Part 8 - Bora Bora Day 4 - SHARKS

On our last day (Monday), Matt and I woke up to a beautiful day. We ate our last breakfast and went to the dock to meet Shark Boy and go on our shark feeding adventure.

He introduced himself as "I am shark boy, you are shark bait". Lovely huh. We stayed in the lagoon and went to the other side of the mainland and he dropped an anchor in about 4 feet of water and hopped in...and got attacked! These stingrays loved him. I have never seen a stingray flap its "wings" to get that far out of water before. Then we got in and they were just as friendly and really would climb up your back.

While we were playing with the rays, shark boy went out a little farther and threw a rope from a rock to the boat and told us to stay on one side and he would be on the other. Imagine the rope between the shallow end and deep end of a pool - that was about it. So we floated on our stomachs with our mask and snorkel on and held the rope and....

SHARKS!
Now I was a little overwhelmed and Matt's waterproof camera case doesn't change settings very well, so sadly some of these pictures are not the large size, but oh well.



There were probably 15 sharks swimming around with the rays and the fish. The sharks were 3-5 feet in length.






I don't know why, but it was scarier to come up and see all the fins thrashing around in the water, than to be under the water looking at them. I nearly died when a shark crossed onto our side of the line!! Matt just laughed at me. Sigh.


When shark boy ran out of food, the sharks seemed to leave again and we played with the rays who were convinced we had more food (as seen in Matt's hand).

I was a little squeamish.
Matt was not.

We also went snorkeling, which I am still bad at to look at the coral. I just wanted to go back to the sharks over the snorkeling - I'd rather be eaten by a shark than drown with a snorkel on!



So we went back to play with the rays.





After that awesome adventure, we took our boat to the other (our) side of the island. On the way there were so many dolphins swimming and spinning in the air. It was a sweet show they put on for us. Then we went to this island where we hung out on the beach for awhile and then had a variety of fruit.
The last picture Matt and I took:

After this we came back, took a shower, and checked out of our hut at 4pm. We got some dinner at the hotel and then took a ferry to Bora Bora airport. We took that flight (45 minutes) to Tahiti where we got on the Air Tahiti Nui flight to LAX (9 hour flight). Then we walked miles and miles (okay it just felt like it) through LAX to United to get on a flight to Denver. We landed in Denver and Cindy picked us up at the airport, where she drove us to Castle Rock and dropped us off at Manka's where we picked up Matt's Jetta that Manka fixed as a wedding present to us. Then we went to Safeway to get me milk and came home. We got home about 5:30pm Mountain time, which is 1:30pm Tahiti time, making our traveling from when we checked out 22.5 hours again. Long traveling both ways, but Matt and I had a blast together in the South Pacific and think that everyone should go visit! We thank Linda for planning a wonderful trip and sending us to all the different islands and different types of rooms. The End.

Part 7 - Bora Bora Day 3

On Sunday morning we got up and after breakfast Matt went off on his Scuba trip.



Below is his version:

Scuba sounded a little intimidating but as soon as they pushed me off (backwards overboard I may add) it was awesome. Two fairly good size sharks went right by us and then I looked at depth and said 23 mind you that's meters so like seventy feet! So many fish and really easy to see. After the first couple minutes I loved it and a few more sharks came back. So cool and pics to prove. Got out and gave us some hot tea and crackers and moved to another dive site close to hotel. So many fish and fun. I need some diving friends anyone?





Matt got back around noon and we hung out at the resort the rest of the day. Here I am playing with the timer again.

The sun either went behind a cloud or came out from behind one, and the water color changed!

Then we went crazy jumping in and trying to time it perfect. Matt made me put the waterproof case over his camera, so I kinda screwed up the setting and some of these pictures are smaller, but oh well.

After all the jumping in we opened our bottle of wine we bought the day before.


Sunset went over that mountain, but I took some pics anyway.

Then we took showers and I wrote some emails on my iphone while listening to music.

We got dressed up and went out to celebrate our last night in Tahiti. We each got an appitizer, a meal, and a dessert. I ordered lobster.

Matt ordered the best dessert in the world, lucky hes so nice and shared with me. (I think the picture is his meal though).

Then we sat in the little wicker eye drop chair. Reminded me of Men in Black.

It was a good last night in Tahiti.

Part 6 - Bora Bora Day 2

So we woke up in our beautiful hut on Bora Bora and ate some breakfast and got some more ponchos, because well it was raining again. We took the ferry from our Intercontinental to the other Intercontinental on the mainland and then just started walking to town (they said it was about a 10 minute walk). We were kinda walking behind this other couple that looked like they knew what they were doing, but when it started to downpour we looked a lot smarter in our ponchos than they did. They ended up at the super market to stock up on liquids, and while we planned to do that, we didn't want to do that and then just go back to our hut, so we kept walking. We came to an Avis, with this sweet little buggy sitting outside. It called our name, so we rented it. It is a 5 speed manual, but the lady said "no 5 speed", and when Matt tried it, sure enough, didn't work.


It was really sweet. We dried the seats with our towels and started to go around the island on the one road.
We stopped a few times at different look out points, but they were mostly the same thing, just looking at the outer ring of islands and the pretty blue colors of the water.

We took pictures anyway :)

I made Matt turn around when I saw Mufasa!!! This was a day care of sorts and had lots of paintings of all the Disney movies! I love Disney, and apparently so does the world! Yes, it started to rain again and our buggy didn't exactly have sides, so we put our ponchos back on.

It cleared up a little bit so we took the "top" off the buggy!

We stopped at Bloody Mary's the fancy famous resturaunt on Bora Bora where apparently all the cool people go. We just took a picture, I didn't see Keith Urban's name on the wall, so if it wasn't good enough for him, it wasn't good enough for me. Ha, jk, Linda said that it wasn't worth eating there, like Hard Rock here in the States. (Urban and Kidman honeymooned in Bora Bora at the St. Regis, which is the resort right next to us, and just so happens to be the place I picked out for Dad to stay! However, the tabloids say their hut was $15k a night, and the one I picked out for Dad was only $4k, so there must be a hidden hut somewhere at that resort).

So instead of Bloody Marys we stopped at Snack Matira, which is a sandwich joint right on the ocean and the side of the road. We ordered Mahi Mahi sandwiches and Matt ordered fries, which came right on top of the sandwich!

This is a picture of the snack joint.

We took the ferry back to our resort and took a much needed shower and then sat and enjoyed a beer (that we eventually got from the super market) on our porch. I am a master at the timer on Matt's camera. I like this picture, yes it is cheesy, but oh well.

Here is Matt and I standing on our porch with the volcano in the background (Mount Otemanu) in the background. I was going for a background pic on my computer, I think I did a pretty good job!


This picture shows us playing cards on our see through table. We played a ton of cards, both crazy eights and kings wild. I really wanted to get a deck of cards with Tahiti on them to remember our many card games by, but apparently card games are against their beliefs because I never found one in all the gift shops we went in - only Tarot cards.

Matt decided to do some wind surfing. I could not stop laughing about this, and took about 20 pictures of his attempts to wind surf without wind. I will spare you all the pictures, but here are a few of the pretty background ones.



After that we decided to walk to the ocean side of the resort, where in fact it was super windy! If you go back to the previous post and the airplane overhead shots, you can see where we were. It was neat, and Matt said it would be pretty to have our hut looking out into the nothingness, but I enjoyed being on the calm, many different blue, volcano side.