Mo'orea - one of our favourite places
03 July 2010 | Opunohu Bay, Mo'orea
Kat
After a few more days in Tahiti where we enjoyed a "bring your own pool to the pool party" in the marina (basically we all bought paddling pools and water pistols and set them up on one of the pontoons in the marina - lots of fun), got very bored watching the Miss Tahiti show (so much so that we left before the swimsuit show) and after a few cool scuba dives involving plane and boat wrecks, we decided to head back to the anchorage in Mo'orea that we had particularly enjoyed after the regatta.
The anchorage is on the east side of Opunohu bay on the north side of Mo'orea and is pretty large holding around 20 boats all anchored in around 3-4m in beautiful clear water over white sand. It's wonderful to be able to see exactly where your anchor is! We've been chilling out with Delos keeping very busy - we've climbed up to the Belvedere view point to see the fantastic view of Mt Rotui dividing Cook & Opunohu bays. We've also hired scooters and whizzed around the island and also inland on a crazy off-road scooter route to visit a waterfall where Brian demonstrated his impressive motorcross talents reaching a place where surely no scooter has been before. We also took the dingy to visit an area where they feed the stingrays and you can stand in chest-deep water and rub them as they all swim around you, which was absolutely fantastic and they feel amazingly soft. We have also done a few scuba dives in various places seeing lots of black tip reef sharks with fantastic visibility in the water and the boys have had some unsuccessful spear fishing and squid jagging trips which has kept them busy!
A particularly memorable event was a couple of days ago on a calm night when we rigged up a sheet on the back of Delos and watched Mutiny on the Bounty on the projector - it was filmed here and it was amazing to watch the scenery in the film and then turn around and see it for real, which definitely wins a prize for most atmospheric cinematic experience! We also had a beach pot luck and bonfire with lots of the other boats in the anchorage to celebrate various birthdays and finally headed back to Tahiti.
For more photos see: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/bradmcmaster1/TahitiMoOrea#
For Delos' blog see:
http://svdelos.blogspot.com/2010/07/gang-of-stalkers-on-moorea-by-brady.html
and also:
http://svdelos.blogspot.com/2010/07/hiking-snorkeling-and-coconut-crabs-on.html