Take 4 sailors without boats, a bottle of wine, a ukulele without a tuner, a fervent desire to celebrate the holidays and way too much free time and what do you get?
Hi-larity.
How well can Vanilla really age?
Taha’a, Society Islands, French Polynesia
Hey see that name up there? Yeah, you try and say that on your own and you’ll understand exactly where Greg is coming from in this video.
Aside from having a deceptively difficult name to pronounce in the English language, Taha’a shares a reef with Raiatea and therefore the same volcanic soil. Continue reading “How well can Vanilla really age?”
The Tahiti-Moorea Rendezvous
Moorea, Society Islands, French Polynesia
Well, now that we got the whole troublesome sailing bit out of the way, let’s get to the partying…
…by getting in an even smaller boat, but this time with no means of automated propulsion and in the rain!
(We don’t get it either dude…)
The first thing we did was participate in the national sport of French Polynesia by competing in 4-man Polynesian canoe races. As we had actually sailed to Tahiti with our friends Allan and Alison, they cross-recruited us into their canoe and coconut shucking team.
Difficult to paddle and almost impossible to steer; how the heck did these people colonize the South Pacific in these things!? Continue reading “The Tahiti-Moorea Rendezvous”
Any excuse for a party!
The Tahiti Rendezvous
There is something you need to understand about sailors: they really need very little excuse to do two things:
1) Sail
2) Party
So any occasion where an actual legitimate reason exists to do both at the same time is guaranteed to draw a crowd. Enter the Tahiti Rendezvous, an annual celebration put on by the Tahitian government to celebrate those insane people who are both crazy enough to think that traveling thousands of miles by sail is a good idea and ingenious enough to actually pull it off.
The short of it is that basically everyone who sailed to Tahiti gets together to have a race to Moorea (her neighboring island) and celebrate the fact that we have actually made it to Tahiti. Which if you’ve ever spent 3 months traveling to a place, trust us, arriving is something worth celebrating.
And what better way to start off celebrating arriving at your destination, after sailing for weeks with no land in sight, than to immediately leave land and have a sailing race?
…It’s not like we said, or even really implied, that sailors made any logical sense.
Being as our current ride was unable to participate in the sailing race because, you know, due to the lack of the sails and all, we were nominated to be the committee boat and carry the band that would provide the soundtrack to our adventure. Continue reading “Any excuse for a party!”
Joining FURTHUR
Remember that this is your last chance to enter the draw for the Lonely Planet book:
Click here for the rules to enter the drawing!
And so begins a new era of our journey, with Brian and Motor Vessel FURTHUR! (Yes, Brian is a Deadhead. He’s such a big fan, he named his boat after their bus. Personally, I had no idea that they had a name for their bus, but the tie-dye printing on the stern for the lettering of FURTHUR clues you in that this is going to be a fun ride!)
Bora Bora here we come!
Onward to Bora Bora, the island you’ve all heard of and dreamed about – we’re actually going there!!! For our first visit with Tiffany’s Mom, we’re going by plane. And as we already knew, Tahitians don’t have the same dress code as the rest of the world! Here’s business casual as defined by the airport attendants:
Yeah, not your typical power suit!
Oh, the Air Tahiti Nui planes have a great symbol on them. It’s the Tahitian tiaré flower, one of their native flowers that has seven petals. It smells wonderfully like a gardenia, and can be found growing all over Tahiti. Tahitians are really into their flowers and “flower language”– The tradition shows that if a flower is worn on behind the left ear means Continue reading “Bora Bora here we come!”
Feeding the Wildlife
Moorea, Society Islands, French Polynesia
Most of the guidebooks about Moorea will at least mention feeding the sting rays.
Typically, you would need to rent a boat or hire a tour guide to go do this but since our old friends on FLY AWEIGH pulled into port a few days ago they offered to give us all a lift out to the reef.
We expected to see some rays at a distance and toss them a few fish. The rays had other plans and were happy to educate us on how this whole thing actually worked. Continue reading “Feeding the Wildlife”
Fine line between cute and slutty
Moorea, Society Islands, French Polynesia
(cont’d from previous post)
Finally, the Polynesian dance school also had a group of little girls, which were there either because they were in fact learning or just because they were ridiculously adorable.
How the heck do they get their hips to do that? It like they dislocate their spines from their pelvic bones or something. It boggles the mind!
One of the things we found interesting was just how young some of the kids who were learning the Tahitian dance were. One little girl was only five! It was something of a culture shock to see such young kids learning a dance with such sexual overtones to it! Interestingly enough, we did not find ourselves completely repulsed like we are when we seen pre-teens in the States wearing push up bras or hip hugging skin tight jeans. So what was the basis for the difference? Continue reading “Fine line between cute and slutty”
So, when are you coming home?
Tiffany: Last year Greg had a birthday post all to himself so he’s decided to keep the tradition alive this year. Please indulge him…
Greg: We have started being asked fairly frequently when we’re coming back, so I guess using that as a gauge, we’ve been gone long enough to be missed 😉
Again a year has passed and we’re still out here in the South Pacific. New island though so that counts as progress right?
Yes it’s a palm tree, but it’s a different palm tree!
This year was an experiment: Would it actually be possible to maintain a twice weekly text & video travel blog while sailing around the world? Well as we’re about to hit our first full year doing integrated entries yes, reckon it is. We are way more surprised than any of you that we’re about to post our 100th page of the new format. Lost count of the videos. According to WordPress it’s something around 400+. It’s been a BIG lift.
And now that we’ve done that, there is so much more to do! Again, you will see massive upgrades in the coming year. As we have learned in business and now blogging, start with the basics and build up as you go. Here’s a preview… Continue reading “So, when are you coming home?”
How do they get their hips to do that?!
Moorea, Society Islands, French Polynesia
So uh…what else do normal tourists do? Dance shows! Yes, tourists go to Tahitian dance shows!
We ended up at the Bali Hai hotel in Moorea for our obligatory Tahitian dance show which ended up being quite wonderful! Every Monday night this hotel puts on a free beachside show at dinner time. Figured we’d fall for the ploy, buy dinner and have a good time. As we’ve come to expect, the food was not cheap but at a show alongside it made it easier to rationalize. Also, this show was cool because it was put on by a local Tahitian dance school.
Instead of seeing paid professional performers, the idea was that we were supporting a group of locals and immigrants who were learning Tahitian dance in order to rebuild and preserve their dwindling cultural heritage. This is totally something we can get behind. Also, we thought watching students instead of tourism professionals would lead to us seeing more authentic dances than just the gussied up shows for the gringos…not that they call them “gringos” here but we are unfamiliar with the Tahitian translation. (Mostly due to the fact that we don’t think the islanders we’ve encountered so far think of tourists in this way.)
It was a great show. So you kind of expect the ladies right? Because basically what the average person thinks of when they hear the words “Tahitian dancer” is a young Polynesian woman. Continue reading “How do they get their hips to do that?!”