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Elizabeth Weintraub
The Blue Lagoon and Bird Island at Rangiroa
My sister in Minnesota sent an email yesterday to say that she was expecting to receive a ton of snow shortly and temperatures were slated to break a 90-year record low. Then, this morning, she said the newscaster misread her prompter. Apparently, the record low temperatures were only going to be beat those from the ’90s, not from 90 years ago. Of course, to that weather girl it probably seems like 90 years ago because she was most likely learning how to read and write in the 1990s.
It’s all in your perspective, I guess. When I was in school, a hundred years ago seemed like an eternity and today it’s like yesterday. Well, today it is almost is like yesterday. The older we get, the more time is put into perspective. Just like the more experiences we have, the greater our perspective because we have more information to draw upon.
I was thinking about a person’s perception of paradise. Tropical paradise, in particular. There are some people in this world who don’t give a hoot about a tropical paradise, people like my husband. People like this typically can take or leave paradise. Some of them actually hate it. My mother intensely despised the tropics and was very attached to freezers. The kind of freezer that I was supposed to strike with a table knife after placing inside steaming ice-cube trays filled with hot water to melt the accumulated ice. But I love a good tropical paradise. I prefer to think of myself as a more normal and balanced person.
In fact, I would like it if I was given a long assignment to search out the best tropical paradises in the world and to write about them. But no, I am simply a Sacramento real estate agent; an agent who sells a lot of short sales and hence can afford to go on vacation in French Polynesia this winter and leave her cats in the hands of housesitters.
Yesterday, we took a super long boat ride across the inside waters of the atoll, Rangiroa, from the town of Avatoru to a place called the Blue Lagoon, or Lagon Bleu. It’s a lagoon within a lagoon. How cool is that? We also visited Bird Island at Rangiroa.
It made me wonder how many shades of blue are there in the world? That’s what you think when you first step foot on the island and lay eyes on the most beautiful blue waters in the world. Azure. Soft blue pastel. Turquoise. Jade. Hypnotic and brilliant blues and greens. This is after dragging your bony and sunburned knees through the water to get past the reef and onto land itself. There is no sandy beach on which to land. The water is almost waist deep, and you’ve got to wear some type of foot covering for protection. Lemon sharks are circling you as well, but they didn’t seem hungry yesterday.
The guys from the boat loaded a huge cooler onto top of a surfboard anchored in the bay and dragged it to shore. It was filled with chicken, fish, salad fixings and stuff to drink. The crew set up a barbecue stand while the rest of us mostly swam around in the lagoon. A few brave souls ventured across the long reef to Bird Island. My husband and I were two of those. The water was littered with what looked from a distance to be gigantic dog turds, but they were actually black sea slugs. We were not about to step on them. We were also careful not to step on the coral and clams and other sea life, so it took us about 30 minutes to cross from the Blue Lagoon island to Bird Island. Like with most things, it’s not always about the destination, and it’s more about the journey. I just wished my journey would speed itself up a bit because I could feel the heat of the sun baking my back. Why did I not think to put sunscreen there?
I walked around the entire island, shuffling though shore waters when navigation on land became too difficult. My husband got lost halfway around. At one point I thought about going back to look for him but then I realized if he was hurt or having some kind of emergency, I could not possibly drag him back to the island by myself, so I should get help instead. He saw it as I left him there to die on a tropical paradise island.
What is wrong with that, I ask. There are worse places in the world to die than the Blue Lagoon or Bird Island at Rangiroa.
Overview of Kia Ora Resort
Something does not want us to sleep in, and my guess is it’s a bird. The last 2 days, we’ve heard a knocking sound before the sun rises. I suspect a bird lands on our balcony and pecks at the glass top over our rattan table. It’s four knocks in a row yet nobody yells out: hellllloooooooo, so our bets are on a bird. This rude awakening doesn’t bother me because I am an early riser and take it as my wake-up call, but my husband just pulls the covers over his head.
Our resort, Kia Ora, is one of those vacation spots that blends so well into the environment that you never want to leave. Some resorts can give you “resort fever,” making it imperative that you high tail it out to explore, but I could happily hang out here for days on end without the slightest bit of guilt or annoyance that I’m not driving around the atoll. It’s pretty much paradise everywhere you go, ocean on one side, lagoon on the other. Except the lagoon is so vast that you cannot see the other side, only the blue horizon.
Roosters crow every now and then, even way after sunrise. Fish splash as they jump out of the water, which makes the birds circle, squawking and diving, trying to catch them with their puny little feet. Yesterday, I spotted an eel swim past our lower-level deck. My favorites are the yellow butterfly fish and big blue groupers.
This is a diving and snorkeling destination for many people, this atoll in the Tuamoto Archipelago. The lagoon of Rangiroa is about 75 kilometers by 25 kilometers. Even though I don’t SCUBA, I can still watch the fish because the jade-colored and turquoise waters are so clear. The fish are so danged cute that I want to pet them. Some of them you can catch if you’re quick enough, and you can pet them as long as you pet them right direction. If you pet them in the wrong direction, you could get your hands cut up. Just like if you don’t watch where you are walking in the water, you could step on a sea urchin (ouch ouch) or squash a ray (triple ouch).
If I have any derogatory comments about the Kia Ora Resort, it would probably be the food. Just because it’s French doesn’t mean it’s as good as Paris or even as good as Tahiti. It’s all right, but it’s nothing exciting. Sometimes, it’s hard to figure out what you’re getting. The waiter called it vegetable soup but it was really cream of celery. We ordered what we thought was a vegetable tray of carrot sticks and celery sticks, and it turned out to be a salad. It would help if we could read French. We only know the important words, like how to figure out whether it’s fish, beef or chicken.
