Walks: Belvedere Lookout Trail, Tahiti

Escaping the NZ winter, we booked a holiday to Mo’orea, French Polynesia. Mo’orea is a small island, so small in fact, that we rode around it on a scooter in a couple of hours. It doesn’t have long hiking trails, but we did manage to find a trail for a day hike. One would think on an island that small, and on a well mapped tourist trail, there’s no way to get lost, but we managed to do exactly that.

We took a taxi to the Belvedere Lookout point, marked with a circle.

The plan was then to follow the orange route the end and take a taxi back to the hotel.

Great thing about islands like this is that there’s no dangerous wildlife at all and some unusual plants.

The trail was well marked.

We reached the highest point of the trail.

The official orange route (green in the app) would backtrack from the summit and go around the summit. I was using Gaia GPS app, which showed an alternate route (blue in the app) from the summit to the other side.

I decided to save a bit of time and take the shortcut.

Since then I’ve realised that shortcuts usually only cut distance, but won’t save any time. This would turn out to be true here and then some.

The trails was there to begin with, but got fainter and eventually disappeared. We ended up bushwhacking through woods and sliding down hillside. Luckily I had brought my Katadyn BeFree, so we could filter more drinking water.

Eventually we found a farm track and followed that to the main road. We sat by a bridge and called a taxi to take us back to the hotel. The couple of hours of walk had ended up a bit more of an adventure and took more time than planned for.

Lessons learned: shortcuts rarely save time and/or not worth the extra effort.

Here’s a video of the hike.