Monday we woke up and noticed a lot of activity on the beach across the street:\u00c2\u00a0 dozens of locals were setting up their outrigger canoes.\u00c2\u00a0 The races, which are part of a July festival called Haeve, began at 9 am with men’s singles.\u00c2\u00a0 About 30 or 40 contestants lined up, paddled out to the reef, turned around and came back.\u00c2\u00a0 Races with boats of six, younger men, followed.\u00c2\u00a0 The owner of our pension competed in both single and six-man events, as did a man who rented us bicycles, coming in first in the six-man event.<\/p>\n
After the races, we rode some sketchy bicycles (only the front brakes worked, and only some of the derailleurs; my seat seemed rusted in one position) to a site on the other side of the island occupied by Hotel Sofitel for about ten years, but which was abandoned about five years ago because it consistently lost money.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s located next to a convenient snorkeling spot, where the lagoon went out about a kilometer and never got too deep to stand up in.\u00c2\u00a0 There were a few rocks with small amounts of coral growing on them, and various tropical fish darting about.\u00c2\u00a0 The water was even warmer than the Timberline pool (though still cooler than the hot tub).\u00c2\u00a0 The current through the lagoon was so swift that you had to swim constantly to watch any particular piece of coral, or else stand up in the waist deep water which defeated the purpose of snorkeling; and if you let yourself drift past the boulders and corals it was like being on a tour bus and you never got to look at anything.\u00c2\u00a0 The lagoon was nice but not spectacular.\u00c2\u00a0 There were the usual suspects in terms of colorful tropical fish and iridescent blue-lipped clams and anenome drama and urchins, but they weren’t arranged so that they would form a desktop or a jigsaw puzzle.\u00c2\u00a0 Most of the coral was of a nondescript brown bulbous sort.<\/p>\n
As we left, we noticed that Ray’s back tire had lost all its air.\u00c2\u00a0 I biked back to get help, and he started walking.\u00c2\u00a0 As he came back, someone offered to pump it back up, but it didn’t take any air at all.\u00c2\u00a0 So he kept walking and got a ride — meanwhile, I got the pension owner to go get him, and we passed him almost immediately after he’d gotten picked up.\u00c2\u00a0 The bike renter was nice enough not to charge us for all the adventures.<\/p>\n
We had dinner nearby at a waterside bar, eating what one hopes to eat on a French tropical island:\u00c2\u00a0 local seafood with sauces made from local ingredients by French chefs.\u00c2\u00a0 In this case it was mahi mahi with vanilla sauce, and lagoon fish meuniere.\u00c2\u00a0 And three liters of water to rehydrate us after a long active day in the sun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Monday we woke up and noticed a lot of activity on the beach across the street:\u00c2\u00a0 dozens of locals were setting up their outrigger canoes.\u00c2\u00a0 The races, which are part of a July festival called Haeve, began at 9 am with men’s singles.\u00c2\u00a0 About 30 or 40 contestants lined up, paddled out to the reef, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/sp2010\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}