May 24-28, 2019
Originally, we thought that Maupiti will be the ultimate highlight of our trip to French Polynesia. But surprisingly this island was not the best one of all that we have visited. Personally, we prefer Huahine and also Bora Bora over it. Island itself is super small, just 9 kilometers around, so we could easily walk it whole in two hours. It has an undoubted charm that seduced us, on the other hand, and mainly due to tragic accommodation, we could not enjoy it at maximum. Our filthy Airbnb was on the north side of the island, around 25 min walk from Tereia beach to the one side and 30 minutes walk to the city on the other side. That sounds convenient, but whatever you want to do you have to walk. a lot before. A better option would be riding a bicycle. In theory, we could rent it in the city but the price was outrageous for using it once to the beach and once to the city during the day. We rather walk then. What I call a “city” is a de facto tiny village with few houses, 3 small groceries, two eateries, and two restaurants. But that is more than sufficient in the end.
The Tereia beach is splendid, super relaxing, empty, and with a shallow light blue lagoon. So shallow that we could even walk to a motu on the other side. The whole lagoon was like our own private bath or pool. Awesome. We were lucky enough to see sharks there as well. And rays of course. There is also one eatery at the beach. Honestly, I don’t know if there are fixed opening hours. We were lucky once and it was open and they had a very good tuna steak with fries. Another day it was raining during the day and the eatery was closed. It is always good to have some backup meal if you stay in a remote place without a half-board (as we did).
Read more: Bora Bora brainwash
For such a small island there are plenty of things to do. As said the beach is perfect and one could spend multiple days there. Another fun activity is a famous, short but steep track to Mt. Teurafaatiu Summit (it was officially closed during and after the rain, but we broke the rule). We also rented a see-through kayak and went to Motu Paeao which was stunning. Just the water in the lagoon disappointed us as visibility was very, very poor, probably due to storms and rain a few days ago. Therefore we spent most of the time watching thousands of hermit crabs. Another popular activity is to pay for a boat trip around the lagoon and to manta point. We really regret we missed this one but one day was raining a lot and the other day we had to choose between hiking the summit or taking the boat. As outlined above, we opt for the summit.
Back to the accommodation. We wanted to save some money and risk it with Airbnb without any reviews. Knowing how bad it is going to be we would rather pay more and stay elsewhere. It was dirty, uncomfortable, and without any place to sit outside and relax during a rainy day (and there is always a quite high probability of rain in French Polynesia). Luckily, we occupied it only with one friendly US couple and had the dorm part of the house for ourselves. I cannot imagine how it could work if the house is full. There was supposed to be breakfast which consisted of a frozen baguette and little packages of butter in the fridge. But the fridge was so dirty that I would not touch anything there. In the end, despite the bad accommodation, there was one thing terrifying us even more – after Maupity, we had only one more night in Tahiti in front of us, before leaving back to Australia.
