Moorea, Tahiti



The Super Bowl 50 frenzy and the crowd in the San Francisco Bay Area, made me long for that South Pacific tranquility.  So this past month I revisited the island of my dreams: Moorea, Tahiti.  It was indeed the place to go if you really wanted to get away from the crowd. You can bike around the island and not run into anybody.  I found a sense of peace in the lagoon, palm trees and the beach and sunset.  That said, I don’t really have that much to share and write about my five-day stay, except that I soaked in the soul-soaring beauty of the South Pacific.  Oh another discovery: the many shades of blue.

                                                            


                                                                   ...and a shade of green

and sunset


 NOTE:  All photos by the author

Comments

Post a Comment

NEW POSTS

Kenya Safari: Masai Mara National Park

Image
Witnessing the Drama of Wildlife at Masai Mara  Venturing into the wilds of Masai Mara National Park in Kenya promised an adventure unlike any other. Having previously experienced the thrill of a safari in South Africa's Kruger National Park, where I encountered the famed big-five, I eagerly awaited a different spectacle this time: the great migration. Timing my journey for August, I hoped to witness this awe-inspiring phenomenon firsthand, only to arrive a week late. Despite missing the migration, what unfolded was a safari filled with unforgettable moments of nature's raw drama and deep insights into animal behavior.  I saw lots of animals; from different types of antelopes, elephants, necking giraffes, leopards, mongoose, to gentle zebras and the so-called ugly-five (hyenas, marabou stork, warthogs, hippos & vultures) to birds (Marshall eagles, vultures & secretary birds that take off and land like an airplane.) Encounters with Lions Our first game drive immersed us
Read more

The Banaue Rice Terraces: A Living Cultural Landscape

Image
My interest in exploring the northern part of the Philippines started from looking at a piece of art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, California.   Among the display of ceramics and pottery engraved with gold and other decorative stuff,  a wooden carving of a male figure squatting on a platform with the lower arms on top of each other, resting upon his knees, caught my eye.  According to the docent, the wooden sculpture was called "Bului" which literally means "granary guardian" in the "Ifugao" tribe dialect. The carved wooden sculpture was set on a platform on top of another platform, a mortar.   Our docent explained the significance of the wooden mortar (which was used with the pestle, to separate the husk from the rice, sort of rice mill) and linked the story to the Rice Terraces in the Cordillera Mountains of the Philippines built 2000 years ago by the “Ifugao” tribe. So two years and three hundred kilometers north of Manila later, we explo
Read more

The Amazon, Part 3: The Tree Killer Tree

Image
"There are 121 ecosystems in the world and 80 of those can be found in the Amazon, and it is in the Peruvian Amazon that you will find the green biome , more than two-thirds of the world's plant species,” said Vics, our naturalist-guide.   Through our small boat excursions, we were able to see the most bio-diverse part of the Amazon, the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, the largest wetlands in the world.  We went through its narrow rivers, tributaries and black waters and lakes to hike the “Amazon Jungle”. Day-3: Jungle Trek Strangler Tree or Tree Killer Tree From the Turmalina, we hopped into a small boat.  The boat hardly moved, we just used it to get offshore.  We walked a tiny bridge and short pathway to get to the lake.  We then crossed the lake using a catamaran to get to the edge of the lake where we found the entrance to the trail.  Within minutes of leaving the larger river, we entered a narrow trail into the canopy of trees, killer vines, kapok and ceda
Read more