5 stars, 4 stars… meh

Today started grey again,

The wind and rain were strong over night, the beach showed the after-effects, sun loungers in the sea, cushions everywhere – the beach hut team were fishing furniture out of the lagoon. The weather in the Pacific doesn’t do things by halves.

The fish put on a good show at breakfast time for our final morning on Bora Bora, plenty of leaping and fighting for the bread scraps thrown their way.

We finished packing and showered, 11:00 check-out soon came round. We went back to the turtle centre, they were clearing up after the night before as well – one of the resort’s electric vehicle had managed to fall into the turtle’s lagoon, it had been removing a lot of debris from the beach, this was now in the lagoon and the staff were trying to remove it.

I bought a t-shirt from their shop – all for a good cause. I’m in good company – on the wall they have pictures of previous visitors including Dolph Lundgren and John Travolta.

We had a last look in the gift shop and decided we didn’t need Tahiti themed shot glasses, glasses cases, phone covers or loud shirts. It was soon time for the airport transfer, when we arrived there was a ukulele serenade, sunshine and floral bouquets – leaving was a lot lower key.

The plane left a few minutes late because the paper work wasn’t complete, as we climber over the ocean we finally go to see Bora Bora from above, even on a grey day its an impressive site. We’re soon over Tahaa again, we could see the channel where we’d snorkelled a few days before. This felt like a proper flight, about 45 minutes back to Tahiti. As we start to descend we can see the island bought by Marlon Brando after he filmed Mutiny on the Bounty in Moorea. It was sold by his estate soon after his death and is now a luxury resort. His wish had been to keep it simple and unspoilt, it doesn’t appear that this has been strictly keep to.

We had a good view of Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, as we landed. Its larger than we’d expected with quite a large water front and container port.

Its a short drive from the airport to our final hotel in French Polynesia. The Intercontinental is supposed to be one of the best hotels on the island – a destination in itself according to Lonely Planet – but it leaves us cold, very large and impersonal, the room is okay but the worst we’ve had so far. To make things worse we can see Moorea where we started two weeks ago a few miles across the water.

We wandered round the hotel, at the far end of the complex there are two giant ‘footprints’ in the rocks in the sea, this is where legend tells that a mountain in Moorea was saved from being stolen by a giant throwing a spear from Tahiti.

We spent a pleasurable hour re-arranging our luggage to meet Air New Zealand’s strict baggage policies then had dinner.

Obviously the poor weather hasn’t helped our impressions over the last few days but we’ve concluded that 4 and 5 star luxury hotels aren’t really for us – we were much more at home in Raitea, just fifteen rooms, very friendly, much better food too – for vegetarians at least.