May 2, we awoke to find the ship approaching its first island destination of Raiatea.

In case you’re wondering, those are the leis we were greeted with that we hung on our porthole windows. Mine’s this one:

Since we were still out at sea and there was not much to do, we went to the onboard gym for our first and only workout there for the trip. =P Walking around after the workout, we saw pretty landscape as we coasted through French Polynesia.

This is the Deck 8 swimming pool, which we didn’t waste time in. If we wanted to get wet, we got in the warm bathwater ocean.

Wanna join us in these poolside lounge chairs?


We had breakfast here about half the time…

…and breakfast here at the deck on the back of the ship the other half of the time.

I’m on Deck 8, Mr. W’s on Deck 7. Hellooooo down there!

Around this time, I had lost Mr. W, so I explored more of the ship alone. I discovered a Tahia Collins boutique. She’s a Tahitian pearl designer.

Given the price of the above, I was scared to find out the price of the below.

Um, my birthday’s coming up. Anyone? …Yeah, that’s the same silence I got on the ship. I went back to the room to find that we had docked at our first port, Raiatea, the largest of the Leeward islands, and the second largest of the Society Islands in French Polynesia (the largest being Tahiti, where we’d just left). Raiatea has a “sister island” called Taha’a, which is our next port. The two share a coral reef, so the theory is that these two may have once been one island.

Porthole windows = neat stuff.

Off to explore the tiny dock town, we found that the activities directors were right in that the whole island would look rather sleepy, as it was Sunday and just about everything was closed.


Normally, this town would be bustling with vendors and shops, we hear.

We did find a couple of street vendors selling their home-grown watermelon.

Oh, look, something we don’t see anymore at home…

Oh, look, something we see too much at home…

We walked to the edge of the docks so I could take some pretty pictures, while doing my best to ignore catcalls and wild waving from Polynesian dock workers who walked around with their shorts down as they prepared to pee against a wall (which, as it turned out, they wanted me to watch).


A monsoon had struck the islands a few months back, and the damage is evident on some docks and also underwater with dead branch coral seen everywhere when we later went snorkeling.

Oh, look, our ship!


Howdy. Let’s walk back now, and I’ll show you our room.

See those 2 portholes I’m pointing at? That’s it.

We can see our leis from the outside of the ship.
Back onboard, we ran across a Polynesian shell bracelet making class. Since I missed this class, I guess I’ll have to buy my shell jewelry from vendors. =P

Now why can’t all classrooms look like this? Cuz this is what you see on the other side of the students:

Here’s a zoomed in shot of that sailboat out there.

We went back to our cabin to change and get ready for our first excursion, a speedboat ride out to another island for a tour of a Tahitian pearl farm, followed by a snorkeling swim. Here you see our tourguide, some fellow excursionists, and Mr. W looking like an urban cowboy.

Arrival at the pearl farm!

Why can’t my work office have this setting? Yes. I think my work building should have a dock. Who do I talk to about that?

Here our tourguide explains how the pearl-producing oysters are kept on ropes dangled into the water so they can be kept track of.

A demonstration of pearl nucleus implantation (the nucleus is made of Mississippi River mussel shell!) and extraction.

I would love to show you snorkeling photos, but Mr. W hadn’t figured out how to work his underwater camera at his point yet, and all the underwater photos from this trip were overexposed. We’ll soon have better ones from future snorkeling trips. Stay tuned!
(As always, rest mouse pointers on photos for captions.)