Dreaming Bora Bora

Oceania Regatta

We just finished the Dream Trip—a three-week cruise on the luxury-class Oceania Regatta from Los Angeles to Tahiti. Looking back on the experience, with gourmet meals, a night in an overwater bungalow in Bora Bora, three days in a Tahitian villa with a private pool overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the island of Moorea, I’m still shaking my head—how did a public schoolteacher and an underpaid state health lawyer pull this off without consigning ourselves to eating nothing but Cream of Wheat for the next three months?

The Amazing Journey

First, the journey itself. The Regatta is a relatively small cruise ship with just under 800 passengers. Oceania Cruise Line’s reputation for great food is well-deserved; we crossed the line from well-fed to gluttonous pretty early in the voyage. The crew and staff are exceptional. I’m not sure how Oceania manages to hire so many happy, thoughtful, polite people to work incredibly long and hard days, but they are extraordinary—every member of the ship’s staff smiles and says hello as if auditioning for a gig in the Magic Kingdom. I keep looking for a chink in the friendly armor, but I truly never see a staffer frown, even at a co-worker. Something in the water?

The same good cheer is not always demonstrated by our uniformly older, well-heeled fellow passengers. We hear some griping about the food (“Not as good as my cruise on {fill in the blank}”) and entertainment (“You call that a show?”) that seems to me completely gratuitous, while reminding me of our status as budget travelers. I’m just happy to not be cooking or having to make the bed.

Days at Sea

We have two five-day stints at sea in the South Pacific—between Los Angeles and Hawaii, then from Hawaii to French Polynesia. Blessed with sunny, warm weather, the ship pitches enough from the waves to give everyone a drunken sailor walk, but not enough to make anybody sick. The small ship doesn’t offer a lot of daytime activities, but the fitness center is well-equipped, there are plenty of chairs around the pool, and the magnificent library is cool and quiet. The days are nicely segmented by meals: Breakfast, a couple of hours of sun and exercise/Lunch, a couple of hours of sun and the daily trivia match/Dinner and (at least for us) bedtime.

Much of our between-meals time is spent socializing with some really interesting fellow travelers, reminding me that the best part of traveling is not what we see but who we meet. We hang out with a delightful septuagenarian woman traveling solo from Canada; a former Air Force One pilot and his wife, who ran a massive Pentagon budget back in the day; and a really fun foursome from Phoenix: Bill and Chuck, an award-winning author and government attorney, respectively, and their best friends Matt and Lisa, very successful novelists in the YA genre. I try to hold my own in conversations with these folks, who look kindly upon us underachievers.

Port Stops

We didn’t book many activities for the port stops in Hawaii and the Polynesian Islands. The shore excursions are expensive and, honestly, living in a tropical jungle, we don’t feel the need to sightsee new ones. Time spent walking around Kona with our Phoenix friends is relaxed and fun, as is our dune buggy ride a couple days later with Matt and Lisa (although they might beg to differ, being relegated to the backseat of a bumpy, windowless vehicle as we bombed around the island). We splurge on a snorkeling trip off the island of Moorea, which brings us up close and personal with sharks, rays, and sea turtles. Totally splurge-worthy.

The Big Splurge

But the big splurge on this trip was Barbara’s lifelong bucket-list item: an overnight stay in an over-water bungalow at the Westin Bora Bora Resort. Unlike most of our other port stops, in which the ship arrived in the morning and left the same night, the Regatta was scheduled to remain in Bora Bora from Friday morning until Saturday evening, so we gave our cabin steward the night off (at least from our room) and made our way to the Westin.

We take a tender ride from the ship, then a taxi about halfway around the big island, and then a five-minute boat ride to the resort, which is located on a ring-shaped coral rim that encircles a lagoon separating it from the larger island of Bora Bora. Only a few years out from a significant renovation, the Westin is spanky clean and lovely. As I would hear Barbara say several times an hour, “It is so much more beautiful than the pictures!”

We are checked in by two exceptional young women, Emma and Blandine, Marriott employees recently transferred to the new resort from hotels in France. They are clearly enthused about their new gig and welcome us as if we are visiting their home. We share a little of our story with them—that I was finally making good on the Bora Bora dream Barbara shared with me on our first date twenty years ago.

The view from our bungalow

The bungalow is magnificent, perched about six feet over the glass-clear lagoon and 633 feet under the peak of Mt. Mataihua, which comes and goes from sight as it is enveloped then released by low-hanging clouds. We swim off our porch and take pictures of each other through the glass viewpoint set in the floor of the room before exploring more of the resort.

It’s not like we’ve never been to a beach resort, or even a really fine hotel, before—but this place is capital-S Special. We try a little bit of everything—the infinity pool with loungers in its shallow entry, the turtle rescue operated onsite, snorkeling in the lagoon. It is a marvelous day.

Just because we could . . .

After we sit down for dinner, the restaurant manager hands us an envelope with our names on it. I figured it was a coupon for a free drink or dessert, but it is a handwritten note:

“20 years after the first date, the dream came true! On behalf of all the team, we wish you a wonderful evening in paradise. Blandine & Emma.”

A personal connection established in gratitude: Ours for simply being there, and theirs for the opportunity to help two strangers live their dreams. We are so touched we get weepy. Dream Trip, indeed.