Today we got to sleep in a bit. Unlike Diving's 7:35am departures, the Land Rover Safari Tour didn't start until 8:40am. Ah, luxury! :)
The tour was the best view of the whole island we'd had yet. It involved driving around the road until we'd reach a trailhead
and then 4x4'ing our way up a mountain trail to a nice summit. The first was a good view of the south of the island.
This was also our first opportunity to start scouting out the trail to the top of the mountain. It turns out that it starts with the road just to the left of that snack shack with the Coke banner...
The second offroad trail was to a pair of 7" guns which during WWII protected the only pass into the lagoon.
One of the guides related the story of 6000 GIs suddenly showing up in the lagoon of the island of 2000 inhabitants (the majority of whom were women) at the time. (it's 8000 now, coincidence...?) When they finished unloading their ships (3 months later) Midway had already been fought, and the question of prepping Bora Bora's defenses was moot, but they finished anyway. When the ships finally departed, there were 150 new babies. :P
The third site was a mountain pareo artist's shop. Beautiful view and beautiful hand-painted pareos, but since we already received two when we arrived we didn't see a need for more.
The fourth site overlooks the airport and was originally an anti-aircraft emplacement..
Once again the real showman of a guide told of the SeaBees building the airport using dredged coral sand to make concrete for the runway, completing the whole thing in only 15 weeks. There were one fighter and one bomber squadron based here during the war. 8000km to the US or Australia, and the Germans and Japanese never touched it. Very lucky.
Finally, the guides brought us to their pearl vender associates "Farm" where we saw the pearl culturing process described,
along with grading, setting and carving. And of course some very nice finished pieces.
Lizards abounded
Just before we took off for the safari, Kei, one of the excursions folks, had let us know that the helicopter would be available in the afternoon, if we would be too. :) Naturally, we said "Hell, yes!" So when we got back we snagged lunch, named all of the GPS waypoints from our safari tour, and piled in the van for the helipad! Wow. 6-man chopper (5 + pilot), "squirrel" in French, "A-Star" in the US (heh, heh - deterministic single-agent graph search in-joke).
Megan got the front seat, and I was in the back with Ron and another couple. 18 minutes of joy flying over the whole Island!
We saw the gun emplacements again,
along with rays and sharks(!) in the lagoon,
a nigh-unreachable cave,
plus the most spectacular views I think we'll have all trip. (Now we're reconsidering the all day excursion in favor of the shark and ray-feeding on the chance that we may not get to see them diving... :( )
Once we got back we found we had many many pictures, but alas, no GPS route. Still... Wow the View!
So it was drinks by the bar, signing up for diving tomorrow, making reservations at Bloody Mary's for Saturday night, and planning on hiking to see the sunset.
It turned out that we made it up to the lookout in time for sunset despite obstacles such as the Front Desk not being able to give us the key, (due to rains sometime in the past few days) though the girl quietly mentioned that if we walked out the front driveway and turned right, we could climb the stairs on our left anyway... :)
On our way up, we met many folks coming down, as if they'd already seen the sun set :|, but we persevered. Toward the top, we asked a couple we'd met on the jetski tour if we'd missed the sunset, and they said yes, but that they had too and the sun had set behind an island so we hadn't missed anything. Ha! Were they confused! I'd used my GPS to look up sunset at our location, and it was still > 10 minutes away. Moreover, when we finally reached the top after a sweaty 15 min ascent which was expected to be a gentle 25 min, we saw that the sun had simply been behind some clouds and the reflections off the water must have confused the other folks. So, we got to enjoy a lovely polynesian sunset atop a ridge-line lookout by ourselves. Very, very enjoyable. :)
