I should really should have included Tahiti in the title of this blog, but it kind of ruins the flow so I left it off! But now I feel guilty about that since we are definitely, happily, here in Moorea, a small island about 25km away from Tahiti.

And we sure got a lot done on this day.

We left Brisbane at 8:00am, flew to Auckland where we sat in the airport for 4 hours, then flew for 5 hours from Auckland to Papeete, Tahiti.  We slept and breakfasted for about 10 hours at our hotel in Papeete, then took a ferry from Papeete to Moorea, checked into our resort and our AWESOME bungalow, swam in the ocean two or three times, wandered around for a couple of hours, did computer stuff for a couple of hours, went for a nice dinner, and we are now back in the room and it is still only 8:15pm. (If only I could have accomplished this much in 12 hours when I was working.)

We started at 8:00am today about 14 hours ahead of Toronto time.  And now we are 6 hours behind Toronto time.  This international Date Line thing is just way too hard to figure out – even my Dad has volunteered he doesn’t quite get it. To me, it just illustrates how arbitrary our definitions of time actually are, but we all adhere to them rigidly and so they work.

Meanwhile, we have this awesome over-water bungalow where our deck is actually out over the ocean, with steps down into the water, or we can just dive right in.  We can sit in our living room, or out on the deck, listening to the surf on the reef out front, and enjoying the wonderful sea breezes. Tonight we treaded water in front for about 15 minutes watching the sun set over the ocean.  And it looks like we can actually snorkel right off the deck –  we saw 5-10 very colourful types of fish in just a short time. The bellman who brought us here with our luggage mentioned that we might want to snorkel here but we really thought he was exaggerating!  Guess not.

I’ve had two worries about our stay in Moorea.  The first was that I’d be so ready to get home that I would be frustrated being stuck here for 6 days.  Well, that’s not going to happen!

The second was that our stay on Hamilton Island was so awesome, I worried Moorea would be a letdown. Again, not going to happen.  The two stays will be so completely different that a comparison is not even possible, and it will be very easy to give them both 10 out of 10!

Truthfully, my body and brain are really starting to complain about all the travelling and time changes over the past 8 weeks so I’m hoping I can get in some good seaside R&R while we’re here.  But what a challenge it will be to fit all of tomorrow into only 24 hours…

  Peter taking in the view from our seaside deck!