The only village on Bora Bora is Vaitape. It consists of a small collection of houses, shops and restaurants. This is where most visitors to the island go to go shopping. Bora Bora is small and uncluttered. The island can be circumnavigated in 1 1/2 hours by car or in a few hours by bike. The dreamlike, often lonely, wide beaches invite you to take long walks.
Sometimes a white cloud sits like a crown on its peaks, and according to many visitors, Bora Bora is also the queen of the South Sea islands. As if adorned with a string of pearls, Bora, as it is abbreviated among connoisseurs, is surrounded on the edge of its lagoon by narrow, palm-covered islands (the motus), as the small coral islands are called in Polynesian. This is what makes Bora unique.
This offers the traveller a scenario that he will hardly find on any other island in French Polynesia. The airport is manageable, as everywhere else on the small South Sea islands. We booked a rental car to explore the island more closely.
Since Captain Cook’s time, who tried in vain to land here, hotels have been built in some places on the islets, but the endless beaches have remained. Mount Pahia can be seen again and again from almost all viewpoints of the island. The scenery is actually as you would imagine it from a South Sea island.
But where there is light, there is also shadow. On some days, the big sailors dock here to pour veritable invasions of tourist streams onto the island, then the South Seas idyll is over.
Fortunately, the big cruise ships don’t dock too often on Bora Bora. When this spook is over, the South Seas romance returns. The fishermen’s small Polynesian boats offer the perfect backdrop for the photos every South Seas traveller dreams of in front of the blue sky of the South Seas.
