Travel with Indigo

When the U.S. Navy abandoned Bora Bora at the conclusion of World War II it left behind a fine airstrip, now the island’s commercial airport, several batteries of shore artillery, a variety of bunkers, Quonset huts and the like, and 116 babies. Its personnel also took home memories of this Eden-like island and its attractive and eager young ladies. As young men will do, they talked up their memories and deeds, the word spread and Bora Bora became in short order the most famous of all the islands of the South Pacific and remains so today.  It is not more beautiful nor its people in any sense more appealing, it just has the cache. As a result, it also has the finest hotels. St. Regis, Four Seasons, Le Meridian and others are all there, each with its rooms perched on stilts in over-the-water bungalows and renting at not less than $1,000 per night, food excluded, and that’s off season. They go up to $25,000. It also gets all the cruise ships in the area, since no trip to French Polynesia would be complete without a visit here.

We employed Dino, a painfully slow taxi driver to take Chris, Pete and myself and several crew on a tour of the island’s entire circumference, all twenty miles of it. Among its other notable features, Bora Bora employs people growing pandanus trees from which leaves are harvested, dried and formed into thatch for the roofs of all those hotel over-the-water bungalows. When the business, and related employment, was threatened by the arrival of plastic simulacra with a far lower cost and longer life, the faux stuff was simply outlawed.

The three of us took the tender and zipped off to the St. Regis for a truly fine lunch in an idyllic setting. Along the way, with your humble servant at the helm, we fetched up on a reef when I misread one of the French ordinal markings for shoal areas. No harm done, just a few more gouges in the tender hull and a ding in the outboard’s foot.

It was a planned convenience that our anchorage was sited just at the dock for the long famous Bloody Mary’s bar and restaurant. It’s a large place and friendly enough but smacks of mass tourism. Bus loads of cruise ship passengers arrive regularly. An interior feature of note is its floor of pure white sand, which the owner complained must be replaced every year. Its men’s room is, so they claim, rated among the World’s Top Twenty Men’s Rooms. Whether it deserves this distinction I couldn’t say, not having visited the rest (that I’m aware of), but it is surely among the most unusual. Hanging in front of the granite trough-type urinal is a chain that when pulled flushes the thing and hanging from the end of the chain is a finely carved and brightly polished phallus. This caused me to wonder what the ladies’ restroom flush chain must look like. Never did find out.

Pete and Chris flew home from Bora Bora, going first to Papeete, then onward to A and home.  After delivering them to the airport in the tender, I went scuba diving with Captain John and Fiona in about sixty feet of water just outside the island’s fringing reef. Since I hadn’t dived at all in many years, it took awhile to get the hang of it and when I finally did and began to look around some I saw eight or ten smallish black tip reef sharks, a few gray sharks, and a wide variety of fish, large and small. All was going swimmingly, so to speak, when there arrived on the scene five very large–about ten feet or so–and menacingly curious lemon sharks. One of them passed not more than four or five feet below my fins, apparently not the least fearful of me. We decided then that a cold beer seemed in order.

While in Bora Bora, the crew and I dined at the renowned Hotel Bora Bora, whose dock was just a half mile from our anchorage, and the Hotel Bora Bora Nui, located on a large nearby motu. But all agreed the finest dining on the island was on Indigo with Chef Fiona.