Raiatea was our second unplanned stop after Huahine. Due to availability and dates of our flight pass, we had to visit certain islands in order to make it to the ones we were actually interested in. Sometimes not such a bad thing (see Huahine), and also in Raiatea we spent a nice couple of days, camping at Sunset Beach Motel – which didn’t really have a beach (there are none on Raiatea), but was located in a beautiful spot, right on the water, and the site was covered in hundreds of palm trees! You only had to watch out where to set up your tent…

The first day was really only half a day, so we relaxed at the camping, went snorkelling and kayaking and organized ourselves a bit.

To see the island, we again rented a scooter the next day and drove the approx 100 km. Like on Huahine, there were very nice views at so many spots, we stopped counting our stops. Haha. The most beautiful part was the South, where there is two roads you can take: inland or along the coast. As we had enough time and wanted to see everything, we first drove around the coast…

…and later inland (return), stopping at some pretty cool viewpoints. At the highest point, there’s a sign leading to a dirt road. Follow it and you will end at a mini race car track from where there’s beautiful panoramic views. Pretty nice location for a race track – and our perfect lunch spot – until we were driven away by the many mosquitoes! One thing that’s not awesome about French Polynesia are the mosquitoes waiting for you everywhere all the time. Luckily we stocked up on mozzy spray before we came here! We heard of multiple people getting dengue fever, so don’t take the risk lightly…

We then finished the circle around the island by driving up the West coast back to our camping, passing by multiple small islets. Lucky if you’re the owner of one of these!

For the next day, we contemplated for a long time what to do. Visit Taha’a or go diving (only me since Mathijs‘ new wound was still not healed). In the end, Taha’a was just too expensive for us for what it seemed to offer, so I booked myself on two dives with Hemisphere Sub. I was lucky they still had one spot free and they were going to the two most famous dive sites of Raiatea: the Teavapiti Pass and French Polynesia’s only wreck dive – the Nordby. The dive in the pass was awesome, even though conditions were not ideal with outgoing current and low visibility since it had been rather windy the last few days. Buuuut. It was super cool!! There were lots of blacktip reef sharks and loads of schools of bigger fish such as barracudas and thelike. Twice during the dive we had a group of leopard rays passing by above us, which was probably the highlight of the dive for me!

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The wreck dive was cool too. There was no big stuff to see, but the wreck itself was cool to go inside and some walls were covered in shrimps. Beautiful! It reminded me a bit of the shrimp cave I dove in the Azores about a year ago. All in all, I had two great dives with a professional dive shop – and between the dives I got to see Raiatea and Taha’a from the water and our boat was accompanied by a group of dolphins! Not too bad, right?

On our last day on Raiatea we made the mistake of forgetting what day of the week it was. Quite funny when you’re traveling for a longer time and suddenly you’re not aware of week days anymore! Haha. Unfortunately in this case it meant that the hike up Mt Tapioi we had saved for the last morning and that I had really wanted to do, was closed. It’s closed on weekends! Too bad, since we easily could have done it the day before still. Like this, we were forced into another chilling day at Sunset Beach Motel, then packed up and boarded our flight to famous Bora Bora…