Rangiroa, Tuamotus

After about an hour of flying I landed on the island of Rangiroa in an island group called the Tuamotu Archipelago. As I was looking for someone holding a sign for Rangiroa Lodge, a guy approached me and asked if I was Katrina. It turns out that it was the CouchSurfer, Ludwig, I had arranged to go for pizza with. I had asked him to host me but he had to leave for Papeete the next morning so we had made plans to meet for dinner the night I arrived. As it turned out, his roommate took the same flight as me so he was at the airport to pick him up. Small world. Or rather, small island! He had also brought a CouchSurfer who had been staying with him. After finding Freddie from Rangiroa Lodge, I made plans to meet Ludwig at the pizza place after dropping my bag off in my room. It turns out that there were a few more people at the restaurant to meet. Yves, the owner of the dive centre I would be diving with, was there, along with his girlfriend. There was also a diver named Romain from France. Even though much of the conversation was in French (it was the first language for all but me), it was an enjoyable evening over my best meal so far in French Polynesia. As I don't eat fish (especially raw!), eating is a challenge. The islands have very little ability to grow anything so almost everything has to be imported. Fresh fruit and veg are rare and expensive and the selection is extremely poor.

The next morning I met Mark and Kirsten, the only other people staying at the pension besides myself and Romain. They all raved about the diving over breakfast but still I didn't have high expectations. Right from dive one I was blown away. It was dive 300 for me so cause to celebrate anyway. Straight away after jumping in the water I knew all the hype about sharks in French Polynesia was true. They were everywhere! There was also a manta ray, something I hadn't seen in 4 1/2 years. Add in some huge barracuda and Napolean wrasse and it made for a great dive. The whole thing was topped off by by a group of bottlenose dolphins that came not once, but twice during the dive. This was a first for me and their playful, inquisitive nature has probably made them my favourite marine creature. The second day of diving brought the closest encounter I had with the dolphins. They swam around us so close you could have touched them. After the first dive much time is spent drinking tea, eating biscuits and chatting. Yves, the owner of Raie Manta Club, is a shark expert and has dived all over the world. He is extraordinarily knowledgeable about marine life and is full of fascinating stories. This day the topic was shark bites, both fatal and not. Yves has had a few bites and the boat driver has a really nasty scar on his leg. Ludwig, the CouchSurfer, also had a scar of his own. With the number of sharks in the water here and the popularity of spearfishing, bites do occur. Yves gets very close to all types of sharks in his work and explained that he sometimes has to elbow a shark away after taking a close up photo. Incidents during dives are extremely rare though. Only once in about 25 years does Yves know of a shark getting aggressive during a dive in Rangiroa. With nothing else to deter the shark, the guide took off his BCD and pushed the shark away with his tank. The worst bite that Yves got came when he was rescuing a shark from a fishing cage. Some thanks!

Apparently equally scary compared to the sharks is Romain in the night as poor Kirsten discovered. He is not only a sleepwalker, but apparently a rowdy one! He banged on the wall which adjoins their rooms and started screaming in the middle of the night! Not quite sure what was happening, Kirsten was understandably a bit alarmed. We all had a good laugh when we discovered the nature of Romain’s night time antics.

Another bit of excitement occurred on the way to the dive centre on the second morning. A French man who owned a local pension was joining us for the dives and driving himself on his motorbike. He was following behind us and as we went around a bend in the road, a truck coming the other way with a load of lumber (not tied down of course) lost its load. The pension owner came close to being decapitated! The lumber hit him in the shoulder causing him to crash. Unbelievably he decided to leave his bike there and jump in the Jeep and come diving! His injuries were some bad road rash to his arms and legs and I would have opted for the doctor, but I guess he was really keen to see some sharks. Maybe with the blood in the water he was hoping to attract more!

