Rangiroa, between dream and wonder

Based in the Tuamotu archipelago, Rangiroa is an atoll of French Polynesia of your dreams without much hope, one day of depression, when you're stuck in monstrous traffic jams in the middle of the ring road.
Diving friends, do not begin your travels through Rangiroa, because then you risk being jaded ...

Stage right, the inhabited area, windswept, long a dozen kilometers, 300 meters wide at most, hardly offers some nice views, or white sand beaches like the ones your imagination s' exhausting to share. The reef is an area of ​​stones, pieces of dead coral that covers the ocean and rejects with regularity. This is the field of very fine-pencil urchins and purple blades.

An atoll is the remnant of a mountain or a volcano collapsed when there are thousands of years. There remains only the perimeter. Suffice to say nothing of the "soup coral" colonized by coconut trees, on which people have settled. No land, no sand, nothing ...
Just the Blue. The great blue. Rangiroa in Tahitian means "Heaven huge".
There the blue sky, dotted with white clouds, blue-green lagoon, inside the ring (one of Rangiroa is 280 km in circumference, the lagoon of 1640 km2 could include Tahiti) and blue black of the ocean and its excesses.
At sunset, you can see the large bottlenose dolphins jumping in the waves of the Tiputa pass.
For side underwater, it's the jackpot for each of your outputs ...
Do not count on you ecstasies of soft corals, the staghorn and gorgonians. There is none.
Rangiroa is the animal kingdom, the reign of large, sometimes very large ...
First, know that you will encounter sharks, not one, but dozens, even dozens. Do not panic, they are harmless and nothing like the "Jaws".

Two passes to ensure the renewal of Rangiroa lagoon. Their name Avatoru, where are the port, the village churches and the airport. The other, called Tiputa huge, named after the second village, based on the other side of the pass.

The dives take place depending on the tides. Outward current, the lagoon is empty, so you can not dive in the pass, where other trail between downdrafts (the cliff is breathtaking). You dive along the coast, away, on a site called "Wind".
Colorful parrot fish, coachmen, butterfly fish-, passage of tuna and kingfish, a few gray sharks approaching with curiosity. At the corner of the password, you can see Manta rays to clean or a hawksbill turtle to breakfast.

The main course is incoming current. The animals arrive and join the lagoon. Manta rays, hammerhead sharks when in season (December to March, and usually huddled about fifty meters). And every once in a while, with luck and happiness, you end up with a humpback whale with her baby face or a whale shark ...

It is the super-Lotto, otherwise the prize pool is daily, with a ballet of gray sharks, aka "raira" (carcharhinus amblyrhynchos), the largest gathering that you may never see. They are everywhere.


Above, below, to side. You watch them away, stuck on a piece of rock, about thirty meters depending on your level, then you are carried away in their midst by the current, which leaves you free on ten meters, the heart the lagoon, with the usual fauna of the tropics: coachmen, butterflies, clownfish, sygnates, sabelles, huge moray Javanese ... or your decompression with confidence.