Our meals are incredibly expensive for what you get. Even a Diet Coke is $5.00. It’s the same kind of Coke you get in Europe, Light and not Diet. So it tastes a little bit like Diet Coke watered down to Light. But I’m happy to get any kind of Diet Coke at all in the South Pacific. I’ll just say if you ever come here and decide to opt for the private dining in the air conditioned restaurant and blow a hundred bucks pp for a 3-course meal, don’t. They put forth an ambitious effort, but it’s not what you are probably expecting.
Tiputa Pass in Rangiroa
Dolphins jumping in Tiputa Pass at Rangiroa
You think the holidays are a quiet time in real estate, but even if a Sacramento real estate agent is on vacation in French Polynesia, stuff can happen in monumental fashion. For example, I’ve been gone for only 5 days and during that period of time I’ve had:
- an Elk Grove home fall out of escrow and go back into escrow
- to rescue a pending cancellation due to changing buyer’s names on the deed at the 11th hour
- receipt of four short sale approval letters on four separate short sales to process
- a stove removal by a short sale seller that should not have been removed, times two.
- a demand for an elevation certificate spring out of nowhere
- to refer a seller to a short sale lawyer because I believe the lender lost the prom note
- and numerous inquiries about buying and selling homes in the Sacramento region
Yet, nothing insurmountable and that I can’t handle from French Polynesia. That’s because I have two invaluable things: 1) The internet. 2) The Elizabeth Weintraub Team. And quite frankly, I am completely confident my team members could handle any emergency that pops up — I think they like to humor me by keeping me involved.
I am replaceable.
What is not really replaceable is the rate at which we over-fish our oceans. The ice that is melting at our poles is not replaceable. The level at which our seas are rising is pretty alarming. The gradual warming of our temperatures around the world is disturbing. Bees and butterflies are in peril. When you put these things into perspective, my challenges seem somewhat miniscule.
We walked from our hotel about a mile down the road to Tiputa Pass in Rangiroa yesterday afternoon. I was hoping we would see tigersharks but we spotted instead dolphins jumping. This is one of the spots in the Rangiroa atoll that has broken and lets water flow from the Pacific into the lagoon and back out to sea again. A large freighter came through in the morning to dock inside the lagoon and left through Tiputa Pass in the afternoon. Below are a few more photos:
dolphins jumping at Tiputa Pass, Rangiroa, Adam Weintraub
A Day in Tahiti is One Day Too Long
You know the adage if a tree fell in the forest? If you don’t know that something exists, you might form your perceptions around that which you do know, because you’ve got nothing else to go on. Your reality is formed by your own beliefs and experiences. And in that way we all create our own reality, regardless of whether you realize it.
For example, when I was in my 20s, I used to think a great vacation experience would be to stay at a place like the Disneyland Hotel. To have room service, a real soft bed (instead of a waterbed) and peace and quiet. Today, not so much. That’s not because I’ve turned into some other weird haute person, it’s because I’ve discovered there are other options that don’t involve sharing your space with 50 million other people.
There is a place in French Polynesia that is home to one of the largest atolls in the world. An atoll is a place where the island has sunk in the middle and all that is left is the coral reef, which has long ago died and today is covered with sand, grass, plants. I swear, the weather is perfect; the water turquoise, brimming with tropical fish; and the resort boasts a small string of modernized and updated over-water bungalows.
I can see why a day spent in Tahiti is a day too long.
There is a first-time home buyer I referred from Sacramento to an agent in another town where I don’t work. The home buyer sent me a dramatic email a few days ago, begging for a new agent. The reason she did not want to work with the agent I referred to her was because the agent refused to answer her questions about the ethnic make-up of a neighborhood. No matter how we explained it to her, the buyer could not understand that federal Fair Housing law prohibits the discussion.
This is an agent to whom I will definitely refer more business.
Would You Eat Kangaroo?
One of the things about getting older is it becomes increasingly difficult to discover new experiences. Fortunately, a good way to ensure these types of rare opportunities continue to present themselves to you is to travel to foreign countries. I mean, how else would I ever get the chance to sample a roo? Yup, kangaroo was on the menu in Tahiti last night. It wasn’t described in any particular manner or its origin sourced but I imagine it came from Down Under. I’m not even certain of what part of the body my rounds of roo came from. My husband joked it was the tail, but we both know that tails, regardless of what you might think, are not very tasty.
I had some reservations about ordering the roo. Roo? Come over here and sit on my plate. Although I am not a vegetarian, I am not always comfortable eating meat. Julia Whitty, in her marvelous book about diving in Rangiroa, The Fragile Edge, says there are more carnivores in the sea than on land. Whereas, we humans eat cows and pigs that eat plants, it’s more removed in the ocean. In the ocean, apex predators can be four times or more removed as in fish that eat fish, that eat fish, that eat fish, that eat fish, that eat plants.
But that wasn’t helping me deal with the fact that I was about to eat a kangaroo. With brow furrowed, lips pursed, I turned to my husband who was busy studying the menu — trying to decide between ravioli with prawns or lobster stew — raised my forearms with fingers curled into what could best be described as gesturing a pathetic rabbit and whimpered. He immediately began to mimic a kangaroo, bouncing his head forward with force and thumping the table. See, this is why I married the guy.
I can tell you that kangaroo, even when accompanied by foie gras with a carmelized crust, and prepared medium rare is a bit tough and chewy. Very dense texture and intense taste. From its initial spot in my mind, sitting quietly and innocently as a hot appetizer option on the dinner menu at the Tahitian restaurant Le Lotus, to its appearance in all of is grand glory on my dinner plate, I could not help but think about it as an animal joyously hopping about while carting a little baby joey in its pouch. Not that I have ever seen a kangaroo in person, mind you.
So, I gobbled it.
