We only spent 6 days in French Polynesia, four of them diving in Fakarava and two stopovers in Papeete. So our summery has to be seen in this context.

Diving in Fakarava is simply amazing, one of the most fascinating diving spots in the world. We marveled at the colorful fish and often felt as if swimming in the middle of an aquarium. However, what makes Fakarava so special are the many grey reef sharks that literally surround you at certain spots.

The Te Ava Nui Diving Center was a good choice: really cool staff but highly professional, security oriented and extremely knowledgeable. What else can you ask for? We are not very experienced divers, but managed with the great assistance of our instructors. There are strong currents and most dives go at least as deep as 30 to 32 meters. With a little more than 20 dives, we were among the least experienced divers in each group. Rangiroa, a neighboring atoll, is even more technical, with even stronger currents and dives down to 45 meters, so we just picked the right place.

Apart from diving, the atoll is a nice, laid-back tropical place, but do not expect a lot of things to happen or to do. We met a few people who did not dive and they got bored soon!

Since tourism is only developing there, everything is still untouched and unspoiled, although one big problem exists already: what to do with the waste? Now some is buried in a big hole in a far away corner of the island, but this can hardly be a solution for a future tourist destination or any place.

One of our loveliest memories of Polynesia is the gracious costume to greet arriving friends & guests with an “ei”, a flower garland worn around your neck. These are often made of the sweet smelling Tiare flower, so typical for the islands.

But … There is a “but” in French Polynesia: this is REALLY expensive! It must be considered as a real splurge during a Round the World Trip. In six days, we spent a mind-boggling amount of 1.000 Euros per person. This includes the flight Papeete - Fakarava - Papeete, for 280 Euros per person and seven dives, for 315 Euros per person (ouch!). For accommodation, we spent 60 Euros per night, a bargain for French Polynesia. The reason we did not spend even more is that we stayed in clean and pleasant budget places, but nothing fancy AND most important with kitchen-use.

This is a must for those who are not prepared to spend 200 Euros per day for two just on accommodation and food. Only once we ate out and otherwise cooked the usual cheap grab, like pasta, canned raviolis or tuna fish. The only restaurant we frequented in Fakarava deserves mentioning though, the name is rather unappealing: “Snack”, but it serves huge amount of superb food in a very tastefully decorated ambience.

Photo: Guillaume Fuenfrock, 5Rock Production, Fakarava, French Polynesia.

Our flight from Fakarava back to Papeete took us first to Rangiroa, so we got a glimpse of this atoll as well, before we continued to Papeete. Since we were warned by fellow travelers that restaurants close early, we rushed into the center around 06:30 pm and found a ghost town. Everything was closed, shops, businesses and we could not find a bar or restaurant.

We walked along the waterfront expecting this to be the hot spot in town, but the main attraction were three gigantic cruise ships in the harbor. There, finally we came across a few places that were open, but most oft them sleazy looking. At the only decent place we had a “flammenkueche”, a Flemish dish, made of thin crispy dough sprinkled with cheese, French wine and mineral water from Germany.

Neither of the building we passed was particularly impressive, most of them rather faded. From what we have seen nothing justifies the hype about this town except maybe the scenic high green mountain in the background.

We spent again the night at Chez Myrna, a family run bed and breakfast with kitchen use, tucked away in a side street, two kilometers from the center. With 52 Euros for a double room with shared bath, it is a bargain in this corner of the world! The owner offers pickup service to and from the airport for 13 Euros one way, a lot less than a taxi. Unfortunately many flights arrive late at night in Papeete so you can hardly avoid spending a night there. We figure the ideal trip would be to arrive in the morning and leave in the evening.

Property prices in Papeete simply blew our minds when we window shopped at a local real estate agent: a 95 square meter apartment sells for 1.6 million Euros and a beautiful house with sea view and 900 square meters of property for 8 million Euros. At this point we really wondered how much all these students from the many islands who are attending school in Papeete, pay for their boarding: most islands only have elementary schools and for any education above that, the kids have to move to Papeete.

Monday morning, the day of our departure from Fakarava, we visited Hinano pearl farm. Black pearls are cultivated throughout French Polynesia and the Cook Islands, the only place in the world, whereas white pearls are traditionally produced in China, Japan and now in Australia as well. It was the Japanese who about 100 years ago developed the technique of cultivating pearls.

The owner of Hinano pearl farm, Herr Günter Hellberg, gave us a brief tour through the production part of his business, which is basically a wooden shack on stilts in the lagoon off his property. This is where nine specialists work, each performing a precisely defined process.

The vital factor that determines the quality of the pearl is the so called “transplant”. It is a tissue taken from an oyster, then cut into tiny little pieces and inserted into another oyster together with a so called nucleus. These nucleuses need to be perfectly round and are therefore produced in factories. They look like a pearl but are made of shells.

