Raiatea
raiaateaLike not to visit Raiatea
That Raiatea was like my kind of island: Like Maupiti it was not a favourite or well-known tourist spot in Polynesia, and given its greatness (it is the second biggest isle after Tahiti) there would be a lot to do.
Other than this is a contribution about how I messed up my Raiatea years. Any decisions I made when I planned my journey to the Isle? At the beginning of my South Pacific voyage, I included Raiatea in my route for the above stated reason. Whilst there are two travel agencies on the islands that offer all-day excursions to the most important places of interest, I chose a less active stop.
As I knew I would travel fast in Polynesia, I thought Raiatea would be my stop. When I found an accomodation near several footpaths, I thought this was how I would do it. When I was three nights on the isle, I was planning to stay one of these nights on a vulcano to take pictures of the laguna, one of them taking a sunbath on the shore and the other one taking a full excursion to the near isle of Tahaa.
Actually, I didn't do much on Raiatea. I' d been researching Raiatea one afternoons, before I decided to go, but that was a limitation of my read. There is also the fact that there is not too much information about less frequented places in Polynesia in France as well. Only when I got to my lodging did I realize that it was almost not possible to circumnavigate the entire archipelago without a vehicle.
But I didn't know that I live in a remote part of the archipelago without anything useful with a 5 km area. Up to my arrival I didn't even know that the isle had no beach! Instead of thinking that everything would be great, I should have asked the owners of my Airbnb flat all the question about the islands - that's what I did in the maldive islands when I couldn't find any information onlin.
I can' get to Tahaa from my flat. Had I done that, I would have stayed in a much better place and had a much more pleasant journey. It was a beautiful flat with a large private garden with a beautiful view of the Raiatea Laguna and simple entrance to the footpaths that lead to the hillsides of an extinguished mt.
It was also in the midst of nowhere and I felt run aground all my life. Not one shop was near the flat unless you thought that a 10+ km roundabout to buy something was a walk, so I tried to expand my little snack pocket, which I had purchased at the beginning for my whole journey.
It was too far away to get to the shuttle station to go to Tahaa. To put it briefly: I was insulated, there was no place to eat, I couldn't find where the walk came from, and because it was raining there all my life, I couldn't even use the swimmingpool. The Raiatea is a large country with many possibilities for shelter.
If I had been there, I could have gone to buy a souvenir on wet summer evenings, arrange a day out to Tahaa and get good cuisine. Instead, if I returned, I would spend the night at Teavapiti Lodge or Hotel Raiatea Lodge. In Polynesia, France, I was at the peak of the cyclonic and monsoonal periods.
As in Maupiti, it was raining a great deal in Raiatea. As a matter of fact, it was raining every morning until my last noon. If I had stayed in a better place, the walks I had been planning, tanning, lying around the swimming pools and possibly the days I would have explored Tahaa probably wouldn't have helped.
During my stay in the Cook Islands it hardly ever rain - many local people could not stop to talk about how arid the wet seasons had been this year. Naive as I thought it would be in French Polynesia. Instead of planing walking and sun bathing, I should have reserved an insular round trips as soon as I realized that my journey was probably raining.
One frequent topic of my journey to Polynesia was not slow enough to appreciate my area. Giving myself only three and a half nights to discover Raiatea, I turned around when the meteorological deities were unfriendly to me. And of course, the morning I was off the beach, there was no clouds in the skies!
Wish I had chosen five Raiatea instead. Admittedly, I can't keep track of the wheather and maybe it would have been raining for five whole day if I had, but it would have given me a larger windows for activity and maybe I would have gotten away from Raiatea as if I had seen some of it.
Well, Raiatea? But the only good thing about my collapse is that I took the moment to take charge of myself - something I've never done before. I' ve always said it's a complete wasteless. Take this opportunity to be imaginative, reading a text or reading a text or photo album.
At Raiatea I used to spend my days on the couch with open arms, my Kindle Paperwhite in my hands and devoured a few weeks of bookwork that I probably wouldn't have read if I hadn't had this amount of idle work. Having dreamed most of my lifetime of different towns around the globe, I found that my high hopes for heaven were seldom fulfilled.
What if I never come back and never get a shot at seeing all the things I miss this one? That' s exactly what I did in Huahine, the next stop on my trip to Polynesia.