Three Months in Paradise (well, French Polynesia)

If you’d told us when we were working as Actors and living in London that “going to work” would sometimes mean stepping off a gangway straight into a lagoon full of reef sharks, we’re not sure we’d have believed you. But that was pretty much our reality for three glorious months working aboard the Wind Spirit in French Polynesia.

Island by Island

French Polynesia is made up of five archipelagos scattered across a stretch of ocean roughly the size of Europe, and over three months we got to see a genuinely staggering number of them. Bora Bora’s lagoon, ringed by its jagged volcanic peak, is every bit as postcard-perfect as the photos promise. Moorea’s dramatic spires rise almost vertically from the water. Raiatea felt quieter and more spiritual — it’s considered the ancestral homeland of Polynesian culture across the whole Pacific. Taha’a, the “Vanilla Island,” smelled and tasted exactly the way you’d hope.

Every island had its own rhythm, its own colour of water, its own version of “beautiful,” and honestly, three months still didn’t feel like enough.

Sharks, Rays, and Ridiculous Amounts of Coconut

We swam with reef sharks and stingrays more times than we can count — blacktip reef sharks cruising the shallows, and rays gliding past close enough to touch… (some even come up to you trying to get you to pet them like little flappy dogs!). Snorkelling here is a different level entirely: coral gardens, technicolour fish, and visibility that makes you feel like you’re floating in an aquarium rather than the ocean.

And the coconuts. So many coconuts. Fresh off the tree, straight via a straw, in a way that ruins every Bounty bar you’ve ever had back home.

Singing With the Locals

Some of our favourite moments had nothing to do with our own shows at all. We got to sing alongside local musicians on several islands, picking up rhythms and vocal styles that don’t really exist anywhere else in the world — and we got to hear some amazing Polynesian harmony singing, built around ukulele, guitar, and huge group vocals that put our two-part harmonies to shame in the best possible way.

Playing a Smaller Ship

Windstar’s ships in this part of the world are intimate compared to some of the vessels we work on, only about 120 guests — which changes everything about how we perform. Smaller stage, smaller audience, much more up-close-and-personal. It’s also one of those ships where the studio setup onboard isn’t built for us to record our own backing tracks, so for this contract we bought in some of what we needed rather than building it ourselves — one of those “smaller ship, different toolkit” realities of this job. Naturally, we still travelled with a small mountain of gear, because being out in the middle of paradise meant there was no chance to buy spares.

A Music History Aside

Polynesia’s musical influence reaches much further than you’d expect — the “exotica” and tiki-pop sound that swept through 1950s and ’60s American music (the ukulele boom that fed into everything from Hawaiian steel guitar to modern indie-pop) draws directly on the sounds we got to hear firsthand out here.

Three months, dozens of islands, and more reef sharks than either of us expected to befriend — French Polynesia might be one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever worked, and we’re already hoping to get back.