Raiatea presented us with a welcome rest. Overnight the ship repositioned from Moorea to Raiatea, a distance close to 110 nautical miles. Raiatea sits only about 125 miles northwest of Moorea as the crow flies. We travelled pretty much in a westerly direction, with a touch of north.
Raiatea is the second largest of the Society Islands after Tahiti, and it carries a weight well beyond its size. In ancient Polynesian tradition it was known as Havai’i, considered the sacred centre of the eastern Pacific, and it’s widely believed the great voyaging migrations to Hawaii and other parts of East Polynesia set out from here. The Taputapuatea marae on its southeastern coast, once the most important religious and political centre in the region, was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2017. The island itself covers about 170 square kilometres and is home to somewhere around 12,500 to 13,000 people, most of them in the main town of Uturoa, which also serves as the administrative capital of the Leeward Islands. Raiatea shares a single lagoon with its neighbour Taha’a, and its deep, sheltered waters have made it the yachting and sail-tourism capital of French Polynesia.
Today is another tender port, so we get ready and head off the ship around 10:30. The tender ride is about 8 or 9 minutes into the port. As we arrive, there’s a large trimaran moored and a handful of other boats dotted around the port area. As with all the ports in French Polynesia, there’s a large and welcoming group of musicians and locals. There’s a marketplace and a number of shops. We wander around for about an hour, looking at the shops and the markets. Mardi finds a couple of sarongs she thinks she could convert into a nice dress, so she buys those.
The thing that catches our eye all day is the cost of things. The sarongs were US$30 each, and when we sit down for lunch and look at the bill, it comes to US$70 for fish and chips and what was meant to be a raw fish salad for Mardi, which didn’t come with raw fish at all, it came with chicken schnitzel, which was a bit odd. Not to worry, we sit and enjoy the lunchtime crowd. ABBA and the Rolling Stones play on the radio, along with a collection of other hits from that era. As we walk around the street, we notice a number of locals sitting on benches, crowd-watching. Are they watching us, or are we watching them? It must be a bit of a spectacle for these islands to see thousands of passengers descend for a day and then disappear.
It’s obviously good for the economy, and the figures back that up. More than a third of all visitors to French Polynesia now arrive by cruise ship, and the territory recorded a record 281,227 tourists in 2025, up 6.6 percent on the year before. Tahiti alone is expecting more than 1,200 cruise ship calls in 2026, a new high, and the islands are leaning into it rather than away from it, a newly built cruise terminal opened in Papeete in 2024 specifically to handle the growth. For small island economies like Raiatea, where everyday costs already run high given everything is shipped in, a single ship’s worth of passengers stepping ashore for a few hours represents real, direct income into local stalls, restaurants, and tour operators who might otherwise see very little through the week. The government here isn’t blind to the flip side either. French Polynesia has introduced a five-year sustainable tourism plan aiming to cap annual visitor numbers at roughly one per resident, around 280,000, and it’s explicitly prioritising smaller ships and local operators over the largest vessels. It’s a sensible, forward-looking balance: keep the benefits flowing to these communities while protecting the very reefs, lagoons, and quiet island life that make people want to visit in the first place.
After wandering around, we rejoin the queue for the tender and head back to the ship. There isn’t much else to do on the island beyond the couple of main streets we’ve already walked a few times over. It’s very, very windy, a big southerly blowing, so we decide to get out of the weather and head back to the tranquillity of the ship.
We spend the afternoon in the Retreat lounge, Mardi doing some crocheting, me reading, writing, and preparing for a couple of work meetings. It’s a beautiful, tranquil area, and the staff are always friendly, they know what we like to drink, bringing Mardi an iced coffee and me an iced chocolate with some chips. It’s a nice way to spend an afternoon. Today is probably the most relaxed we’ve had of the entire cruise.
After my work meeting we head up for dinner. Umesha, our head waiter who has looked after us for the three weeks we’ve been on the ship, has prepared a special Indian meal for us tonight and tomorrow night. Tonight we start with butter chicken, not on the menu, but made specially for us. The chef in the kitchen is Indian and has a real flair for the cuisine, so we look forward to delicious food with some raita and rice. He presents it family style, a big bowl of butter chicken set down in front of us, hot raita alongside. In a word, delicious, really authentic-tasting butter chicken. Tomorrow he promises lamb rogan josh, so we look forward to that, we’ve decided not to eat out when we dock in Papeete tomorrow. Eat out, you might ask? Yes, when we arrive in Tahiti we dock overnight, we have about 36 hours there.
After dinner we head to the show, a modern rendering of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream called A Hot Summer Night’s Dream. It includes aerialists, dancers, and a number of 1980s songs. The best way to describe it is Shakespeare meets Cirque du Soleil meets a rock concert, but to really bring it together you’d need to drop a couple of lines of acid. It’s quite bizarre.
After the show we wander the ship and notice the shops are open, but the casino is closed. We bump into a couple we met earlier at the lounge, hoping to gamble. We chat to them for a little while outside the casino, wondering when it will open, if at all. It comes down to international waters. Cruise ship casinos are governed by the laws of the country the ship is registered in, but by long-standing maritime convention they only open once the ship is roughly 12 nautical miles offshore, outside any nation’s territorial waters. Dock in port, or skirt close to an island’s coastline as we were doing tonight, and the casino stays dark, there’s no choice in the matter, it’s the law of whichever coastline you’re hugging that applies, not the ship’s own flag. When I get back to the room I check the map, and sure enough we’re skirting the island, not yet in international waters, which answers the question nicely.
Katarina greets us with a couple of cocktails. We chat to her about her day, she got to go off the ship for about an hour and a half and wander around, but she agrees with us, there wasn’t a lot there to see or do. We finish the day with a nice drink. Another lovely, relaxing day in the South Pacific as we hear the engines fire up and the ship heads for Papeete.
