Bora Bora, Day Two

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During the night, we had seen lights through our side windows and woke up to find out they had been the lights on another ship, the Paul Gaugin, which had been owned by Regent, a sister company of Oceania, but is now an independent. Daryl's Mom and sister did a cruise on the Paul Gaugin a few years back.

It was a nice day and we had nothing planned and a bottle of champagne in our refrigerator. So we ordered bagels and smoked salmon which we ate with Mimosas in our cabin. We then went to complete some book keeping details. This is the first cruise we have been on that, because of weather-related cancellations of port stops and therefore, excursions, we got refunds which put us in a position to have them owe us money. This is also helped by the various amenities we got from Oceania and Avoya Travel, and our agent Barbara. A couple of things about arranging excursions through the ship – they are required to hold the ship if you are late returning and they refund you if there is a cancellation. Private tours are not required to do refunds and independent guests are responsible for getting back to the ship on time, no matter what.

After the heavy traffic on the tenders for excursions had slowed down, we went ashore to wander around the thriving metropolis of Vaitape (population: 5,000 or most of the island.) There are some regular stores, but mostly it is a long string of pearl shops as that is the hot shopping item to get in Bora Bora. We have not been doing much shopping the whole cruise so have not bought t-shirts le alone major jewelry.

We returned to the ship to put some effort into packing our bags within airline tolerance. They have to be outside our cabin door by 10pm tonight, so all we will have to do is add our dinner clothes to the right place and put our valuables in the safe to be switched ot our carry-ons in the morning. We need to be out of our cabin by 8am, but not off the ship until 10am, so we will have breakfast aboard before we get on the bus to the hotel. We are going back to Le Meridien as we we enjoyed our 2 nights there last year before boarding for the trip to Peru. We plan on continuing our lazy pattern of sitting around and reading, although we need to make sure we use sunscreen as we got more sun than we planned last time.

Tonight we will be in Toscana for dinner. Somehow that is our usual rotation. We will try to stop by and see some of our crew friends before the evening is over.