July 6 - Touring Huahine and "doing nothing

It's been rainy and quite windy here for the last few days. Fortunately, the holding here in front of the town of Fare has been good, so the "cannonballs" of high winds that barrel down the mountains at the yachts anchored here haven't adversely affected us other than slewing everyone around a bit. Hiking the mountains in the heavy mist and squalls didn't sound too appealing, so we ended up renting a car along with Dennis and Mary Lee of sv Lardo. A road mostly encircles the islands of Huahine Nui and Huahine Iti, and we slowly drove around the island taking in the lush scenery and noting how windy it was at most of the other anchorages; whitecaps were constantly visible everywhere. We visited a few beaches and marae, and stopped for lunch at a snack place where we unexpectedly ran into a bunch of other cruisers from boats anchored at Avea Bay. They were all commenting how rough a night they had had in the high winds, and then asked us if we had seen the blue eyed eels. It turns out we had driven right past the small gulley where these unique eels were, so after lunch we backtracked about 10 minutes and found a bunch of kids in the water trying to play with these 3-4' eels. The eels, indeed, had small blue, beady eyes, and the books said they are unique in all the world…where's Joseph Banks (the botanist/naturalist who accompanied Charles Darwin) when you need him? At any rate, after about 10 minutes of taking pictures and looking at the eels we drove away, ending up back in town for an ice cream, and inquiring where we could find the vanilla farm. You wouldn't think you could get lost on a small island like this, but it took us driving around about 45 minutes and taking a back road to eventually stumble across the vanilla farm we were looking for, and that quite by chance when Mary Lee looked up and happened to notice it. We bought some fresh vanilla beans, and now will look forward to recipes which use them. Unbelievably, we returned the car 7 hours and 45 minutes after we left the rental office; all of us shaking our heads wondering where those hours had gone. There's really not that much to do or see here, which is one of the allures of Huahine, but we managed to spend 8 hours "doing nothing", enjoying the raw, lush, natural beauty of this special place. Kind of sounds like a Seinfeld script.