to buy some breakfast, lunch, and snack food and lots of drinks. While I speak nearly no French, I found the market easy to navigate and we stocked up on baguettes, cheese, local juices, bottles of Hinano, and a few other snacks.

[okiebaugh]

Loving your review!

[deladane]

Loving your review!

 

Thank you!

[deladane]

After we finished food shopping, we continued along the main road to our hotel. Moorea Fare Miti was a bit hard to find as their sign was a little small and we didn’t see it until we passed it, so we made a U-turn to get back to the entrance.

 

0638 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

 

Fabienne (Faby) greeted us at the reception desk and quickly found the reservation we made through Booking.com. She introduced us to Elvis, who cleans the grounds and the bungalows at the hotel. Our bungalow was already cleaned and ready for us even though it was before 11am. She told us to drive our car along the road behind the bungalows, to park behind the last unit and she would meet us there. The bungalow was exactly as pictured online, sitting directly on their private beach with an oversized thatch roof and wrap-around front porch. The main room features 2 daybeds that were set up as couches since we only had 2 of us staying in the unit, but they would have been set up as beds if we had 4 people in our party. There was also a coffee table and ceiling fan.

 

0059 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

 

The galley kitchen had a ¾ sized fridge/freezer, a glass cook top, a few dishes and cookware, a kettle, and a small coffee pot.

 

0060 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

 

Down the hall was the bedroom with a full sized bed with a mosquito net, a closet with a hanging bar and shelves, and a safe. The bedroom window did not have a screen on it, so we never opened it for fear of letting in the bugs.

 

0062 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

 

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The large bathroom had a stall shower, another closet with a hanging bar and shelves, and a door that lead outside to where the car was parked (but we did not have a key to open that door from the outside so we had to enter through the sliding glass doors into the living room).

 

 

0061 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

[deladane]

Faby gave us the password to the free wifi, and asked if we would like some fresh coconut bread and/or a baguette for breakfast. We requested one of each, and she told us we could pick them up in the lobby at 7:15am tomorrow. She also showed us the binder on the coffee table which contained lots of tourism info. After she left, we unloaded the car, put away our groceries, unpacked and got settled. We hadn’t eaten since our small snack at the ferry terminal so we made some sandwiches and enjoyed them outside on our porch.

 

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We spent a few hours relaxing at the hotel, settling in and getting the lay of the land. This was our beachfront bungalow:

 

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To give some perspective, this is a screen capture of the Google satellite image of Moorea Fare Miti, and our bungalow is the one circledi n red.

 

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There is one other beachfront bungalow on our right, but it is actually privately owned and rented out as a vacation rental unit when the owners are not there, so it is separate from the Moorea Fare Miti hotel. The 7 other units in our hotel are situated side by side progressively further backf rom the beach, but they are all angled so I think they can all see the beach from their porches.

 

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The section of beach in front of our bungalow actually stretches pretty far north and south of the hotel so it wasn’t quite private, but there were very few people using the beach whenever we were there. In fact, I only saw two or three people there who weren’t guests at our hotel, and they were just taking a walk along the shore.

 

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The view sitting on our porch looking out towards the beach:

 

 

0073 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

[deladane]

Here’s a few other photos from the grounds of our hotel…

 

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By around 2pm, we were ready to get up and do something, mostly to keep awake and void the jetlag urging us to sleep all day. It was raining on and off so we could not take advantage of the beach at our hotel, and we didn’t really want to use the kayaks in the rain. Instead, we drove up to Le Petit Village to explore the little shops and restaurants. There were a few small stores selling souvenirs, black pearls, jewelry, art, and Tahitian pareos, as well as a small grocery store, gas station, and a few small restaurants. Most of the products seemed more pricey than we wanted to pay, so we just looked around.

 

We weren’t quite hungry for dinner and it was still raining, so we went back to Moorea Fare Miti for happy hour on our porch. We bought a carton of Tahiti Drink at Super-U and were curious to try it.

