2026 French Polynesia - January - Day 03 - Moorea…oh my… rain, rain, rain.

 Saturday, January 17, 2026

Oh my, we’ve had a lot of rain today.  So much so, I’m starting my blog at 1 PM over here.  The rain started at about 6 AM and rained really hard.  As usual, it stopped after about 30 minutes.  But then the skies have looked quite angry.  Nonetheless, we just chilled in the morning.  I got busy and scrambled some eggs and then heated up some pan de chocolat in the microwave and had a very French,  breakfast.  I am missing my milk however.  The skies remained nasty looking and the wind a bit up, so we fired up a movie that we had started a day or two ago and finished that.  It was called, ‘Train Dreams’.  Kind of slow and depressing, per Denise.  But interesting to some degree.

Well, we kept watching the skyline and it seemed to ease up around noon.  So we put on our suits, packed our wetbag and headed to the place where Jeanro has kayaks.  I texted him that we were coming there.  I don’t know where this guy lives, but he was there waiting for us.  Turns out he has a bungalow there but does not live there.  He said he lives in the mountains.  But boy, his bungalow is on one of the most popular spots in Moorea.  It is an amazing lagoon with a couple of islands about 300 meters away.  One is called Coco Island and has a restaurant on it.  But as we talked, you could see the sky growing angry again.  And it was apparent to all of us that it would not be safe to kayak or even swim.  So we told him we’d come back another day and kayak around the beautiful lagoon.  And, getting back into where his bungalow was a muddy drive for about 50 yards with water filled pot holes.  We made it ok.  Car did not get swallowed up in a sink hole.

After meeting with Jeanro, we went to find a hotel, restaurant…Lestrapinier.  We apparently drove right past it and went always down the road.  We eventually turned around and found it coming back.  But the rain began to come down hard so we opted to just head home to the flat.  Fortunately we have some food that we bought at the supermarket and left overs that we can survive on if the weather continues and we do not venture out again.  It’s crazy.  Jeanro says his weather app is telling him that tomorrow and Monday will be much better days.

After taking a small nap, I turned on the BYU game to listen to it.  I can’t stream ESPN over here.  But I can stream KSL radio.  So I listened to the first half.  Good first half.  But at half time, we decided to go check the little stream that we hike down to get to the beach near this flat.  It was fine.  A little more water but easy to walk.  So we gathered our stuff and off we went.  It turned out that the water was calm, warm and awesome.  Denise dawned snorkel gear and being the most brave person ever, hooked on to me and went out snorkeling.  She should be writing here to share her experience.  But I’ll just say, she was amazing as together we swam over coral, through valleys, seeing so much sea life of all sorts of colors.  I think we snorkeled for nearly 2 hours…well maybe 1.5 hours.   While swimming at one point, I knocked a piece of coral off.  I felt bad as the little piece fell to the ocean floor.  I think the deepest part where we were was probably 8 to 10 feet.  But it was quick to get back to shallow areas.  We had so much fun.  A few more days of it.

After snorkeling, we came back to the flat and showered.  We then went out to find some food.  We remembered a food truck like place a few kilometers down the road that we passed when we first arrived here at the flat.  So we went and found it.  It was a pizza and hamburger joint that advertised milkshakes all over the place.  So we decided that we’d share a pizza and Denise wanted a milkshake.  We ordered a cream based pizza.  Then Denise asked for a milk shake.  The girl politely replied, ‘we don’t have any’.  We just smiled in amazement wanting to say that you have signs everywhere saying that you have milkshakes.  But we just said ‘Merci”.  We took the pizza back to the flat.  It was quite good.  The remainder of the night was spent watching a movie…’Rental Family’.  It was interesting.  Now, I’m heading to bed.  

Here come some pictures:  

Our yummy dinner.  White sauced pizza from a food truck.

This is our driveway.  That is my rental car back there.

This is the driveway looking from my rental car.  The building you see is the two bedroom flat that we are in.

This is the Moorean version of Papa Murphy’s.  You can see the food truck down there.

This is a picture of the food truck where we bought our pizza.  A couple of folks are waiting to go deliver pizzas on their scooters.  Lots of scooters over here.

Not sure why or what it represents.  But this sits just down the road from our flat.  Handsome fella!

They don’t believe in fold up chairs I guess.  So we are having to drag the table chair to the beach.  Jeanro, our host, said that would be fine.

It’s a beautiful mermaid in the water.  We had much fun snorkeling together and seeing the beauties under the water.

We climb up and down this to get from our flat to the beach.  It’s the only way to get there and is right across from our flat.

We went to check out the kayak options and there was this swing.  Denise immediately climbed on it and started to swing out over the water forgetting her fear of water.

Kayaks that we will be using before we go home assuming we get some better weather.

The chef making breakfast.  I couldn’t get the fire stick to light so I could light the burners.  Fortunately he had matches there.

Our bedroom set up.

The living area.

From the bridge where we hiked down, we entered this runoff area to walk to the beach.

Just a picture of me holding my chair.  Denise though that was funny.

Denise took this while out in the water showing the beach.  Today there were some kids playing in the water while we were there.  They were boogie boarding on the areas where the fresh water was flowing in.

It turned out to be a good day with a slow rainy start!