We arrive to the Island Raiatea around noon after a smooth 45 minutes flight from Moorea. The weather is a bit cloudy but the temperature is still very pleasant around 26 °C.
Charlotte, the host of this hostel is giving us an extreme warm welcome. Her warmth, helpfulness and friendliness never drop which makes our stay here to one of the best once during the trip!
In Raiatea almost everything is closed on Sundays, except two supermarkets and our first mission is to buy the ingredients needed for lunch. At the supermarket both of us are extremly hungry and as we also want to visit the dive center Hemisphere as soon as possible, we spontaniouly decide to buy what we need for Salami-Brie sandwiches to take on the go. I’m super glad that both of us are very flexible and uncomplicated, as that makes many situations on the trip much easier to handle.
Raiatea is a very beautiful island and we like it mostly due to the great opportunities to hike and dive. The island is very green, have several mountains, great diving spots, cristal clear water and very friendly people.
For our first full day we have beautiful weather which is amazing as we have booked two dives in the morning. Even though that we are super excited, the experience don’t dissapoint us at all. The first dive is a drift dive at the site Teavapiti pass. We dive for about 45 minutes and reach a depth of 29,5 meters. No one of us went that deep before and we realize that we need more air than during other dives. Both of us reach the red level of oxygen and get to swim next to the dive master for a little while to breath a bit from his tank. It was never critical in any way and both of us had some air left at the end, but better safe than sorry.
The current is quite strong and it’s almost impossible to stay at the same spot without quite some effort. We see several sharks, sting rays, a moraine, many different types of coral fish and a lot of nice corals. We both reach the surface with the feeling that this was the best dive we’ve done in our life (so far).
After a very short visit at the dive center, warm tea and a snack, we are back on the boat. This time for the Miri Miri dive spot. This one is as cool as the first one and even though we saw several sharks during the first dive, we see even more here! And they come close! Very close! I was swimming around with one, only ca 30 cm from my face and as I turn and see Lukas, he has one passing just in front of his head, looking him directly in the eyes! Breathtaking! Diving with sharks might sound a bit scary but honestly, it’s not. Or at least we luckely trusted our dive master when he said that it isn’t, otherwise we would not have been able to enjoy these special moments as we did.
We relax a bit at our hostel after the dive and as the temperature drops , we ”climb” the hill Taipoi. The walk takes around one hour from our hostel to the top, but the climb is only about 35 minutes. Never the less, I’m swetting like a pig while Lukas looks totally relaxed! If it’s the temperature or the level of my fitness, I leave unsaid… From the top we have a super nice view so at least it was absolutely worth it!
For the second full day on Raiatea we rent a scooter with the plan to drive around the island. After the first 30 minutes drive and with constant rain, we decide to change our plans as we anyhow don’t stop anywhere to take photos. We head back to the islands best snorking site and spend the next hour in the water! Rain or not, we get wet anyhow!
We do another try in the afternoon and this time we head towards the west side, as the weather looks better there. Even though we get all kinds of weather during the tour, we love it! It might would have been convinient to stay at the hostel for a lazy day due to the ”bad” weather, but thanks to the rain we can enjoy several beautiful rainbows. One thing is for sure, all weather has it’s charm, you just need to look at it from a different angle.
As we stay at a hostel, we take the opportunity to cook our own food for once. Of course we like to go out and enjoy good food in nice restaurants – but after almost 2 month with only eating out for both lunch and dinner, we enjoy a few days with a bit of normality.
As we still have the scooter the next morning, we get up early to get out the very most of our last hours on this island. With nearvously little gaz in the tank and only 2 hours until we need to bring back the scooter (09:00) we head of to the UNESCO herritge site Taputapuatea to tick it off on our list. Belive me, this is not our best decision on this trip. The result, we hardly find it and loose valuable time searching, and when we do find it, we are in such a hurry that we run up to the view point, take a few pictures and one selfie and run down the hill again. There it takes 3 minutes to get rid of the 5 cm layer of mud that got stuck under our shoes and as soon as we are done, we drive back with slightly stomach ace as we don’t think that we will make it on time and on top of that, we are nervous to run out of gaz (gasping at the fuel gauge every third second is not helping 😆) …
As we drive in on the place for the scooter rental 8:59, we both agree that if any similar situation accure in the future, we skip it! 😂
We wave Charlotte goodbye as the taxi is taking us to the airport where we have the boat transfer to our next destination: Le Tahaa.
Living The Moment 
Great post 🙂
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