 

0091 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

 

0092 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

 

It is a pre-made fruit juice cocktail made with rum and itis 8% alcohol. It was good but I think the pineapple juice and coconut rum (bought at duty free) drink we made with our lunch was better haha They should serve Tahiti Drink in single-serve juice boxes to take to the beach! If anyone has traveled to Puerto Rico (or read my 2015 Carnival Valor review), this reminded us of Gasolina.

 

Thanks to the completely overcast sky, there wasn’t much of a sunset tonight, which was a shame considering our bungalow faces west over the water with the potential for an amazing sunset view (stay tuned to see if we ever got that perfect sunset!) The rain did taper down to a drizzle long enough to capture this photo though!

 

0100 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

[deladane]

We were starting to get hungry for dinner around 6pm, so we drove south from the hotel to look for somewhere to eat. By now, it was raining again. Not just a light drizzle…it was raining fairly hard. After about 5 minutes, we saw signs reflecting back in our headlights that looked like the road was closed. We got a bit closer and saw that they were doing construction (perhaps on the pipes or sewers?) so traffic was being diverted off the road onto a dirt path along the side of the road. With all the rain Moorea has had in the last few days, this dirt road was a muddy mess! I thought I took a photo of it that night,but maybe it didn’t come out in the dark and I deleted it because I can’t find it. Here’s what the construction site looked like when we passed by another morning. They really need to find a safer way to do construction because it was such a mess and likely just a matter of time before there is an accident here.

 

0507 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

 

One of the restaurants on my planning list was called Pizza Daniel. I had read several good reviews about this place on Trip Advisor and it was only 6km from Moorea Fare Miti. After driving about that far, we still didn’t find it, but we did find it, but we came across a different pizza place which matched the descripton of Pizza Daniel. Perhaps they changed names?? This restaurant was called Pizzeria Mano Arii, and they had a bunch of options for thin crust personal sized pizzas for about 1500xpf ($15) each.

 

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We ordered the Chevre-Miel and Vegetarian pizzas to go, and waited about 10 minutes while they made them fresh to order. We took the pizzas back to eat in our bungalow and washed them down with our first Hinano beers of the trip.

 

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After a very long day that started at 7am Pacific time on Thursday morning, we fell asleep by 8pm on Friday night under the shelter of our mosquito net in French Polynesia.

[pghsteelerfan]

We just got back from 2 weeks in Hawaii on Sunday and I finally got a chance to get on CC and see what's out there. When getting caught up on Trippingpara's review, I notice that you posted that you were back from your honeymoon trip. I'm just taking a quick CC/lunch break, so came over to see if you had gotten started on your review yet. So very happy to see it in progress and really looking forward to spending time reading word for word. Oh, and I had the same issues copying/pasting from Word on my last review of Carnival Liberty in 2015. I also experienced issues with spacing between paragraphs (too many spaces).

 

Today I'm basically just skimming through but will read in detail later on when I get caught up around here. You both look so nice in your wedding pictures. I love the others that you have posted as well. I can't believe the flight from LAX is only 8 hours!!! I was thinking it was much farther. We had a direct flight from Washington Dulles to Honolulu and that was a 10 hour flight. But it's also a flight from the east coast. We flew out over San Francisco but I couldn't see much as it was all fogged in. If we were on the left side of the plane, we *may* have been able to see San Jose (where I lived until I was 10) and Mt. Umunhum, which I was able to see from my bedroom window.

 

Again, looking forward to getting a chance to sit down and reading your review.

[Wendy The Wanderer]

...I can't believe the flight from LAX is only 8 hours!!! I was thinking it was much farther....

 

Funny, that's what most people think. But with most flights coming from L.A., coming from the east coast the trip can be broken up in quite manageable bites. We fly on Monday to L.A., and Tuesday to Papeete.

[deladane]

Funny, that's what most people think. But with most flights coming from L.A., coming from the east coast the trip can be broken up in quite manageable bites. We fly on Monday to L.A., and Tuesday to Papeete.

