Moorea is what remains after a volcano tore itself apart. The saw-toothed green wall rising straight from its lagoon is the eroded rim of a shield volcano built here between roughly 1.9 and 1.5 million years ago; its northern flank later slid into the sea, and the two long, deep bays that notch the north coast — Cook's and Opunohu — were carved into that collapse. From the air the island reads as a rough heart wrapped in a barrier reef, its eight jagged ridges the reason Tahitians once knew it as Aimeo of the eight ridges. Mount Tohivea, the high point, rises 1,207 metres above the water, and the neighbouring spire of Mou'aputa is pierced by a hole that runs clean through its summit. Moorea lies just 17 kilometres off Tahiti, a thirty-minute ferry from the capital, Papeete.
The island's real stage is its lagoon, held inside the reef in flat turquoise sheets. Off the north shore you can wade in waist-deep and stand among blacktip reef sharks and broad stingrays that pass near your legs, or snorkel over coral that scientists have tracked here continuously since 2004. A road climbs to the Belvedere lookout, where both bays open below you with the blade of Mount Rotui between them and pineapple fields — the first planted in Polynesia — terracing the valley behind. This is the island that gave the writer James Michener his Bali Hai, and its silhouette still stands in for the whole South Pacific. From July to November humpback whales arrive to calve just outside the reef, close enough that licensed boats carry swimmers out to meet them. What most people carry home, though, is simpler: the green peaks and the blue lagoon meeting along one thin shoreline.