Huahine Island: A True Paradise

During my last holidays, we decided to spend a few days on Huahine Island. For this 3 days trip, I grabbed my Diana Mini and my Nikonos V camera, as well as 9 rolls of film… Now I want to share with you the beauty of this little island that you can easily call a paradise…

Huahine Island is located just in front of Raiatea, the island where we live. And from our garden, we can see Huahine every day, as it’s only about 50 km distance from our home.

As everybody here told us how magic and beautiful Huahine is, we decided to spend 3 days there. You must consider that people here are so used to the islands of the pacific that they’re able to tell you that some islands are “not beautiful” and that they don’t deserve a visit, but when locals tell you that an island is worth to visit (and at least as beautiful as their native one, because, of course, the native island is always the most beautiful one….), you can truly imagine how beautiful it can be.

Huahine is in fact composed by 2 islands in the same lagoon: Huahine Nui (the “great Huahine”) and Huahine Iti (the “little Huahine”), but they’re so close together that you can consider it as one only island (and a little bridge makes the junction of the 2 parts). The island is very little as it has a surface of 74 km2 and the whole tour by car of the 2 parts is only of 60 km…and 6000 people are living there.
The name “Huahine” means in tahitian “woman” (in french, the word “Vahiné” describes the tahitian young women….) as the island was only governed by women in the past, and the polynesian mythologie says that the very first woman of the origins was born here and gave birth to all the polynesian people. As a proof, some people tell you that when you look at the island from the sea, the shape of the mountains represent a lying woman….

But the beauty of Huahine lies also in the fact that it is perhaps one of the less touristic islands of the “Society Archipel” (Tahiti, Moorea, Huahine, Tahaa, Raiatea, Bora Bora and Maupiti) and is perhaps the most natural preserved one (all tourists go directly to Bora-Bora which has lost the real polynesian identity and people here hate what was made of Bora-Bora…), so if you really want to discover an authentic polynesian island, you must visit Huahine. There are enough hotels for the little touristic activity and the people there are really very very friendly with the foreign visitors (as they don’t see so much of them, perhaps….).

We chose the “Mauarii Pension” (http://www.mauarii.com/) near of the village of Parea (in the south of the island) as some friends recommended it to us and because it’s located in the south of Huahine Iti, the most “authentic” place to stay of the island and one of the only places of Polynesia where you got real natural sand beaches. Yes, you read it well: most of the islands of French Polynesia don’t have any natural sand beach! What you see often on the postcards is not on the islands but on the little islands called “motu” in the middle of the lagoon, or the artificial sand beaches made by the Hotel owners because the clients want to have a sand beach….

During our stay, we made a very long walk along the sand beach of Parea and were amazed by the real “postcard” mood of the place, and it’s no fake, all is natural and authentic here… The next day we took some bikes and went a bit around the south part of the island and discovered some new amazing and different landscapes. And finally, for the 3rd day, we made a whole tour of the island by car and were very surprised to discover how the north-east part of the island was “wild” (in comparison to the south) because there isn’t any corallian recife, and the beach looks very different….. So, in a very small place like Huahine, you can have very different places to visit and you’ll be surprised how the landscapes are different from one part to another of the island…
The place is just dreamy and really looks like a true paradise…. If you don’t believe me, just have a look at the galleries…!!

Gallery #1: Lomography Diana Mini – Agfa Optima Prestige 100 & 200 iso
Gallery #2: Lomography Diana Mini – Lomography Redscale 100 iso
Gallery #3: Nikonos V – Fuji Sensia 200 & Lomography x-pro 200 iso
Gallery #4: Nikonos V – Fuji Sensia 100 iso

written by vicuna on 2009-12-12 #places #nature #island #sea #landscape #lagoon #discovery #holidays #location #pacific-ocean #paradise #beach #authentic #diana-mini #nikonos-v #french-polynesia #huahine