Speaking of the hotel... We picked it because of its highly-recommended on-site scuba shop, which as you'll see below lived up to the hype. The drawback was, well, everything else about the place. (We don't want to name names, but it rhymes with "Yentl".)

Located in a spot that's not within walking distance of anything (even for professional walkers like ourselves), they have a completely captive audience. Arriving in our room, we were shocked to see Internet access was $20 / hour. They even had a grouchy disclaimer reserving the right to disconnect anyone who does anything bandwidth-intensive... like, say, uploading Easter Island photos to one's popular travel website. We were too tired to complain, so we just went to sleep.

When we woke up, we discovered more to be upset about. The hotel — which bills itself as a "resort" and charges accordingly — had two of its three restaurants closed for renovation. The remaining one, an open-air lounge designed for big dinner shows ($180 per person, if you're interested), hosted a breakfast buffet in the morning.

There were three options. For $16, you could get coffee and a danish. $30 and they'll throw in some fruit. But if you want, say, eggs, toast, or bacon, you need to get the "Américain", with a whopping $40 price tag. Since the only other option would be to try to catch some fish, we begrudgingly forked over eighty bucks, warning nobody in particular that this had better be the best breakfast of our lives.

It, uh, wasn't.

The food was okay, but there were several offenses that I wouldn't have tolerated for one-tenth the price. Squeamish readers may want to skip to the next section.

First, there was at least one roach crawling amongst the breakfast breads. It happens, I guess. Then our coffee arrived. Hil added milk and passed the creamer on to me. Luckily, like most of life's situations, I have a system for this: Before I add milk to coffee, I give it a quick sniff to make sure it's okay.

It, uh, wasn't.

I'm not talking about a slight hint of sourness. I'm talking about a stench, like when you leave for a weeklong vacation and forget about the already-expired milk in the back of the fridge. I quietly brought it to the staff's attention, and they apologized and said they'd take care of it right away. Their solution was to bring us fresh cups of black coffee — and no replacement milk. I guess the entire batch was spoiled.

I felt sorry and nauseous for the people all around us drinking coffee. You know what? Maybe living on a remote island means it's hard to get fresh milk, even when you can charge through the nose for it. Maybe no amount of money can provide unexpired milk on a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But how about those little creamer cups they give away for free at McDonald's? How about non-dairy creamer? It's like they just didn't care.

The worst, however, was the bird eating scrambled eggs off the serving spoon. The staff noticed but did nothing about it — even as I snapped four pictures over the course of eight minutes. I considered shooing it away myself, but concluded that if they weren't going to replace the spoon, it was best that the bird remain there as a warning.

There wasn't much to do back at the hotel except dive and sleep, but luckily that's all we had on our agenda. As mentioned earlier, the diving was spectacular. (The sleeping was pretty good, too.)

The water was crystal clear, warm enough that I didn't need a wetsuit, and filled with interesting stuff. There were fish and clams:

You have to search far and wide to find a fish this ugly.

Giant clam

...and sea anemones and clownfish:

...and shipwrecks:

...and weird things to touch:

Which brings us to the following creature. In the following series of pictures, you can see the transition as Hilary (1) grabs it, (2) tries to get rid of it, and (3) discovers that the "tentacles" are actually a sticky defense mechanism which thankfully doesn't sting but still takes several minutes of sand-hand-washing to remove.

Yuck.

After that, we stopped touching stuff.

Actually, that's not true. Throughout our dives, we noticed that much of the coral was studded with tiny plants — they looked like pine trees that go on your model train set, except they were blue or yellow or pink. They looked like they were begging to be touched, but as soon as we tried, they disappeared into the coral, as if pulled in by the Grinch. We later found out they're actually animals, commonly referred to as Christmas tree worms. The part you see is a sort of tongue, which filters microscopic food out of the water and retracts when it detects the slightest change in current. Their incredible sensitivity thwarted all my attempts to take a close-up picture, but here are two from Wikipedia along with a video of some of my efforts.

We also stuck our arms right into this cold spring. Brr!

The best dive of the trip — and our lives, so far — took place after dark. We had never been on a night dive before, and it really struck me as a rite of passage, like trying out for a higher belt in karate. Unlike a normal dive, we would only be able to see whatever our flashlights were pointed at. Communication, an important part of diving, would have to be done with the lights — waving them in a circle meant we were okay, shaking them back and forth was a sign of distress, and so on. To get someone's attention, you bring your spot of light over to theirs, shake it around, and then drag it away. If their spot follows yours, you have their attention and can lead it over to whatever it is that you want them to look at.

The typical point of a night dive is to see the fish that don't come out during the day. That alone is reason enough to go, since the nocturnal species are usually very different from the day shift. This site, however, had even more to offer. Known as The Wrecks, it's a veritable junkyard of ship and plane parts, and our trip through it was otherworldly. The divemaster took us on a path where we seemed to be surrounded by twisted metal on all sides and at all times. Several of the divers said it was like a scene at the beginning of Alien where an interstellar mining crew investigates a mysterious derelict spacecraft. Since I've never seen the movie, I was reminded instead of Nintendo's Super Metroid.

At the end of the dive, we paused at 15 feet. This is a standard part of diving; stopping at this depth for three minutes helps reduce the likelihood of decompression sickness. While we were waiting there, the DM signaled us to turn off our lights. We did, and of course everything went black. Then, suddenly, we started to see little green bubbles of light all around us — he was waving his arms and causing dozens of tiny, formerly invisible phytoplankton to glow in response.

Back on board, we warmed up with towels, tea, and cake as the boat sped back to the dive shop. You can see all our dive pictures in the Flickr set.

If you'd like to visit French Polynesia, we recommend you not follow in our footsteps. Rather than spending your vacation on the main island of Tahiti, get to one of the outer islands as soon as possible. Unless you're a diver, in which case you should just stay underwater the entire time.