The Star Princess: Sunday, October 4, 2009

After four days at sea, it was time for our first of three days on land. We are now in Bora Bora and what a beautiful island it is. It’s just like you imagine an island in the south pacific is going to be. It’s very small, but with lots of green vegetation.

When we got off the ship, we got onto a local bus which had a cushion on the plastic seat and the windows were plastic, but we could put them down half way to get air and to see out more clearly when taking pictures. Our tour guide was a local fellow, but his English was quite good and his accent was not thick so we had no trouble understanding him.

Our guide showed us and told us about many sites along the way. Our first stop was to see a pareo demonstration. Pareos are one long rectangle piece of material which can be tied in many ways around a woman or man like a dress or skirt. The women at this stop made these pareos and showed us how that was done. First they take a white rectangle strip of material and fold it in different ways and dip it in dye. They then lay the material on long pieces of wood like a table and put items on top of the material (like shell shapes and turtle shapes and letters). When the dye dries, the shapes are then formed on the material. A native woman also showed us how we can wrap/tie the pareo around us to wear it. They also provided a taste of local fruits: mangoes, papayas, poi, breadfruit, grapefruit and coconut.

After seeing many more beautiful vistas, we stopped at a very famous bar called ‘Bloody Mary’s’. A lot of famous people have sipped drinks there and there are lists of their names on boards before you enter the bar. It wasn’t anything amazing in our opinion and the drinks were very overpriced. I think a drink of Coke was something like $16US. Needless to say we didn’t get anything to drink but we did get our picture taken there just to say we had been there.

One thing that we thought was different in Bora Bora is that there are many dogs wandering the island all on their own. No-one seems to worry about them and they don’t seem to worry about people either.

It was definitely a tour well worth the money and the island of Bora Bora is simply lovely.

After the tour, we took a short walk through the shops that we there by the ship dock, but the items were so expensive. For one little t-shirt for our grandsons, they wanted between $20 and $25US. We decided to wait until we got to Tahiti to look for a t-shirt from the Polynesian islands.

Back on board and time to relax in the sun. We took our books up to the swim deck and enjoyed laying on the deck chairs and reading to our hearts’ content. It really is nice to just sit and relax. We know we are going to be full-on once we get to Sydney so we are really taking time to do not much of anything on this trip (at least in the afternoons).

Supper tonight was delicious - we had a wonderful turkey dinner that reminded Sue of Thanksgiving/Christmas. The only missing was the company of our family. :-)

After dinner, we went to the show which was billed as ‘Variety Showtime’ starring Don Ware and Martin Lewis. Lewis is a magician and was quite enjoyable to watch - some of his tricks were so fun and it was amazing to us to see how he did some of them. Ware is a comedian who started off his show by asking certain ‘heroes’ to stand up to be recognized: firefighters, police officers, veterans and teachers. I appreciated being recognized for my contribution as a teacher, but I felt he took up too much time asking people who were standing what they had done, for how long, etc. Once he started his comedy show, however, it was great - he was so funny and had a laughing up a storm (at times we had tears running down our face).