GRÉGOIRE LE BACON
38 TRAVEL+LEISURE | OCTOBER 2019
The infinity pool at
Sofitel Moorea Ia
Ora Beach Resort.I
WAS WAITING at the airport in Papeete,
on the island of Tahiti, for a man with
whom I’d gone on only one date, four
months previously, in France. He wasn’t French
but Australian, divorced, and nearly three
decades my senior, and he’d been delayed a day
because his plane was struck by lightning leaving
Sydney, which we’d decided was a good omen
for this vacation, which was to be six days in one
of those dreamy bungalows you see all over
Instagram: thatched-roof and standing on stilts
in seas as preposterously, luminously blue as
blue Gatorade.
We’d met like this: I was reporting on a
round-the-world sailing race, one he would have
been in had his boat not been dismasted off
Cape Horn, necessitating rescue by a freighter.
A SECOND DATE
IN PARADISE
Just west of Tahiti, on the French Polynesian
island of Moorea, MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD tests the
waters of a budding relationship.
(Be still, my salty heart.) He’d decided to come
to Les Sables d’Olonne anyway to help with
safety inspections before the start, and one
afternoon, a sailor I’d interviewed introduced us.
He bought me a drink. Then we drove to a
nearby town for dinner. That was it. We hadn’t
even kissed until he emerged from the baggage
claim in Tahiti and planted one on me.
“Who are you again?” he asked as we stood on
the prow of the ferry to the neighboring island of
Moorea. It was and was not a joke. Moorea’s steep,
cloud-wreathed crest loomed up, blocking out
the sunset’s tangerine heart.
We had kept in touch after France, and finally
I’d asked in an e-mail if he’d ever want to travel
with me. Yes, it turned out, he would. We
compared schedules, found a weeklong windowThe Romance of Travel