Day 24 - Friday Jan 20 Moorea, French Polynesia

Moorea photos

position at 8:00 am: S17:29:37 latitude W149:42:23 longitude
(Papeete, Tahiti)
temperature: 83F and 84% humidity
distance since FLL: 9081 miles

Debbie slept in until after 6am this morning. No sunrise for her today. Instead she senses motion. We were sail to at 6:30am, but she is awakened before 6am by it. At 6:03am when she finally gets up to look outside, we are about 12 feet away from the dock and moving forward. There is one van with one woman to see us off at the dock. We guess everyone was listed as onboard and there was no reason to wait to sail.

Debbie gets showered and dressed by the time Clay returns from his morning deck walk. We go up to LaVeranda. You can probably sense what happens next. The anxiety is building... There are NO CHOCOLATE CROISSANTS, NO STRAWBERRIES. Debbie hears a man behind her at the buffet, bellow "BRING ME SOME RASPBERRIES!" Oh, ok. We have NEVER seen raspberries on the buffet, Debbie has always gotten hers in Compass Rose. She puts a few slices of bacon on a plate and goes to sit down and order the special French Toast. When Clay comes to the table, she tells him. Now I know what to do. Clay asks what, bellow your wish?! We have a good laugh. But, Debbie does not think much of Voyager's French Toast. It is just not special or even that good. All the breads we have eaten aboard have been fantastic. The French toast is just too thick, it is just plain gummy white bread with golden raisins. It is not good bread, or cinnamon bread, it is sliced too thickly and is just gooey in the middle. Still something wrong with the cappucino. On the way out, Debbie catches Anna and asks her what is going on with the chocolate croissants. Anna looks confused. Debbie tells her they have not served chocolate croissants for 4 days now and she wonders what is going on. What is the problem? When will it be remedied. Anna tells her they usually serve chocolate croissants every 2 days. Debbie puts up her trembling hands and tells Anna, "NO, it has been FOUR days. I have been counting, waiting, watching, checking every restaurant. NO CHOCOLATE CROISSANTS! FOUR DAYS!" Anna, to her credit, cracks up and laughs in Debbie face. Anna said, "I can see there is a problem. I'm gonna look into this for you. Four days is TOO LONG to go with NO CHOCOLATE CROISSANTS." Then she asks for our suite number. We'll see.

Last night with all the other excitement, we got a door letter. It said that if we wanted a certificate that said we had crossed the equator, we should go to reception today and provide and names and cabin numbers and the certificates would be delivered in a few days. What is up with that? What does it cost them to print a certificate and deliver it to people who don't care either way, or won't keep one if they did get it? Anyway, we went to reception after discussing the NO CHOCOLATE CROISSANTS crisis with Anna.

Debbie is still steamed about breakfast and can't figure out what exactly we will do today. The circle island guide is not as detailed as the one from yesterday. Moorea has white sand beaches and she might actually want to go to a beach today. But, after sweltering yesterday in suits under clothes, she is trying to determine if she should wear the suit or just carry it, etc. Clay just wants to go get on the tender. We docked on our port side yesterday and we are tendering from port side today. Clay has seen several tenders go out full of passengers and come back empty. There is no announcement made that tendering has begun. We are expecting the rental car to be delivered at 9am and Debbie sees no reason to sit out in the sun and wait by arriving out there early. We are met at the 4th floor atrium by Jamie, the cruise director. He asks if we are going ashore independently. What are we doing? Debbie tells him that we have a rental car being delivered. He says, OK we can go on the next tender. We get to the next set of stairs down to the tendering area and are met by Dionne, the social hostess. Same quiz. Same answer. We will be allowed on the next tender which is leaving in a few minutes. There are several crew and 3 passengers besides us onboard at about quarter of 9am. We have seen tenders running for at least the last half-hour. We don't intend to be special, but if there are never announcements made about when tender is available or when you can leave the ship then every passenger aboard that is not on an RSSC excursion has to act like some kind of special jerk and just show up uninvited or else never leave the ship at all. We just don't understand and we did not see this problem on Diamond when we did not take any ship's excursions at all. It is just a problem we have never seen before and we don't understand why it exists on Voyager.

Walked a little through the dockside vendors and Debbie was interested but Clay raced ahead and found Europcar. We got a newer version of the same car we had yesterday and it has a working reverse. The car we had yesterday had a completely different stick shift configuration, R was labeled as being in a different place. So, we still don't know what was up with the car from yesterday. Today, though we have reverse. The pressure should be off with this and the shorter distance, fewer roads and fewer cars and people on Moorea. Wrong. Clay is racing ahead again. Now including his ability to back up. We zip around Cook's Bay and back half way to turn up a dirt track. Now it does have a sign to the Belvedere, but the 2 circle island guides Debbie has printed out and the 2 maps do not say to go this way. Clay is a man on a mission. We drive for 30 minutes on an ever narrowing, winding dirt track. We see farmers and chickens. The scenery is amazing but Debbie still has to pitch a fit to get Clay to stop to take any pictures. Yesterday, we had fun doing this. It was so great to be driving and in a car again. (Even one without reverse!) Today, we are just completely at odds. Clay does not know where he will get lunch. Debbie can't answer this, so apparently the idea is to get the drive around the island over and get back to the ship. We tendered, so Debbie has no intention of returning before she must. We finally connect with the paved road up. It is about 12 feet wide and has a faded white stripe painted in the middle. There cannot be six feet of pavement on either side of the line. There are no shoulders. The curves are mostly 90 degrees and the grade is almost straight up and down. Clay grouses that now that we are on pavement, we are really in trouble. There are loads of Taxi vans and big buses! You have to move over for the buses. Fortunately, we have no AC so we have the windows open and can hear the oncoming cars before there is a problem. We have a tougher time today avoiding the bus groups, but there is really not much to see here like on Tahiti. Signage is better on Moorea, but there are so few roads and so few attractions that it really doesn't matter much.
It is very hot, humid and we caught one big rain in the morning. We were at the Belvedere first thing, back down and blew by Opunoho Bay with no pictures. No Pictures of Cook's Bay either except right at Voyager. We stopped at Tiki Village Theater. It was rather sad. We had a nice talk with the people selling black pearls there. They were curious to know where all the ship's tour buses were. We were no help. Debbie fed Clay some Nabs and a bottle of water and persuaded him to continue on around the island and when we returned to civilization after the empty south coast that we would find a lunch place. It was after 1:30pm before we returned to civilization. Clay did rally some to the beauty after the crackers though and the drive was not unpleasant. We wound up having lunch about 5 minutes drive from the tender dock at Carameline Crepery. Debbie had crepes and a coke. Clay had Poisson Cru with coconut milk and a Tabu beer. (We saw on Voyager Today before leaving the ship that Capt. Dag and Chef Mike learned Dag's favorite Chinese poisson cru recipe from a friend of his who lives in Papeete and is Dag's son's Godmother. Mike said it will be served in Compass Rose tomorrow. So, Clay figured he should eat the other version here. He thought it was better than ceviche and then he had a pistachio milkshake.

We pulled out of Cook's Bay right at 5:30pm. We then went up to the next bay (Opunobu Bay) and sailed into that bay as well. The captain took us into the bay, and then did a 180 in place to turn us around to cruise out of the bay. It was impressive. A smaller cruise ship (Pangaea) was in the bay, and had a great view of our moves. We had dinner in the Compass Rose so Clay could try the Poisson Cru on ship. It was a little more spicy than the version he had on shore, but was good. Of course, the shore portions were about 10 times the ship's portion.

Moorea photos