The lagoon is the trip. The question is which boat.
Which Bora Bora day actually feeds you on a motu. What a Moorea whale morning costs. Whether the 4x4 crossing of Tahiti beats another afternoon in the water. Reviews of every tour you can book across French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, Samoa and Tonga.
A Bora Bora lagoon lap, a Moorea mountain road, and lunch cooked on a sandbar.
The four bookings a first Polynesian fortnight hangs off. What each one costs, and what the people who took it say.
01The Moorea morningMoorea 6-Hour Snorkeling and Lunch Shared TourSix hours on the lagoon with lunch served on the water and the reef straight under the boat. More travellers take this than anything else on the site.
02The Bora Bora dayFull Day Lagoon Group Tour in Bora Bora with LunchA full lap of the lagoon with rays and blacktips, lunch on a motu, and Otemanu over your shoulder the whole way round.
03The Cook Islands oneHalf-Day Muri Lagoon BBQ Lunch Cruise including SnorkelingHalf a day on Muri lagoon out of Rarotonga, two snorkelling stops and a barbecue cooked on board. The cheapest of the four by a distance.
04The day off the waterMoorea 4WD Tour Inc. Belvedere, Pineapple Farm, Magic Mountain…Up to the Belvedere between the two bays, along the pineapple road and on to Magic Mountain. Half a day, and the view everyone else queues for.
A Polynesian day out starts at a jetty and ends on a sandbar.
Four kinds of day on the water, what it costs to get aboard each one, and which island suits it best.
Sleep on one island. The Papeete ferry and the Air Tahiti hop do the rest.
Bora Bora for the lagoon, Moorea for the mountains standing behind it, Tahiti for the road all the way round, Raiatea for the marae, and Rarotonga, Upolu or Tongatapu when you want the Pacific without the overwater bungalow. Six places to start, and the best day out on each.
Humpbacks calve off Moorea and Vava’u, and you are allowed in with them.
They arrive off Moorea, Tahiti and the Vava’u group from August and stay into November. French Polynesia and Tonga both license guided swims, the boats go out with a handful of people, and the season shuts as sharply as it opens.
Bora Bora is one lagoon. The choice is how you cross it.
Everything in Bora Bora →
The island itself is twenty minutes of road. Everything worth the money is offshore: the drift where the rays come to you, the motu where lunch is cooked over wood, and the circuit that puts Otemanu behind the boat with the light on it.
The whole lagoon, with lunch on a motu
One boat, one lap, stops at the ray drift and the blacktip shallows, then a grill on a sandbar while the crew cuts fruit. It eats the whole day and nobody comes back wishing they had done the half.
Sharks, rays and the coral garden
The short version drops you at the two things people come for and has you back before lunch. The water is chest-deep at both stops, so it works for anyone who can float with a mask on.
Up the interior track to the wartime guns
A truck grinds up the rough track behind Vaitape to the American coastal guns and the saddle under Otemanu. It is the only way to look down on the lagoon without paying for a seat in a plane.
The days out more travellers take than anything else in Polynesia.
Every Polynesian tour on the site →These go first across the islands, and this is what earns each of them the slot.
1
Moorea 6-Hour Snorkeling and Lunch Shared Tour
Spend about six hours on Moorea’s lagoon with a small group of up to 12 people. Guides such as Mana, Wilfred, Nolte, and Elvis lead you to rays, black-tip reef sharks, coral gardens, and mountain-framed bays, then serve a motu lunch with poisson cru, coconut demonstrations, music, and local customs.
From · $138
Read our review →
2Half-Day Muri Lagoon BBQ Lunch Cruise including Snorkelingfrom $713Full Day Lagoon Group Tour in Bora Bora with Lunchfrom $184
45 Hours Tahiti Island Tour – West and East Coastfrom $79
5Reef Discovery Half Day Group Signature Tourfrom $143
6Moorea 4WD Tour Inc. Belvedere, Pineapple Farm, Magic Mountain…from $70
7Snorkeling excursion, discovery of the lagoon, small group.from $118
8Franckyfranck Tours Moorea – Half day Toursfrom $57 Moorea is thirty minutes from Papeete and the reason people rebook.
Two deep bays cut into a ridge of volcanic spires, a pineapple plateau in the middle, and a lagoon with more rays in it than Bora Bora. Most of what you can do here costs noticeably less than the same thing further west.
Every Moorea day out →
Moorea, Tahiti and Raiatea all keep a volcano behind the beach.
Half-day climbs to the Belvedere, quad tracks through the pineapple, a waterfall an hour from the ferry and a crater crossing that needs low range. The road round the island is the other half of a Polynesian week.
What a day out in Polynesia actually costs.
Every tour on the site grouped by price. The lagoon days sit in the middle; the cheap end is half-days and anything you drive yourself.
