French Polynesia Is the Perfect Destination for a Family Adventure

Crouching beneath the surface of Bora Bora’s impossibly blue lagoon, I watched as stingrays and black-tip sharks swam calmly around me. Emerging, I looked up just in time to see two enormous humpback whales simultaneously breaching in the distance. 

“Did you see that?” I gasped. Tove and Jordana, my six- and eight-year-old daughters, clutching a kickboard next to me, answered with wide eyes and wider smiles. “You are the luckiest beans on earth,” I said, hoping they wouldn’t become too accustomed to their princess lives in paradise.

It was day five of our seven-night cruise aboard the Paul Gauguin around French Polynesia. As the only kids on that morning’s “Sharks and Stingrays” excursion, they lapped up attention from our guides. These two enthusiastic Tahitian men dragged my girls around on a kickboard, hoisted them into the primo sunny spot at the front of our snorkeling boat, and gave them each a small bottle of vanilla-scented monoi oil to take home. 

Most people come to Tahiti and its surrounding islands to celebrate a honeymoon, or a milestone birthday. They come for scenes like the double rainbow stretching onto the black sand of Plage Lafayette that greeted us on our first morning, or the sweet scent of tiare, the tropical gardenia blooms we tucked behind our ears. But you know who else adores pretty flowers, silky sand, and bathwater-warm ocean? Children.

I brought Tove and Jordana to French Polynesia because I wanted my own honeymoon with them: an unhurried time to get to know my girls better. Less pointing out the mess in their room, more pointing out the octopus resting on the underwater rocks. (My husband, the girls’ father, stayed home in Seattle to bond with his mountain bike and our dog, Ezra.)

Throughout our 10 days in the South Pacific, I watched them fall in love with Polynesia — with the dancing, the sea turtles, and, unfortunately for my future vacation budget, the soft life of room-service french fries dipped in chocolate ice cream.

I got a preview of the week ahead on Air Tahiti Nui’s mercifully easy direct flight from Seattle to Papeete, when Tove forewent her usual cartoons to watch hours of videos about Polynesian culture. She stepped off the plane obsessed with the haka, a ferocious warrior dance that consists of rhythmic stomps and fearsome facial contortions.

One major appeal of Paul Gauguin Cruises is that its single 330-passenger ship spends most of its time in French Polynesia. Not only is it designed specifically for the region’s shallow waters, but the onboard experience is also heavily influenced by Polynesian culture. Tove squirmed with joy when we boarded the Paul Gauguin and she saw the haka brought to life by Les Gauguines, the cruise line’s singers, dancers, and cultural liaisons. The troupe also leads craft workshops, teaches dance lessons, and runs trivia events for guests. (Let the record reflect that Jordana led Team Lynx Pups to three consecutive victories in the latter.) 

After our first night aboard, we awoke to find ourselves anchored just off Huahine, a quiet island northwest of Tahiti. The duties of the Gauguines included ushering us onto “Le Truck,” a white and blue bus that brought us from the pier into the heart of Fare, the island’s largest town. There, just a block from the main drag, we came to a stretch of sugar-soft sand wedged between crystal-clear water and a jungle of trees.

We slipped our sandals off on the beach and attached our snorkels, stepping into the sea and sliding into an underwater world. An eel poked its head out of a hidden cave, frilly-edged clams shimmered from their coral perches, and schools of small fish swam by, unruffled by our presence. We followed a puffer fish for a bit, then floated past the beach to the stretch of shore where the town begins. Just above us, a restaurant served customers tropical cocktails, but we kept our heads down, spotting a large octopus as it waggled its eight arms and disappeared into the rocks.

Afterward we walked back through Fare, pausing to watch a holiday parade. Dancers in outfits as turquoise as the water performed in the plaza. Floats lined the streets, decorated with leaves in every shade of green, dripping with fireworks of flowers with names like red ginger and orange lobster claw. 

“Guests see a lot of the scenic, beautiful islands of Tahiti, but we are also here to represent the Polynesian people,” said Hei Ura Peyroux, one of the Gauguines. “We’re sharing our way of living.”

As we sailed away from Huahine that afternoon, Tove begrudgingly napped for the first time in years — my condition for letting her stay up well past bedtime for the Gauguines’ evening performance. She arrived early to claim a spot in the front row of the theater-style Grand Salon, where she became entranced by the Tahitian songs they performed and the sway of the pareos wrapped around their waists. After the first few numbers, the group brought volunteers onto the stage to do a haka with them. The crowd roared as Tove got up and shyly wiggled her knees. The moment immediately became (and, last I checked, still is) the highlight of her life. 