With just a couple "snacks" and the pizza place nearby, night life doesn't exist on Rangiroa. So we spent our evenings watching video footage that we took during the day's dives. On the second day, we were joined at the pension by a French woman named Stephanie and we would all crowd around her netbook to re-live the shark and dolphin action. The third day of diving brought more sharks and dolphins but also a few manta rays for those of us fortunate enough to be looking in the right place at the right time. The creature of the day though was the turtle. On a couple dives, what I'm sure was the same turtle, came around. He was very friendly and only too happy to munch away on the coral and let himself be filmed. Since the next day was possibly my last day of diving (I had already done 7 dives of my 10 dive package and could possibly do 3 that day depending what Yves planned) I asked everybody else who was diving (Romain, Stephanie and a couple English guys named John and Stan who were staying at a fancy hotel) if they were keen to dive Avatoru Pass. So far, all our days had been spent diving Tiputa Pass, but I thought I couldn't leave without diving the other pass. Everyone agreed. Was I ever happy that I asked!

The next morning the plan was for Yves to take a fish down in a plastic bag and hide it in a coral head. The idea was that it would attract the sharks, not just the grey reefs, but hopefully a silvertip to come very close and stick around awhile. However, as we headed out to the dive site we spotted manta rays on the surface and one even jumped out of the water! Change of plan! We got into the water and after a few minutes we saw the manta rays. In only 5 metres of water we spent the rest of the dive watching several manta rays feeding. Not since the Maldives had I had such an experience with mantas. Unbelievably majestic creatures! As we got back on the boat after the dive, John comments to Yves, "Yesterday I was going to tell you that you were going to have to change the name of the dive centre to the Turtle Shell Club but after that you can keep the name Raie Manta Club!"

For the second dive, we carried out our original dive plan and were rewarded with some very close shark action. The grey reefs circled around and then came the sizeable silvertip. Although I had great luck with the marine life, I was not so lucky with the camera as a few minutes into the shark action, and before the silvertip arrived, my memory card was full! I frantically tried to keep my eye on the action while simultaneously deleting what I thought were some rubbish photos to make room to take some footage of the silvertip.

Over lunch, Romain and I were discussing dinner plans. We had decided to go for pizza and I had invited John and Stan. Romain asked me if they were coming and I said that it would depend on their wives who had just arrived from Bora Bora to join them. With a look of total shock Romain revealed that he had thought they were a gay couple. After some hysterical laughter I realised I probably would have thought the same if I hadn’t heard them mention their wives previously. They were obviously very close friends and had talked at length about numerous diving vacations they had taken together.

After another great third dive back in Tiputa Pass with the dolphins and a school of eagle rays I decided to do another day of diving rather than a day trip to the blue lagoon (an apparently very pretty lagoon within the main lagoon of Rangiroa). With such amazing diving, I just couldn’t stop! The last day was slowed back down to just 2 dives and we were joined by a couple new faces – Niko from France and an American. Stephanie had left the previous night. Just when I thought Rangiroa couldn’t possibly have anything left for me, I was once again amazed. Although I had seen tons of sharks on every dive, I hadn’t yet experienced what Romain referred to as the “wall of shark” in which there are hundreds of grey reefs which seem to literally form a wall. On this last day I finally saw it. To top it off I also saw a great hammerhead (rare to see, especially at this time of year) as we drifted through the pass. I frantically tried to get the attention of the others, but nobody saw me before it vanished into the blue. A memory for just me to savour!

The final evening was spent eating pizza, just as my time on Rangiroa had begun. Romain and Niko were my company on this final night and I knew it would be hard to leave the next day as I had had such a fantastic time, not just diving, but also with the people I had met. The three of us gathered around Niko’s laptop that night and watched a documentary which featured Yves as a guide for Jean-Michel Cousteau on an expedition to study sharks at risk. Yves had also done the camera work. It was funny to watch him explain many of the same things he had told us over the course of the week when the documentary was obviously quite old. A much younger Yves in a ridiculous pale blue wetsuit made us all laugh.

I’d spent 5 days diving with sharks, but it was two land based creatures that finally got to me. As Romain and I were sitting at the picnic table in the kitchen area, I glimpsed not one, but two rats walking on the rafters. Then, when I went to my room, I moved the rock that propping the door open and saw a small scorpion. I thought it was dead so I grabbed an empty water bottle to push it outside. When I went to do so it started to move and I let out a small scream. I cleared it out and then was returning to the kitchen to get more water from the fridge. Just then Romain came around the corner to see if I was okay, but in the process he made my heart jump again!

My last morning I got up to say goodbye to Romain and Niko and then ended up chatting to a woman who had just arrived from France as I enjoyed my last moments sitting and looking at the aqua coloured water and white coral beach. I would really miss this place...