MOOREA, FRENCH POLYNESIA

Here’s the thing about Tahiti: It’s really well set-up for honeymooners and whatnot, but it’s not very well suited to the backpacking set. I’m sure the vast majority of people who go to these islands are going with romantic intentions so spending many hundreds of dollars per night for a luxury hotel is jim dandy. But, there seems to be a small segment of backpackers and cheapskates, like myself, who get caught up in this accommodation trap.

Air Tahiti Nui offers competitive fares from Australia and New Zealand to California, and when you book your flight they offer you a free stopover in Tahiti on the way if you’re willing to pay the small airport tax in Tahiti. What could be nicer? A free stop in an island paradise for like $15 extra? Hell yeah!!!

So you book your stopover and then look for budget hotels on the island, because every place has budget hotels, right? Wrong! After being committed to 4 nights there I began searching and found even the most ramshackle place to be starting at around $150 a night, and the online reviews for those places sounded terrible!

It turns out that Tahiti and nearby Moorea are extremely mountainous (not surprising being volcanic islands) so the only real livable space is on or very near the beach. So over the last 100 years or so developers have come in and erected resort hotels on all the lagoons. By the way, another surprising thing is there are actually very few natural beaches in Tahiti. The prime real estate is the sections that overlook the natural lagoons. I’m pretty sure some of the expensive hotels bring in sand to make a small beach for their guests, but actual beaches are very rare here.

So virtually all of the hotels are resort hotels on prime real estate. There are no Best Westerns sitting on cheap land a mile inland because a mile inland is almost always way up on a mountainside. Many of the hotels are the names you’d expect like Marriott, Hilton, Four Seasons and whatnot, and those places are modern and posh and like $400 a night and up. Then you have places that were once very modern and posh, but that was 40 years ago and now they are falling apart and offer poor service, but they are still located on lagoons so they can still get $150 to $200 a night and up.

Even for a backpacking couple that wouldn’t be too terrible, but for a solo traveler that’s ridiculous, especially when you read about the horrible service most people get at those places. Also, I read that you can expect to pay around $20 for breakfast at those places, and that’s the cheapest meal of the day.

So after much searching in corners of the internet that I never knew existed, and consulting the message boards on the Bootsnall.com site, I stumbled across this place called Camping Nelson on Moorea. Shared rooms started at around $20 a night, but with only one roommate, and the most expensive private room was around $70 or so. That was more my speed. Also, I’d heard from many people that the island of Moorea is actually more scenic and nicer than Tahiti itself, so this was sounding pretty good.

I hopped in one of the buses that meets the incoming ferries and we started to circumnavigate the island. Moorea is only about 35 miles around and evidently at any given time during the day there are two buses circling it, one in each direction. Camping Nelson is near the opposite side, so it didn’t matter much which direction I went.

The resort hotels are few and far between on Moorea so you just tell the driver which hotel and he drops you off out front. After getting a lovely look at half the island I was dropped off in front of the majestic Camping Nelson.

I won’t do an hour-by-hour report on the next few days, but I’ll mention a few key things here. It turns out Camping Nelson is an awesome place. There are a few long buildings that each have 8 or so rooms in them, with some having normal-sized rooms and others having small rooms that contain little more than two bunks. They are spread out on this large property that also has a dining hall/public kitchen so it’s really like a proper hostel. You can buy food from a small grocery store just down the road and cook it yourself, and obviously that saves a fortune in a place like this.

There are also a few decent beachfront restaurants very nearby that are attached to modest resorts. I had a European style pizza and a beer in one place and it was around $15 in total. This was far from the mega-resort areas in style, even though there are a few mega-resorts just a couple miles away. There’s also a guy a hundred meters or so down the road that grills up kick-ass chickens every night, so if you go by earlier and order one it will be ready for you later.

Also, Camping Nelson happens to be situated right on a real, natural beach. It’s not big, but it’s a real beach so the guests at this cheapo place can actually lay out in the sand while many of the other island visitors can not. The last thing that makes Camping Nelson so cool is the sun sets straight out over its beach every evening, making for some breathtaking sunsets. I don’t know if it’s a little off at certain times of the year, but while I was there in late May the sun set directly out my beachfront window.

