Our Honeymoon Twelve days in French Polynesia spread over three islands

~ day 5: Manihi ~
click here to view all photos from day 5

We woke up to a beautiful sunrise and a clear and gorgeous day.

this is what we woke up to every morning

our ceiling fan whirling silently above us

We had breakfast then headed for the dive shop at 9:45am for our first dive. We did our morning dive with Nico (Nicolas) just outside the reef at a drop off. We saw a small spotted eagle ray, tons of beautiful small fish, a rockfish, a couple lionfish, and moray eels. We dove for 55 minutes.

on our way to "The Drop Off"

can the water be any more blue?

 

lion fish

Jeff's favorite - blenny

We headed back to the hotel for lunch (all the dive spots are only 5 minutes by boat)

enjoying that french bread

lunch before our second dive

Afterwards, we continued with a second dive with Thierry the Manager of the Blue Nui Dive Center. We dove "The Crossing" and saw black tip and white tip sharks, a flounder, and nudibranchs.

can you see the flounder?

finishing our second dive

cheese!

We found that we seem to get hungry quite often when diving so we headed back to the hotel after the second dive and ate an afternoon snack which consisted of a "Croque Monsieur" (melted ham and cheese sandwich) and a panini.

hunger satisfied after eat our second lunch

enjoying the afternoon

We then went back to our bungalow and fed fish some bread, courtesy of the hotel, off our balcony. We were trying to throw pieces of bread as far as possible to see if the fish would follow (and they did), when all of a sudden, a reef shark came out of nowhere and ate one of the fish! It was amazing to see it happen right in front of us… although, we both felt really guilty as we somehow felt responsible.

After our own National Geographic moment with the fish, we took some bikes and toured the tiny motu that we were on. All we ended up seeing on our bike ride was the airport and a small boutique selling very expensive black pearls.

i'm cruisin now

pit stop for photo

We then had dinner (which was actually good tonight) and was entertained by the locals who gave us a Polynesian dance show. They were so cute and so game for anything, even with all their technical problems (their CD player kept breaking). And what was even cuter was that the performers, during the day, were also our servers, or bartender, or housekeeper! The Manihi Pearl Beach is a much smaller place so it definitely had a more homely feel.

our overwater bungalow #48 before sundown

dusk, the moon between the palm trees

 

dinner

polynesian show - the kids

After dinner, we went back to our bungalow and stargazed some more. We thought the days were beautiful here until we saw the nights. We haven't decided which we liked best. We could watch the night sky for hours and feel like we're on the edge of the world. And then to sleep… to sleep with the door open to the sea, with the warm ocean breeze coming into the hut and the sound of the water lapping against the reef below our bungalow - heavenly. It puts you right to sleep. It is so unbelievably spectacular here that Cheryll found herself waking up several times in a night, just to lift her head up to see some stars in the dark distance and to know where she is and hear the soothing sounds of the water below, then to have it just lull her back to sleep. We agreed that we need to be independently wealthy so we can live here a couple months out of the year.

onto day 6...