The term “cruise” used loosely. The Faaroa river is the only navigable river in French Polynesia, so Jason thought it would be an interesting spot to explore that was a little different than the fish and coral. Everyone else loaded up on sarongs, towels, shirts etc to cover all exposed body parts because the sun was so hot and high overhead. I, like an idiot, didn’t bother to do this. Luckily I didn’t get a sunburn, but we sure looked like a shady bunch piloting our dinghy into the river.
A few more minutes after we went through the above spot we realized we took the wrong fork in the river and this one dead ends in a really shady looking spot. It’s also considerably narrower… So we turned around to try again. A friendly local lady yelled at us and pointed at the other direction for the other fork in the river. Glad to know we didn’t trespass too badly. According to the boat charter people, if you run your dinghy through the rivers at high speed the locals will shoot at you! I didn’t want anything to do with that!
After turning around and trying the other side of the river we motored on for a half hour or so. Our destination was an abandoned botanical garden. No idea what that entails… but I had visions of a tropical jungle paradise with flowers everywhere.
Turns out, an abandoned botanical garden looks just like all the other foliage that grows wild in the area with the exception of a few small buildings and a lovely foot bridge. BUT…story time… in like 4th grade or so we had a science class where the teacher brought in these plants. When you touched the leaves, they would fold in and I’ve been fascinated with it ever since and have literally touched every plant that looked like them ever since with no luck. Until today!!!! I poked this little weed on the ground and it folded up and I was so excited!!! I finally found it! Apparently it’s a Mimosa Pudica. Here’s a video!
We finally made it back to the boat after a few hours of running around the river. It was definitely different, but also way way hotter than being out on the water with the breeze and we were all super hot by the time we got back. The water exiting the river wasn’t super clear, so we decided to go ahead and move to the spot we planned on anchoring from the night and swim later. I had a Coke Zero instead. Crisp and refreshing, but I was still hot and sweaty.
If you hadn’t noticed, the outrigger canoes are everywhere out here and people paddle their boats all over. It looks like a ton of fun! I miss my kayak! An interesting thing that they do here is pick up the wake from passing boats and surf it as long as they’d like. This guy picked us up in Raiatea and followed us all the way to Taha’a! He was probably back there for more than an hour!
Eventually we made it to our stopping point, dropped the anchor and dove into the refreshing water. It felt amazing after being hot pretty much all day long! The view wasn’t too bad either!
