Bora Bora Bike Loop

After what has felt like a pretty packed set of days, we treated ourselves to a lazy morning. We slept in past 7am and used the time zone delta with Caty to our advantage to hear how her summer in Italy has been going. Laura announced that she would be eating pancakes for breakfast, so we ate our fill at the breakfast buffet (crepes with house-made hazelnut spread for Laura, a mound o' bacon for me). After the concierge informed us there were no more bicycles available for rent on the main island, we spent the rest of the morning at the bungalow, the main excitement being my mild electrocution via a frayed hair dryer cord.

Fully charged up, we decided to boat-taxi to the main island anyway for lunch and to see if anyone had returned bikes. We had lunch at a bar called "The Lucky House" -- Pizza, a Fish burger, and a shared Hinano Lager. We found the shop up the road did indeed have 6 bikes to choose from, so hopes were high, and we secured a rental.

We subsequently discovered the bikes were all single speed. We settled on picking the bikes that weighed about 75-coconuts, but whose brakes were not permanently engaged. Upon mounting our trusty iron horses and kicking off, we soon we're enlightened to the fact that they had a maximum speed of 10.5mph, and my bike's chain would make an escape attempt at any bump of consequence. Thus began our leisure cruise around the island. Still, other than one steep climb and a few gusts of strong wind, we had a good ride, though we were both feeling saddle sore and about done with biking by the end of the ~20m loop.

We dropped the bikes, suited up, and spent an hour by the ocean to kill time until our boat arrived to take us back to the resort. We made it back in time to sneak in a happy hour drink order, and then took much needed showers before dinner. Dinner at the resort was an Indian buffet, paired with a superb bottle of we-definitely-earned-this wine. Dinner also featured a tahitian dance show, topped off with a digestif.Read more