I had been looking forward to our stop at Raiatea.  The last time I was here was a two day stop.  We had originally been scheduled in Raiatea for one day and for a stop at Bora Bora the next.  But Bora Bora had imposed a limit on the size of cruise ships that could call and Zuiderdam was too big.  So, it was two days in Raiatea.  But I could only look out at the scene from my balcony because I was quarantined with COVID.  I was up for the sunrise.

This time we made it ashore.  We had a ship’s tour to the island of Taha’a, enclosed by the same reef that shelters Raiatea. Taha’a is the vanilla island.

Our guide is passionate about vanilla.  Her island used to export a lot of it but the business collapsed in 1965 when the French started exploding nukes in French Polynesia.  They had just lost their colony, Algeria, where they had been testing since 1960, and came in with offers of high paying jobs and economic development to convince the locals to accept the nuclear testing.  It was more like bribing than convincing.  According to our guide, they brought money and all sorts of strange food.  “And we loved it, although it was not good for us.”  Vanilla is labor intensive; the plants must be pollenated by hand because bees are not efficient enough to make a viable cash crop.  The vanilla growing areas, high in the mountains, reverted to rainforest. 

After the nuclear testing only a small vanilla industry remained.  Most vanilla now comes from Madagascar, then from Mexico, where it originated, and then, well our guide said from their island but looking it up Indonesia, Papua New Guney and China all produce more vanilla than Polynesia.  Taha’a’s vanilla is a boutique brand mostly sold locally, meaning sold to tourists, or exported to Denmark. 

Vanilla comes from an orchid that only opens for pollination for a brief time, usually very early in the morning.  Workers hand pollinize the flowers.  Then the seed pods (called beans) are picked, sun dried, placed in cotton sacks while still warm, the cotton absorbs moisture and the process is repeated until they are dry.

Then the dry pods are placed in a closed jar filled with rum.  The vanilla infuses the rum.  (In some places they use Bourbon.) The process is repeated with more beans in the same rum until the extract is the right consistency.  That is why vanilla extract is alcoholic.  Vanilla abstract needs to be 35% alcohol or 70 proof to be sold in the United States legally.  And yes, there have been cases of Vanilla abuse where teenagers buy the extract to get a shot.  It seems expensive to me.  We, of course, were given the opportunity to buy all sorts of products, from dried beans to infuse ourselves, power, extract, and vanilla soaps.

After visiting the vanilla plantation, we took a boat to a motu, small island along the reef, for snorkeling along the coral. 

I was more successful with a mouth snorkel than I was with the full face snorkel earlier in the trip and saw fish and a stingray, which was shy in front of my camera.

Following the snorkeling we had a picnic with Polynesian food, Taro, casava, plantains, coconut, chicken, and fish.  I passed on the fish because of my allergy.  The food we had is an acquired taste that I have yet to acquire.  We were under a palm thatch roof, which was a good thing, because just as we started to eat, we had a downpour, which continued on our boat trip back to Raiatea.  We got soaked, but we had been snorkeling just an hour before so I didn’t see a problem.  It was a warm rain but with the boat up on step, a stinging one.