Half-days on the water, quad and boat hire, market walks and the short island circuits.
The full-day standards: a whole lagoon with lunch on a motu, whale mornings, the 4x4 crossing of Tahiti.
Private boats, jet-ski-and-barbecue combinations, deep-water fishing and the charters worth doing once.
Three things that only happen in this corner of the Pacific.
Warm water and palm trees are everywhere. Being dropped on a sandbar with a fire and a cool box, walking the seabed under a brass helmet, and eating out of a pit oven beside a marae are not.
The Motu Picnic
A motu is a scrap of coral rubble on the reef with a few palms on it, and most of them belong to somebody. The boat lands, the crew splits a coconut, grills whatever came aboard that morning and serves it on a banana leaf under the trees. No jetty, no building, no second party on the sand, which is the entire point of it.
- 1Half-Day Muri Lagoon BBQ Lunch Cruise including Snorkeling★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,518 reviews
- 2Full day Lagoon Safari & Lunch on a Motu – ST★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 443 reviews
- 3Bora Bora Snorkel Cruise by Polynesian Outrigger Canoe with BBQ Island Lunch★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 195 reviews
Helmet Dives and Sea Scooters
A brass helmet fed by a surface hose lets you walk the sand floor at four or five metres with your hair dry and your glasses on, which is why families book it. Sea scooters are the other half of the same idea: a battery-driven handle that tows you along the drop-off faster than you can kick, with a guide on the reef side.
- 1Ariki Adventures: Premium Sea Scooter Turtle Adventure★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 455 reviews
- 2Aqua Safari Introductory Helmet Dive (Underwater Walk)★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 428 reviews
- 3Eco Friendly Sea Scooter Turtle Tour in Rarotonga★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 345 reviews
The Marae and the Umu
A marae is an open stone platform where chiefs were invested and the gods were addressed, and the great ones on Raiatea were the departure point for the canoes that reached Hawaii and New Zealand. The visits worth booking pair the stones with an umu, the earth oven where breadfruit and fish go under hot rocks and leaves for a few hours.
- 1Authentic Polynesian Experience★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 491 reviews
- 2Bora Bora Snorkel Cruise by Polynesian Outrigger Canoe with BBQ Island Lunch★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 195 reviews
- 3Polynesian culinary experience★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 137 reviews
Four Polynesian bookings that will not wait.
Most of these islands can be arranged at a hotel desk on the morning. These four run on a season, a boat with eight seats, or a swell chart, and none of them take any interest in when your flight lands.
- 01Swimming with Whales in Moorea (Half Day tour)The humpbacks are here from August into November and the licensed boats take a handful of swimmers each. Outside those months there is nothing in the water to see.
- 02Full day Lagoon Safari & Lunch on a Motu – STA motu day runs one boat and cooks for a fixed number, so a full boat is a full boat. Through July and August they go a fortnight ahead.
- 03Sunset Cruise : Moorea Sailing on a Catamaran named TabooA sunset boat sails once. This close to the equator the sun drops at six all year round, and there is no later departure to catch instead.
- 04Unique Tahiti tour to Teahupoo, small group, full day combo tourTeahupo’o sits an hour past the end of the ring road and the reef is only reachable by boat. Trips stop outright when the swell gets too big, which is also when the wave is worth seeing.
Tahiti is the island everyone lands on and too many skip.
The ring road takes a day with stops: black sand at Point Venus, the blowholes on the east coast, the Vaipahi water gardens, and a 4x4 track that climbs into the crater and crosses to the other side. Teahupo’o is an hour past where the tarmac gives up.
- 15 Hours Tahiti Island Tour – West and East Coastfrom $79
- 2Moorea Street Food Tourfrom $73
- 3Crossing Over Tahiti Island Safari 4×4from $137
November to April the lagoon chops up and the Tahiti tracks turn to grease.
The wet season does two things. It keeps the small boats alongside for a day or two at a time, and it turns the interior tracks to grease. Both have the same answer: go inland on foot, go under a roof, or take the side of the island the wind is not on.
By island, and by country
By kind of day — on the water, on the road, or under both
Tahiti, Moorea, Bora Bora: the run almost everybody does first.
Moorea
Bora Bora
Raiatea
RarotongaThe newest Polynesian tour reviews.
The rest of the new ones →
Tahiti E-bike, mtb, vtt Tour with Swimming and Lunch
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Bora Bora and Taha’a Private Scenic Flight one hour
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Private Bora Bora Lagoon Snorkel Cruise with BBQ Picnic
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Must-Do : Nature, Culture & Moments Uniques – MirimirI Tours
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Moorea Cruise Ships 4×4, Belvedere Magic mount PRIVATE Tours
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Half day Private tour of Moorea Safari Albert Pick up hotel
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