Royal Huahine located on a corner of Huahine island accessible by boat (I heard there is a bumpy road on a 4×4 can also reach the hotel when the boat breaks down), the hotel offers a free shuttle to the village (where the marina is) on scheduled time but you’ll need to pre-book. The ferry schedule is below. Like many hotels in French Polynesia, the free shuttle only up to the early afternoon so if want to go to the village for dinner, you’ll need to pay extra. This is to keep guests to have dinner inside the hotel property. I forgot to mention, the transfer fee from the airport to the hotel round trip was 3500 xpf per person although it is the exact same boat that makes the hotel to village trip.

Evita finally woke up after sleeping for more than 15 hours LOL; she totally skipped a day! We pre-booked the 9:00 AM shuttle and checked with the hotel that the village market is open very early at 6 AM! In 15 minutes, we arrived at the village marina where the village daily market is at. First thing we saw was this lady selling dried fish haha reminded me of the “salty dried fish” that my grandpa used to get from the village market back in China.

The street was filled with locals selling their products, it was fun to watch!

The next ferry going back to the hotel is at 11:30 so we had plenty of time to walk around. This one street is where the supermarket is located along with some shops. Our main purpose was to stock up drinks and snacks because Huahine was the only island in our trip that has a supermarket. We didn’t want to lug the heavy drinks with us so we kept the supermarket to visit last. We checked out the shops first…

Their shops were interesting…the floor is unfinished!

The Tahitian dresses they were selling were quite expensive at 5000 xpf and up!

The walk from the start of that street to the end takes less than 5 minutes! At the beginning of the road is another shop that sells Monoi Tiaré, a local perfume oil made by the island Tiaré flowers in coconut oil and jewelry.

Across from it is the Port of Huahine.

We walked in to check it out the scenery, it was okay, our hotel has better views!

Then, we turned back and Evita bought us all fresh coconut juice for only 100 xpf (less than $1) each.

They were so refreshing and sweet; Evita had two herself haha! Lastly, we went to the supermarket, named Super U haha!

A lot of supermarkets in French Polynesia are own by Chinese-Tahitian so you can see a lot of Chinese sauces and snacks 🙂 The prices were reasonable being in a remote location in the South Pacific, 500 xpf for a large mango juice. Please when you are in French Polynesia, you must try their local mango juice, the brand is called Rotui. Once you tried that mango juice, you’ll realize fresh real mango versus from mango concentrate and artificial juice! They are that good – juicy, rich flavor, and naturally sweet!!! Even the “all organic” Evita from the healthy New Zealand felt in love with that mango juice!

The Super U supermarket was huge in island standard! You can almost get all daily needs from this market. Even macaroons haha!

When we were there, it was filled with locals and they bought boxes of food for the New Year celebration; it was New Year’s Eve that day! They charged 100 xpf for a bag urgggggg, that was the most expensive grocery bag that I ever paid for!

Lugging our heavy groceries, we stopped by the local fruit stands to check out the fruits locals were selling. Evita wanted to try out their unusual looking bananas so we went to the old Chinese looking lady’s stand. She was selling bags of those bananas and we asked the price. We found out that the lady is Chinese and she speaks Hakka. But she refused to sell us only 4 bananas, she said must buy the whole bag for 500 xpf; the bag have over 10+ bananas. There was no way we could’ve eaten all those bananas so we left and went to another stand which the lady sold us 4 bananas for like 200 xpf haha.

After that, we walked back to where our hotel boat parked, we got in and the boat driver asked if we mind leaving early since he had to make a trip back to the hotel, of course, perfect!

Butler Jason LOL!

After our 10 min walk back to our room, I had to walk all the way back to the lobby to get ice hahaha good exercise. And then I rewarded myself with that yummy Rotui mango juice with a view!!!

Time for lunch, I was starving!

We walked to the hotel restaurant and took some photos there after we placed the order; islander takes their time!

It was Evita’s first time to French Polynesia even though she only lives 5 hours away in New Zealand, she was saying the food is so expensive, her salad was 2200 xpf. We replied where can you buy a salad for $20 USD with a view like this? You pay for the view and she totally agreed LOL! Our table facing the overwater bungalows!

Jason ordered the spaghetti bolognese, woah that dish was huge!

I had the burger again. Our lunch with a million dollar view cost 6500 xpf.

After lunch, we went back to our room to start the photoshoot haha since Evita slept through yesterday, she needs to catch up with photos! Behind the scene LOL:

Here are some photos of ours:

Evita wasn’t good with photo taking…..we should rely on our tripod!

 

The right most overwater bungalow was our room 🙂

Oh silly Jason! How Jason knows Evita? They were middle school classmates and haven’t seen each other for 10+ years (Jason went to the USA and Evita went to New Zealand) until two years ago that Evita went on a USA tour with her parents and visited us. It was pretty amazing that we went on this trip together!!!

Then a passing rain…we went back into our room and waited. Few minutes later…..

Then, an overwater bungalow looking boat approaching our hotel, it looked like a “party boat” with loud music LOL!

Evita and Jason went in the water for a dip, our infinity pool!

With some rest, we headed out for dinner, I was looking forward to having the duck that I had the night before, and we found out that because it was New Year’s Eve, the hotel only serving a New Year Buffet. I asked how much, the lady said 15000 xpf per person…what???? No way we can eat that much worth of food per person…yikes robbery! I purposely routed Royal Huahine for New Year’s Eve to avoid the mandatory expensive dinner fee and luckily we were able to opt out of it! We went back to our room, disappointed that no more chance to have that duck again, but luckily, Jason bought some cup noodles from Super U. Our New Year’s Eve dinner, the yummy instant noodle!

We went to sleep early that night and around midnight we heard some fireworks noises. I opened the curtain to see, some fireworks but not impressive and went back to sleep. Happy 2017!!!