So you have the person taking out the tissue of an oyster and cutting it up, needless to say the oysters dies in that process. The next step is to open the oyster that receives this transplant just a tiny bit otherwise the oyster would be killed. Then, the “main” specialist inserts the transplant and the nucleus in the tiny opening and closes the oyster. In this process, this specialist may come across an oyster that seems to have the perfect color and thus the right genes. He would then use the tissues of that oyster rather than inserting the pearl. Once the oyster is filled and closed, a small hole is drilled into the edge of the oyster and it is tied to large plastic grid. These grids are fastened about 100 meters off shore in the lagoon at 6 to 10 meters below the waterline.

After 1.5 years, the first pearls are ready to be harvested. Each oyster is opened only a tiny bit to see if the pearl is of good quality. If this is the case that same oyster is used again, because the transplant has proved to be of high quality, only another nucleus is added. This process can be repeated up to three times.

The five factors that determine the value of a pearl are its shape, perfect surface, size, color and the shimmer. A pearl of 14 millimeters, perfectly round and with a flawless surface can sell for as much as 2.000 Euros, but only 2% of all pearls are top quality. At the shop next to the farm, single pearls or jewelry made of pearls are for sale, somewhere between 10 and 4.000 Euros! But as far as we can judge, Hinano pearl farm seems to have really attractive prices compared to other islands in French Polynesia.

The main customers of Polynesian black pearls are China and Japan: 85% of all pearls are exported to Hong Kong, Shanghai and Kobe. The 15% remaining is sold to the rest of the world. The main producer of Black pearls in French Polynesia is Monsieur Wang, a man of Chinese descent as his name indicates, maybe explaining why the local population claims that “all black pearl business is in Chinese hands”.

The choice of the Te Ava Nui diving center was definitely a great one: everyone there is just nice and relaxed, but when it is about diving, they are all extremely professional and security oriented, just what we are looking for. The instructors know the lagoon inside out and the fauna you find here, making these few days an unforgettable experience!

The reason for the incredible amount of fish around the atoll is the two “passes” in the reef of the atoll. These passes, one in the north and one in the south, are raptures in the reef around the lagoon and at these points there is a lot of exchange of water. The saltier warmer water of the lagoon meets the less salty, cooler water of the ocean and thus resulting in lots of nutrients, which means lots of fish. And lots of fish means lots of predators, thus the huge number of sharks that can be seen here, one of the highest concentrations in the world!

We are always excited before each of our two excursions per day, because we simply know that we will get to see something new and exciting. No matter if we drift dive in the passes in a strong current, the very place where you find sharks, or in a corral garden, we are sure to enjoy some of the best diving ever.

At least once a day, we dive through the passes and enjoy being surrounded by sharks, clinging carefully on to corals so that the current does not wash us away. Having no gloves, our fingers are already very sore. For us these are very challenging dives, even though the guides explained us that what we experience now is not a strong at current all. Nobody risks diving in the current moving away from the lagoon, since it can be extremely dangerous. There might be the risk that divers are sucked down when the warmer, saltier water of the lagoon goes underneath the colder, less salty water of the open sea. Once a group of very experienced divers tried this and was taken down 80 meters before being able to climb again!

The dive in the afternoon is usually much more “relax”, with little or no current, but always a few sharks to remind you that you are in Fakarava! There, we enjoy astonishing corals, schools of fish and lots of fish of any color, at times so curious that they come very, very close.

Some of the regulars here complained that we did not see “the really big ones”, like Hammerhead Sharks, Tiger Sharks or Manta Rays. Well, we guess the usual suspects always complain! Diving in Fakarava will remain in our memory as the best spot we have ever seen, much better than what we had dreamt of: maybe being there is a little like doing a Safari in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, where we were overwhelmed by the number of animals we had the privilege to see!

Photo: Guillaume Fuenfrock, 5Rock Production, Fakarava, French Polynesia.

Our top priority for accommodation was kitchen-use since everything we heard and read about prices here seemed outlandish. Accommodation on the atoll is limited and most of them offer rooms with half-board for at least 65 Euros per person and day, but often much more. Only one or two provide cooking facilities, which is why we chose the Relais Marama. It has nice breezy bungalows with shared squeaky-clean bathrooms. The common area is large & inviting and includes a well-equipped outdoor kitchen, all this for “only” 60 Euros per night with breakfast, a bargain for French Polynesia!

A great plus is that drinking water, rainwater, is provided free of charge. If this might sound a bit too budget oriented, it does not if the bottle of water sells for 4 Euros in the supermarket. Relais Marama is also the only place with an Internet connection, of course a slow modem but for no less than 8 Euros per hour we are connected to the world!

Our first visit to the supermarket was a shock. Prices were so high that our initial reaction was “we should have brought food from Rapa Nui”, a place we already considered as very pricey: a pound of lettuce sells for 10 Euros, a bottle of cheap wine for 20. The cheapest food we could find was canned stuff. So our first lunch was a can of raviolis, a common meal as we discovered when we observed other guest’s culinary adventures. It reminded Gilles very much of his days as a student …

Since we are here during school holidays, the vast majority of the tourists on Fakarava are people living and working in French Polynesia and especially Bora Bora. Interestingly, all of them complained about Bora Bora as being a super expensive tourist ghetto, far from the image anyone has from what is supposed to be paradise! As it is the rainy season and therefore the low season, there are only few other tourists here, and only passionate divers.

