Marvelous Moorea

In her freshman year, my daughter told me that she wanted to spend her junior semester abroad at UC Berkeley’s research station in Moorea. I had no idea where Moorea was. Now, I do. Moorea is an island west of Tahiti in French Polynesia. We (all her West Coast relatives) were very fortunate to be able to visit her during Thanksgiving week.


After an eight hour overnight flight from LA, we arrived early in the morning to Tahiti. At the airport we were greeted by Polynesian dancers and given a small bottle of Monoi oil. Monoi oil is a blend of coconut and tiare flowers. A drop of it makes your skin feel soft and scented like a gardenia.


To get to Moorea, you either fly or take a ferry boat. My daughter highly recommended having a car on the island, and she was right. We rented a car and drove it onto the ferry boat. Even though you can drive around the island in ninety minutes, there is not much public transportation and cabs add up. Click on photos for an enlarged view.

Our first stop was to tour the Gump Research Station on Cooks Bay. What a scenic place for students to do field work. No wonder everyone we met there was happy. We saw the different projects the students worked on, the classrooms, and the living areas. The photo below is where most of my daughter’s field research on giant ferns took place. I listened to her presentation a few times…ask me anything!



We stayed the first few nights at the Intercontinental Resort on the northwest coast of the island. This resort is wonderful with dolphins, turtles, kayaks, overwater bungalows, entertainment….The only shock was the price of the meals. We spent the latter half of the week in a house rental in Maharepa. Maharepa has a small commerce area with banks, a grocery store, a patisserie, a few restaurants and gift shops (black pearls are big here). Our house slept eight and was walking distance to the commerce area so we could shop daily for our meals or eat at restaurants much more affordable than at the resort.


There’s lots to do on this tiny island of 16,000 people, but what I enjoyed most was the peace, beauty and remoteness of Moorea. There are no traffic lights. One two-lane road wraps itself around the island. The food is fantastic and anything produced in France is cheap here. We stocked up on pate, cheese, and wine.


If you love to snorkel, Moorea is snorkeling heaven. The reef around Moorea creates shallow and narrow channels. Where we stayed on the north shore, the reef contains fifty percent of the island’s coral which was home to a wide variety of beautifully-colored reef fish. Also spotted were eels, sea cucumbers, and crabs (more later on crabs).


Thanks to underwater cameras, I got to see what everyone else saw. I borrow from Dr. Seuss here.









In the center of this lush tropical island are the mountains. We drove up a windy road to the Belvedere lookout for some magnificent views. There are lots of hiking trails, but rain can make it a muddy venture.


Learning to speak Tahitian was a fun tongue twister process that made us sound like a bunch of roosters. The upside to not mastering Tahitian was that speaking French seemed much easier. Here are a few words we tried to learn:

Hello – ia orana (yo-rah-nah)
Thank you – mauruuru (mah-roo-roo)
Good Bye – nana (nah-nah)


Back to the crabs. One night as I drove to dinner, hundreds of crabs decided to migrate across the main drag. I cannot tell you how squeamish I felt driving over them. My consolation was that I provided dinner for the stray dogs that sleep by the sides of the roads at night.



One of my accomplishment’s as a parent was not passing my fear of the ocean to my daughter. Even with a snorkel and mask on, I think she’s the prettiest fish in the sea.