Manta moment with bonus karaoke

We woke to pouring rain on our arrival to the capital of the Marquesas islands, Taiohae.

While the sky was grey and cloudy, the view was still spectacular – verdant peaks shrouded in mist, with waterfalls cascading down the hillsides.

We were taken on another jeep tour, winding through the hills and dodging the various horses, roosters and dogs standing on the roads.

(The previous day we drove past a local riding a horse bareback, the traditional method in the Marquesas, with just a hessian sack as a saddle.)

We toured ceremonial sites featuring impressive statues and also the grandly named Notre Dame Cathedral, which was attended by hundreds of Catholic locals a few hours earlier.

Built between 1973 and 1977 on the site of a 19th-century church, it incorporates stone and building materials donated from the six inhabited islands of the Marquesas and is the largest church in the region.

In the afternoon, we climbed into zodiacs and zoomed along the edge of the caldera (the island was formed by a collapsed volcano) to watch the manta rays feeding.

It was magical to see them glide around the zodiac with their wide mouths open to scoop up plankton, but it was tricky to photograph them while we were bobbing around in the two-metre swell. Here’s the clearest one DD took …

And this is what manta rays look like under the water …

They look a bit scary and surreal, but I would love to swim with them one day.

We toasted another fun day with Kir Royales in the late afternoon, followed by a white party in the evening. White is my least favourite colour to wear, so I teamed white pants with a silvery grey top to try and lessen the impact. I still looked like a prime GLP-1 candidate in the full-length version of the pic below.

After dinner I was cajoled behind a microphone and screeched my way through the first song of the karaoke night, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, with my cruise buddy Lynda … why on earth did we choose that song? It has an opera section!

Then DD performed two duets with Lynda, “Islands in the stream” and “Stop dragging my heart around”. He was having the time of his life (see main pic). It may be the most I’ve seen him smile EVER. He loves a microphone.

Then I ran away to our cabin because it was waaay past my bedtime at 9.30pm. Should DD and I have sung a duet together? Too late now.

Today we arrived at Ua Huka, an island rarely visited by cruise ships. However the waves were too high for us to disembark, so we anchored behind the coastal islets (motus) of Hemeni and Teuaua, which provide nesting habitats for 10 species of seabirds, including thousands of white terns and sooty terns.