Bora Bora is a lagoon with a mountain in the middle of it. Mount Otemanu is a blade of dark basalt, 727 metres high, whose crumbling near-vertical summit almost nobody has stood on. Around it the water lies in bands of colour — jade in the shallows, pale turquoise over sand, deep blue where the lagoon runs to twenty metres. A ring of coral reef encloses the whole thing, and low sandy islets called motu sit along that ring like a broken necklace. The reef is cut by only one deep passage, Teavanui, on the western side, which is why the water inside stays glass-still while the ocean outside runs a swell. The Tahitian name was Pora Pora, the first-born, from the belief that this was the first island raised after sacred Ra'iatea. Early European charts misheard the soft Tahitian p and wrote Bora Bora.
The lagoon is the whole stage here. Wooden bungalows stand on stilts over the water, with ladders dropping straight off the deck into warm shallows. Outrigger boats run out to sandbars where southern stingrays glide against your legs and blacktip reef sharks circle at a distance. On the motu you can wade an almost empty beach with Otemanu framed behind you. Matira Point is the island's one public beach, and it shelves so gently that you can walk far out at dusk while the peak throws its shadow across the water. The interior is barely visited and completely different: steep green ridges, rough back roads, and American coastal guns from 1942 still rusting where they were hauled up. The main island is small enough to drive around in under an hour, and most people who come here never really leave the water.