A 3 Hour Tour (well, maybe 4)

Just sit right back
And you'll hear a tale
A tale of a fateful trip,
That started from this tropic port,
Aboard this tiny ship.

- theme from Gilligan's Island


The weather grew progressively less worse so we felt increasingly somewhat confident enough to book a day-long lagoon excursion with a local family. We were picked up by a gregarious and (thank God) multi-lingual young Polynesian woman and driven to one of her family's two tour boats in the tiny village of Fare (fair-eh). When she wasn't laughing or singling along with her ukelele, she regailed us with native legends and interesting information about the island and its people. Her father played Skipper to her Gilligan.

Fortunately, the little boat was fast enough to outrun the black storm clouds that had been stalking us. We stopped for snorkelling and squeamishly watched our intrepid guide clambour down in to a draining ditch to feed chunks of raw fish to a swarm of three-foot long, blue-eyed sacred eels.





















Then it was on to a small pearl farming operation in the lagoon before we stopped for lunch at our host's coconut plantation house on the eastern-most muto.

The guest were enlisted to help set up and prepare lunch which included poisson cru. This is a local speciality dish consisting of small pieces of raw mahi-mahi mixed with lime juice, fresh squeezed coconut milk, salt, cucumbers, and tomatoes. Thank goodness, no cilantro. We had been avoiding this dish on the advice of our travel medicine doctor but it was so obviously fresh and exceptionally clean (and we were hungry!) so we took the plunge...and it was Deeeeeee-licious!


The hundreds of mullet fish swarming around our beachfront dining facility thought so too. Mostly they really seemed to like the look of Mark's meaty calves and thighs. Although eating with the fishes was cool, the highlight of the day was the drift snorkel we did after lunch. We hopped out of the boat about 200 meters off shore and let the current sweep us over coral heads and resident fish for about a kilometer. The water quite deep enough for sharks, but we didn't see any today.


Tomorrow we head for Bora Bora - and not a downpour too soon!