I think I paid around $50 a night for my room, but it was on the beach end of a building that went perpendicular to the beach itself, so I had an extra window and an actual ocean view. I also had a small and private terrace that wrapped around the front of this room, so it was quite deluxe. The room itself was pretty minimalist though. None of the rooms had bathrooms or sinks or TVs (hey, it’s a hostel) or air conditioning, but this room had a small fridge, which was nice. Because of the fridge this was also the only room that has a power outlet, and I am always on my computer so this was fairly important to me.

The bathrooms were grouped in the center of the compound, but there was never a problem with crowding as there were many toilets and private shower rooms. One thing that was shocking at first was there is no hot water in the bathrooms, at all. Yes, that meant cold showers, but they weren’t all that cold. The daytime outdoor temperatures were in the 80s and at night it might get down to about 70, so it was always warm but never hot, especially with the ocean breezes. I adjusted to the coldish showers after about 10 seconds each time. It was really quite refreshing.

On my first evening there I heard a familiar voice and discovered that David, the English guy I left in the hostel room that morning, had just checked in to Camping Nelson. I told him about my intentions to stay at the place and since he was also on a budget and didn’t find anything better he decided to take the ferry over that afternoon.

During the days I hung around by the beach and I rented a bike for half a day so I could ride it around the island, or as far as I was in the mood for anyway. The bike wasn’t in good condition and the seat was a bit loose so it wasn’t as pleasant as it should have been, but I did manage to go about 10 miles around the island and then back, of course. On the way back I even parked the bike by the road and went swimming in a secluded cove. It was heavenly.

There wasn’t all that much to do, but the great thing was there were travelers in a similar situation from all over the place staying at Camping Nelson as well. I chatted with David some, but I also spent a lot of time with a couple from Belguim and a German girl who was living in New Zealand for the last few years. I probably met about 15 people and after a couple days it was almost like a family.

The thing that bonded everyone together (in addition to the booze that David and I brought with us) was the sunset ritual. There are a couple of picnic tables overlooking the beach and since the sunsets were always so fabulous, every person staying at the place congregated together to ooh and aah at them. The sun went down quickly, but with no TV or any other options, most people stuck around and chatted the night away in a group. I have extremely fond memories of those warm and breezy evenings and I highly recommend the place to anyone caught in the Air Tahiti Nui Stopover Trap.

After three wonderful nights there I packed up and got ready to leave. My flight wasn’t until late in the evening, but I had to check out by noon and then get back to Tahiti. I was all packed up and I actually checked out, but I checked my plane ticket one last time before I left the hotel office and I was surprised at what I saw. It turned out my flight to Los Angeles was actually the NEXT day!

That airline actually only flies to Los Angeles like 3 or 4 days a week so even if I had gone to the airport there would be no flight. It turns out that in all the configuring and changing my travel dates from Australia through NZ and Tahiti to Los Angeles, I forgot the international dateline on the final version. I was factoring gaining a day in to my plans in several earlier versions, but this was complicated by leaving New Zealand on May 28 and then leaving Tahiti on June 2nd. That doesn’t sound like 5 nights, does it? No! I left NZ on the 28th, but arrived in Tahiti on the 27th, so the 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th, and 1st, and that makes 5 nights.

There are worse things than another day in paradise, but I was already mentally ready to fly home that night so it was weird for me. I checked into a slightly cheaper room and said hello again to all the people I had just bid farewell to 30 minutes earlier. I had one last sunset party and the next day it really was the end.

Nothing terribly interesting happened on the way out. I checked out and hopped the bus going in the same direction that I came in on, so this way I could see the part of the island that I hadn’t seen yet. I bought a ticket for the ferry back to Tahiti and then had dinner at a pleasant restaurant in the harbor area. I found the bus stop for the local bus that stops in front of the airport and that was it. On Moorea the buses are like old school buses, but on Tahiti the buses are like military transport vehicles and they are called Le Truck. I think it was $3 to the airport from town, so not bad and a hell of a lot cheaper than the $20 taxi on the way in.

And that’s all, folks. I flew over night from Tahiti and landed in LA, I believe it was a Sunday when I landed, which was nice because I didn’t have to worry about too much traffic to go along with my state of shock of finally being back home.