Huahine holds the densest concentration of ancient stone temples in all of Polynesia, and almost no one outside the Pacific has heard of it. The island is really two — Huahine Nui to the north, Huahine Iti to the south — split by a narrow channel, ringed by a single coral reef and sharing one turquoise lagoon. Forest-covered volcanic ridges climb to Mount Turi at 669 metres, and the lowlands run to vanilla orchids, melon fields and coconut groves that earn it the name garden island. Polynesians settled here around a thousand years ago. Above the village of Maeva, more than two hundred stone structures cover Matairea Hill: open-air temples, house platforms and fortress walls. V-shaped coral fish traps built generations ago still line the shallows of Lake Fauna Nui. Wet ground at one nearby site has preserved things that rotted away everywhere else in Polynesia.
Life moves slowly here, a world away from the resorts of Bora Bora. You can paddle a va'a canoe across water so still it turns to glass, or wander the centuries-old basalt slabs of the marae at Maeva. One coast road runs over the bridge between the two islands, past sleepy villages and empty white-sand bays. At Faie, a short bridge crosses a stream full of sacred blue-eyed eels, longer than your arm, believed to carry the spirits of the ancestors. Reached by a forty-minute flight from Tahiti, Huahine stays the least developed of the main Leeward Islands, with only a handful of small hotels and overwater bungalows that turn gold at sunset. Watching the light fade over the lagoon in near silence, you understand why some people call this the real Tahiti.