Find out more about where to stay and what to see in Bora Bora.
Halfway around the world from his restaurant empire in New York, chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten is telling a big fish story. This one's actually true. It was a year ago, and he had just arrived on Motu Ome'e to open his Lagoon restaurant at the St. Regis Resort, Bora Bora, the splashiest new outpost in the South Pacific. But a labor strike had halted food shipments across French Polynesia, and that meant Jean-Georges's cupboard was practically bare.
"I couldn't even find a fresh vanilla bean," he says, adding that Nicole Kidman and other A-list guests were due to arrive the following afternoon. "I thought, What am I going to serve? Coconut juice?"
Now he can laugh about it, relaxing on Lagoon's cocktail deck, with its views of the verdant camel's hump of Mount Otemanu. Families and honeymooning couples, thrilled to have the silver-haired chef in residence, excitedly take their places at their tables. The water is so tranquil and luminescent, it looks Photoshop-ed.
But back on that hectic afternoon, Jean-Georges was hightailing it to the "city" of Vaitape (population: 800), on Bora Bora, the main island, for local squash, sweet potatoes, anything he could find. He then put out a radio call to offshore fishermen, hoping someone would come back with the catch of a lifetime.
Two hours later, salvation arrived in the form of a gleaming 250-pound marlin. "We called our opening-night special 'marlin five ways,'" Jean-Georges says. "Sashimi, sushi, seviche — you name it, we made it. And the guests couldn't stop smiling."
Indeed, fortune is smiling everywhere on Bora Bora these days. In the past year alone, the St. Regis and other opulent properties have cranked up the luxury factor with butler service and plasma screens where once there was only sand. Other places, like the Bora Bora Pearl Beach Resort & Spa and the InterContinental Resort & Thalasso Spa Bora Bora, have unveiled fabulous spa facilities, and such old favorites as the Hotel Bora Bora aptly illustrate why building bungalows on stilts over water was such a brilliant idea in the first place. To top it off, direct flights to nearby Tahiti from Los Angeles and New York make it easy to get to Bora Bora from North America.
It's so convenient, in fact, that my wife, Ruth, and I chose Bora Bora over Hawaii for this brief getaway from our four-year-old son and our overscheduled lives in Los Angeles. After all, Hawaii gets almost as many visitors in ten days as French Polynesia does in a year. And that meant more paradise per square foot for us.
Bora Bora has always been touted as heaven on Earth. Stories of its charms have been luring global wanderers since at least the 1770s, when Captain James Cook and his men made the 12,000-mile voyage from England — twice. In the 1940s, Henri Matisse referred to the island, with its surrounding lagoon and outlying motu, or reef islets, as a paradise for painters. By the time James A. Michener got around to describing "the infinite specks of coral we called islands" in Tales of the South Pacific, the 1947 novel that hatched the musical, "Bora Bora" had become shorthand for everything modern life was not: serene, sensuous, blissfully carefree. No matter that Michener was thinking of a different South Pacific island group, Vanuatu. People just assumed Bora Bora was his Bali H'ai.