 

Oh wow, you are flying out so soon!!! You must be so excited! I'll bet you have a lot of packing to do this weekend :cool:

[deladane]

We just got back from 2 weeks in Hawaii on Sunday and I finally got a chance to get on CC and see what's out there. When getting caught up on Trippingpara's review, I notice that you posted that you were back from your honeymoon trip. I'm just taking a quick CC/lunch break, so came over to see if you had gotten started on your review yet. So very happy to see it in progress and really looking forward to spending time reading word for word. Oh, and I had the same issues copying/pasting from Word on my last review of Carnival Liberty in 2015. I also experienced issues with spacing between paragraphs (too many spaces).

 

Today I'm basically just skimming through but will read in detail later on when I get caught up around here. You both look so nice in your wedding pictures. I love the others that you have posted as well. I can't believe the flight from LAX is only 8 hours!!! I was thinking it was much farther. We had a direct flight from Washington Dulles to Honolulu and that was a 10 hour flight. But it's also a flight from the east coast. We flew out over San Francisco but I couldn't see much as it was all fogged in. If we were on the left side of the plane, we *may* have been able to see San Jose (where I lived until I was 10) and Mt. Umunhum, which I was able to see from my bedroom window.

 

Again, looking forward to getting a chance to sit down and reading your review.

 

Hiii!! So glad you found my review, and I hope you enjoy reading along! How was Hawaii?? That is still on my to-do list, but we keep planning big vacations to far away places so we never have enough vacation days for a short trip like going to Hawaii (since we can get direct flights to Maui from SJC and be there in about 4 hours, it is totally doable over a long weekend if we ever get our acts together to plan it!).

 

I am sure you flew right over us, but you must have been very high up if you weren't landing at SFO or SJC. I just had to look up Mt. Umunhum because I've never heard of it, but guess what... I can see it from my bedroom window in our house now!! We live in South San Jose and our bedroom faces South and West and looks right at Mt. Umunhum but I never knew it had a name! How funny!!

 

As for the spacing thing, I only noticed the issue when Cruise Critic changed the format of their forums last year. I did not have any issues when I posted my Celebrity Equinox review in March/April 2016, but that was still with the old forum format. I can't figure out how to fix it other than just manually re-entering the spaces between the words that get messed up, but it's definitely annoying and means I can't just throw a post up quickly like I used to.

[deladane]

01 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

 

After an amazing 9 hours of sleep, I woke up at 5am to the sounds of roosters crowing in the distance. Literally! Luckily, we could not hear them inside our room and they are not what woke me up, but once I stepped out onto the porch in the early morning light, I could hear them loud and clear! They continued to crow for quite a while out in the distance (in fact, we could pretty much hear roosters crowing all day long… not just in the mornings!) It was still too early to pick up our breakfast, so I spent some time on the porch catching up on notes for this review in my trip journal and enjoying the beautiful view.

 

0106 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

 

 

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Our bungalow:

0118 by deladane, on Flickr"][/url]

 

Side note: Moorea (as well as many other French Polynesian islands) has a bit of a problem with stray dogs. While driving around the island, we were constantly on the look out for stray dogs wandering out into the street (seemingly unaware of oncoming traffic, so it was shocking that we saw adult dogs… you’d think most wouldn’t have survived to live beyond being puppies!) Most of these dogs were not aggressive, they just wanted food. There were 3 dogs that we frequently saw at our hotel… they would be right there to greet us when we stepped out of our car coming home each day and would follow us right up to our porch. We got to the point where we quickly had to open our gate on the porch, run through, and close/lock it behind us or the dogs would have come up onto the porch with us. Faby shooed the dogs away whenever she saw them, so clearly they are not welcome at the hotel, and there was even a sign inside our bungalow asking us not to feed the dogs. One dog came out to greet me as I was taking photos on the beach this morning.

 

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At 7:15am, I walked up to the lobby to pick up our baguette and coconut bread. Faby kept a tally of what bread we purchased throughout our stay, and told us to pay in XPF cash when we checked out. She also had some jam and butter stocked in the fridge that we could purchase if needed. We enjoyed our bread on the porch paired with the brie we picked up yesterday at Super-U. When we finished, we quickly finished getting ready and left a little after 8am for our tour.