Dive Bora Bora

FOUR SEASONS BORA BORA IS INCLUDED IN OUR BOOK, DIVE IN STYLE 

Hotel Bora Bora has finally caved in to her need for some major surgery and has closed until at least 2012. So, in a fortuitous and timely manner, the Four Seasons Bora Bora has picked up the banner as the island’s top resort and opened about the most inclusive and extensive hotel you could imagine, and in a magical position.

This is no boutique resort, with over a hundred rooms, but it does have space, and lots of it. Almost all the rooms are hovering on stilts over the translucent lagoon and are reached via long wooden tails spearing out from the fringing beach, while the few villas are on the motu itself with their own private beaches. The balance of the fast-maturing 55 acres is devoted purely to the resort’s endless facilities and as a result it has dedicated areas for just about every age group. Nature created it as three separate motus or islets, but now it is effectively one, joined through a series of bridges over meandering calm lagoons and inlets, home to juvenile eagle rays and ideal for gentle snorkelling.

The diving here is very much about the pelagics, principally sharks, and if you have an innate fear of them then this is the perfect opportunity for ‘in at the deep end’ therapy. This is the only place in the world we know where, albeit thanks to the questionable act of feeding, you are guaranteed close encounters with burly and reclusive three-metre lemon shark, along with droves of the more common grey reef and black-tip reef shark.

Since we last visited the islands, a new force had emerged in dive operators, Bathys Diving. Someone has finally decided to invest serious money and create the number one dive operator both in Moorea and Bora Bora; they have succeeded. Simply put, it’s probably the best equipped dive operation you are liable to find anywhere.