Tales of the South Pacific - Vaitape, Bora Bora

Cruise Day 36

Monday, November 3, 2025

Halleluiah, the codeine worked, I didn’t cough at all during the night and Val and I both had a very good night’s sleep.  I did feel a little groggy and slept a little longer than I wanted to but got up feeling well rested and pretty good.

We are in Bora Bora today, and this is the start of a very busy time in the cruise as, including today, we have eight straight days in ports and nine of our next ten.

When looking at the overview map of our cruise, French Polynesia is the last area we'll be visiting.

This is a detailed view of French Polynesia and it's many islands.

Bora Bora is my favorite island in French Polynesia.  When we visited here in 2013, we spent two days in Bora Bora and loved it.  We spent our first day snorkeling and having a wonderful lunch on a motu (a small coral island).  On our second day we did a land tour of the island to give us a feel of the whole island.  As it is with most of French Polynesia, it’s all about the water with the beautiful beaches, azure water and reefs.

Today though, we have no plans; we would have loved to have gone snorkeling again today, but with Val’s hip problem, we just weren’t sure we could do it.  It turns out, it’s a good thing we didn’t do it anyway as neither one of us is 100% right now and anyway, I can’t imagine snorkeling with the coughs we’ve had.

A detailed look at Bora Bora.  We are docked in Vaitape (red marker).

We arrive in Bora Bora

Vaitape

We decided to just go ashore and walk around the town of Vaitape and continue Val’s quest to find the perfect pearl earrings.  This is a tender port so after our breakfast in the Neptune Lounge, we decided to take the tender ashore.  Because we had slept in this morning, there was no need to wait for priority tendering, so we just walked down to the tender platform and got right on the tender for the short trip to shore.

We were welcomed by music.

The area by the tender dock.

It was in the mid-eighties today, so it felt pretty warm with the humidity, and it was a sunny day, so it felt even warmer when directly in the sun.  We walked for a while, with Val finding a promising looking jewelry store, but she didn’t find anything she liked.  We were quite warm by this time and decided to go back to the ship but first decided to stop and have something to drink.  We sat down on a covered patio and had a cool drink and watched the people and cars go by.  There is only one main road that runs around the island, so the traffic was very heavy (relatively speaking).  Vaitape is not exactly a picturesque little town, but it is interesting.

We walked through town looking for shops selling pearls.  Vaitape is not very picturesque, but it still was an interesting walk.

Time for a cool drink in the shade, this is where I left my camera.

After finishing our drinks, we felt refreshed and decided to walk the other way into town from the tender pier and Val found several more jewelry stores and I found a Bora Bora t-shirt to replace my worn out one from our last visit.  After buying my T-shirt I made a very bad discovery, I had left my camera back where we had had our drinks.

I left Val to browse in the jewelry store and rushed back to the restaurant in a panic.  As I neared it a woman stopped me and asked if I was looking for a camera.  It turns out she worked at the restaurant and found the camera and gave it to another cruise passenger we had been talking to.  I walked on and saw the man she had given the camera to walking my way and sure enough he had my camera.  Since he didn’t know who we were, he was just going to bring it back to Ship’s Services hoping I might look for it there.  He opened his backpack, and I was reunited with my camera, what a relief.

This reminded me of when I left my backpack on the golf cart at Petra on the Grand Africa Cruise.  In both cases, very nice and helpful people saved me from a very stupid mistake.

After that we wandered around a while longer and then headed back to the tender and the ship.  We were quickly on the tender and back to (need I even say it again) the wonderful air conditioning of the ship.  It was getting a little late for lunch, and neither Val nor I were very hungry, so we decided to just have some snacks in the Neptune Lounge.  One thing I forgot to mention at breakfast was I decided to reduce my codeine to only one pill a day and see if that is effective, I’ll save taking it until after dinner when I am getting ready to go to sleep.

We relaxed for a while then went to trivia where we had a full team again.  We had our usual middle of the pack finish then talked a while catching up with Arthur and Donna and then returned to our room.  When we got back we went out on the balcony watching some passing rain squalls and the beginning of the sunset.

This is a shuttle that runs between the nearby islands.

I spent the rest of the time before dinner catching up on the blog as I had ignored it the last few days.  There was no casino for us after dinner tonight as we aren’t leaving Bora Bora until ten, so we returned straight to our room and after reading for a bit, called it a night.  Tomorrow we are in Raiatea.