After scuba diving, we often ride our bikes around the few kilometres of tarred road in absolute quietness, enjoying the lush tropical vegetation. We truly enjoy the postcard-like sunsets over the lagoon, the bushes with brightly coloured flowers and of course the ever changing colour of the shallow part of the lagoon.

What struck us immediately was how friendly people are on this atoll: everybody greets you on the street, no matter if you know the person or not. We were also surprised to see that on this tiny strip of land with no traffic to speak of, all people on scooters religiously wear their helmets, something you would never see in any South American metropolis and definitely never in a village! Well, the French know how to run their Territoires d´Outre-Mer, as their remaining colonies are called.

The reason why a few tourists come out to this atoll in the Tuamotu Islands is to spend as much time under the water as possible. Fakarava is one of the top-notch diving spots in the world with a marine life that is truly unchallenged!

We had contacted the Te Ava Nui diving centre from Rapa Nui and received a prompt answer from the owner, Jean Christophe, who also happened to be on the Easter Island. Yes, it is a small world! This was not the only coincidence: we took the same plane going from Hanga Roa to Papeete and from Papeete to Fakarava, so we had time to talk about diving and what would be a good and inexpensive place to stay.

Well, Fakarava more than met our expectations and they were very high, since many divers with great experience had told us it is one of the best diving spot in the world. We are just overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of fish we have seen so far, that is to say after five dives: of course you have the impression to dive into an aquarium as in Red Sea, with at times hundreds of small fish of all colors surrounding you.

But this is not what we came here for! In five dives, we actually saw more than two hundred Grey Reef Sharks, sometimes being surrounded by them and having them swimming between us. We also saw Silvertips Sharks resting on the ground: they are one of the very few species of sharks that can breathe without moving! One of them was far more than two meters long. We also saw many Eagle Rays, once a mother with three young ones, a lot of Napoleon Fish, some really big one, and the usual Barracudas, Parrot fishes and what not!

Another fascinating phenomenon was the large schools of fish: sometimes, it seems like penetrating a wall of floating shiny bodies. Often they are so close together that from the distance it appears to be one huge fish!

The people diving with us are all extremely experienced divers, some of them having been to the most famous diving spots in the world. Many of them are using state of the art equipment and cameras. A few gentlemen were truly shocked to see that we went down without a diving computer and even more horrified to hear we had only about twenty dives. “This is no place for someone with only 20 dives”, one German gentleman snapped at Gilles. Well, we enjoyed it as much as they did!

During the second dive, Gilles for the first time in his young diving career faced a major challenge. When the guide, Jean-Christophe, made the group report their air pressure, he had 80 Bars, just fine. Then he became preoccupied with his goggles and when he checked again he was down to 30 Bars, in what seemed to have been only a minute. By the time he reached the nearest guide he was down to 10 bars. During these seconds of light panic, he also felt that breathing became extremely difficult. Gilles simply clung on Jean-Jacques who gave him air through his “Octopus” and then passed Gilles on to Jean-Christophe, the guide in charge of our group, so he could at least do the required deco-stops to the surface. Quite an experience!

Photo: Guillaume Fuenfrock, 5Rock Production, Fakarava, French Polynesia.

The very name Tahiti probably triggers the wildest imaginations in most people, a tropical island with white sandy beaches lined with palm trees, populated by graceful people dressed in exotic costumes with flowers in their hair moving their hips to the wailing music.

Well, the truth is, Tahiti is a volcanic island with beautiful steep green mountain slopes and lush vegetation, but there are no beaches to speak of and the often overweight islanders dress in western clothes, speak French and obey to E.U. rules.

What Tahiti really stands for is the magic beyond it, the many islands or atolls of French Polynesia with a couple hundred inhabitants, luxurious resorts with bungalows over the water, the crystal clear water of a lagoon surrounded by dots of land, water in all shades of blue and green, palm groves and its famous black pearls.

Being the biggest island in French Polynesia with the only real city, Papeete, Tahiti mainly serves as a transport hub for tourists moving on to one of the many islands or atolls that can easily be reached by plane. Our first arrival was around midnight, so we slept a couple of hours in a cheap but pleasant pension, Chez Myrna, and left the next morning for Fakarava in the Tuamotus Islands, for some serious diving.

Staying about 5 kilometres from the centre, our only memories are barking dogs until late into the night and noisy roosters early in the morning. On the way to the airport, we saw lots of grand houses perched on the mountain slopes around the city. Papeete seemed as well quite a busy city with lots of traffic. Once our host explained that only 35.000 people live there but about 100.000 people work here, we were not surprised anymore.