It’s Thursday afternoon and we’re waiting in the hotel lobby for our shuttle to begin the long trip home.

Yesterday was a nice hot and sunny day, and we got in a great kayak outing – broke all the rules with respect to staying within the boundaries and paddled to and around the island offshore from the hotel.  It was a gorgeous paddle in bright turquoise water.

For dinner, we left the resort and went to Le Coco sur la Colline, which is a lovely restaurant higher up than the resort so with a much broader view.   It is apparently a very famous restaurant in Papeete but they just opened this Moorea location 30 days ago.  It’s too bad they can’t get the Intercontinental to refer guests to them because it makes a wonderful change from the resort restaurant.  Peter was most excited because it had 2 geckos that wandered around upside down on the ceiling, busy catching flies. We had a terrific dinner there, nicely memorable for the last one of the trip (except for airports and airplanes.)

This morning after getting all packed up, we got in one last snorkel all around the resort and it was just lovely.  Saw even more new fish including some that are coloured in incredibly complicated patterns, and I kicked myself for the last time for not having an underwater camera.

It’s hard to believe we’ve been away for 9 weeks.  It sure flew by and I’m so glad I did this blog (over 70 entries!) because it will take us a while to process all that has happened.  Once we’re home, I’ll do one more entry on our final Final Thoughts, which we’ll be accumulating over the next couple of days.

  Farewell view of the South Pacific.