I was happy to hear that our cruise director, Hinanui Ina, had started as a Gauguine before becoming the first Polynesian to hold her position. “It is a pathway,” she explained. For the current members of the troupe, interacting with kids is a major highlight of the job. As Peyroux later told me, “It’s like our inner child wants to be with them sometimes, and play around. They light up our faces.”

And vice versa: “I have seventeen friends on the ship,” Tove declared proudly at the end of the cruise. Seven of them were Gauguines. Her favorite waiter, Ian Ramos, was another. They met when he reversed a jet-lag-induced meltdown under the dinner table by making her a balloon poodle. Throughout our trip, he also brought her the tuna poke she liked from the upstairs restaurant to the downstairs one; tiny breakfasts — complete with coffee in a little espresso mug — for her stuffed animal, Lamby; and a tiare flower to tuck behind the lamb’s ear, “So she can be a Tahitian girl.” Tove rewarded him with the unfettered giggles and missing-teeth grins only young kids can deliver.

When we disembarked on Paul Gauguin’s private motu, one of the small islets made of sand and coral fragments that ring the island of Taha’a, Ian brought the girls two tiny hermit crabs in a plastic cup. He showed them how to draw circles in the sand to race the creatures against each other, and they did this endlessly, taking breaks only to sip from coconuts and pick bougainvillea flowers to add to the palm-leaf headdresses I made for them.

Before we set off on the cruise, the ship’s small swimming pool and lack of child-centric entertainment had worried me. There are no waterslides or arcades, only elegant wood paneling and old-world craftsmanship. But in practice, the only real issue was that my often-hangry children struggled with the rigid French attitude toward mealtimes. 

The food on the Paul Gauguin is very French in all the best ways — fresh-caught local fish, an array of stinky cheeses at every meal — and also completely lacked snacks. Thankfully, teatime saved us: while many consider Tahiti itself to be paradise, eating three desserts shortly before dinner turns out to be precisely my children’s idea of heaven.

On our third day, we moored on the island of Raiatea. The second largest of the Society Islands after Tahiti, Raiatea was once the cultural and spiritual center of the Polynesian people. The town of Uturoa greeted us with a smattering of rain, so we ducked into the local market and shopped for vanilla and souvenirs. Luckily the sun had come out by the time I set off on a kayaking excursion up the Faaroa River that afternoon. The paddle took me along this tranquil, ambling waterway, littered with sea hibiscus flowers in various stages of their daily transition from pale yellow to crimson. I floated serenely between banana trees and coconut palms, stopping as the guide pointed out land crabs, taro plants, and the 3,337-foot Mount Tefatoaiti, the peak of which was obscured by mist. 

Most importantly, the timing of the kayak outing lined up with the schedule of the ship’s educational children’s group, the Moana Explorer Program, which is run by a local conservation group called Te Mana o Te Moana, or Spirit of the Ocean. In the morning indoor sessions, which ranged from 60 to 90 minutes, Tove and Jordana played games and watched videos to learn about local flora, fauna, and environmental issues. The two- to three-hour afternoon sessions involved a trip to the beach or a snorkeling excursion. 

“We are not a kids’ club,” naturalist Mai Manceau explained. “Our goal is actually to make children love nature.” Manceau and his colleague Doris Marcheau lead the program, which is available on specific sailings during summer and winter school breaks. They are not babysitters, nor do they have any experience in early education — the rest of the year, they both work as snorkeling and marine-mammal excursion guides. 

For Te Mana o Te Moana, the goal of the Moana Explorer Program is to spread their conservation message to children, whether they be locals or visitors. The method has been working, Manceau said: kids pass the lessons on to their families, and through them, the group has been successful in changing attitudes toward turtle poaching in French Polynesia.

I saw the program’s results on our sixth day of the cruise, during a walk around Vaitape, the main city on Bora Bora. As we walked past pearl shop after pearl shop, Tove insisted on constantly stopping to pick up litter. “We have to do this,” she explained to me with urgency. “It helps the animals, and it helps us. I want to pick up every single piece of trash in the ocean.”

On the last day, I joined my children for the Moana Explorer Program’s snorkel excursion to Ta’ahiamanu Beach — and began to fully grasp just how much they had learned on this trip. This wide stretch of sand sits between twin bays on the northern coast of Moorea, Tahiti’s smaller, wilder sister island. Tove was the first to spot a green sea turtle, which, she explained, got its name from the color of its fat. Then, just as I swam toward a pretty shell to pick it up, Jordana stopped me, explaining it actually belonged to a deadly poisonous cone snail. 

Like many passengers, we extended our trip by spending three days at the idyllic St. Regis Bora Bora Resort after our cruise. The palm-lined boardwalks that connected our overwater villa to the rest of the property looked so perfect that, when the sunset dyed the sky behind them an ombre of purple and orange, it felt like we had stepped into the pattern of a tropical shirt. The splash I heard while drinking my coffee on the wooden deck of our villa one day turned out to be a turtle poking its head up to say hi. And, though I had paid actual cash to swim with stingrays in the Bora Bora lagoon just a few days earlier, when a group of them floated by during my morning dip in front of our villa, I decided it was time to get out of the water.

The St. Regis has a more typical range of activities for kids: The girls made coconut-husk art and watched Moana while I enjoyed some quiet time. But other experiences skewed more educational. One morning, a St. Regis naturalist guided us through the process of releasing juvenile fish into the resort’s lagoon and I listened, amazed, as Jordana answered the woman’s questions with the confidence of a Jeopardy winner. How Bora Bora was formed (by the activity of a now-extinct volcano). The fact that sharks are fish, not mammals, and that coral gets its color from algae. Over the course of a single week, it seemed Jordana had quietly absorbed a swath of information as vast as the Pacific Ocean itself.

On this trip, I saw firsthand why Moana’s parents had told her not to go beyond the reef: the protective ring prevents the ferocious waves of the open water — the same ones that created last year’s Olympic surfing venue — from rolling up to shore. Like a parent aiming to make life easier for their children, Bora Bora’s reef absorbs the brunt of the danger, creating a safe lagoon and sheltered beaches for kids to play on.

But on our trip, my kids were more than just safe; they were pampered princesses of Polynesia. I taught them the joys of ordering lunch to an oceanfront cabana, and how to take lazy afternoon naps to escape the tropical heat. In exchange, they introduced me to the ultimate luxury: seeing entirely new parts of the children I thought I knew so well.

I planted a coral garden because Jordana, my budding scientist, lit up when she heard it was an activity at the St. Regis, and went to every single dance performance on the Paul Gauguin because her sister couldn’t miss a show by “my friends.” I relished the chorus of “Hi, Tove” that greeted my daughter everywhere we went on the ship — and was reminded of the fact that, despite what you might read online, people generally like children. Mine found friends, suckers, entertainers, and assorted other folks willing to indulge their whims wherever we went.

We did miss out on some of French Polynesia’s highlights — hiking to Tahiti’s Puraha waterfall, say, or visiting the marae of Taputapuātea on Raiatea, the 1,000-year-old sacred grounds of the Mā’ohi people. But traveling with kids has a way of softening FOMO: those stone temples have been there for a millennium, and Tove will only be a giddy six-year-old for a heartbeat. And there will only ever be one “Mr. Coconut,” as the girls dubbed the piece of coconut shell they found on the beach and played with for hours. 

Anything I missed in order to make my daughters’ memories as happy as possible seemed worth it. Because as a parent, nothing can quite compete with watching the pure joy of a child in her personal paradise — even if that smiling face does happen to be covered in chocolate ice cream.

Where to Stay in Tahiti

Le Tahiti by Pearl Resorts

At Le Tahiti by Pearl Resorts, spacious ocean-view rooms with balconies overlooking Lafayette Beach, just 10 minutes east of Papeete, make a great pre- or post-cruise base.

Te Moana Tahiti Resort

Also about 10 minutes from Papeete and just south of the airport, Te Moana faces west toward Moorea. Apartment-style rooms, an infinity pool overlooking the ocean, and a gaggle of food carts just up the street make it ideal for families.

Where to Stay in Bora Bora

The St. Regis Bora Bora Resort

Expect paradise epitomized, with soft, white-sand beaches, roomy overwater and beach villas, and butler service at The St. Regis Bora Bora Resort.

How to Sail

Paul Gauguin Cruises

With a singular focus on the region and an elegant ship, this old-school luxury line integrates Polynesian culture into every aspect of the experience.

A version of this story first appeared in the February 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Hearts Aglow.”