A remote fishing village in Tahiti, French Polynesia will gain worldwide attention when it hosts the Olympics 2024’s surfing competitions. Teahupoo, also known as Teahupo’o, has a population of a mere 1,500 and is a 90-minute drive from Tahiti’s Faa’a International Airport (it’s a 12-hour flight to Tahiti from Sydney via Auckland).
Until the early 2000s, Teahupoo’s wave was only known to local surfers, reports Lonely Planet. It’s now one of the most photographed and powerful on the planet, with wave quality best for surfing from April to October each year.
Local surfer Kauli Vaast tells Red Bull’s blog the three main factors that make Teahupoo’s waves so special include their perfect barrel and surrounding landscape.
“Finally, there’s the mana,” Vaast says. “When you come out through the reef pass you can feel that good mana, that good energy and you know you have to be respectful and understand how crazy the wave is.”
The Olympics 2024 surfing competition will take over Teahupoo from Saturday, July 27 to Monday, August 5, hosting athletes including four Australians Tyler Wright, Molly Picklum, Jack Robinson and Ethan Ewing. Teahpoo hosting the games is a chance to engage French overseas territories and their communities — for the first time in history — while showing France’s heritage.
After watching all the action on TV, you might be keen to visit Teahupoo. Here’s everything you can do on the island, other than surfing, of course — plus where you can eat and stay.
What to Do in Teahupoo
Aside from surfing, Teahupoo has plenty of other water-based activities, like snorkelling, diving and swimming. You can also hike to waterfalls, cliff jump into the sea and embark on a half-day or full-day tour around the island by boat.
A Teahupoo Wave Watching Tour takes you on an hour-long boat ride to watch the famous wave while a captain explains the island’s history, legends and present-day activity.
A nine-hour Teahupoo Olympic Journey Tour sees you visiting nearby Vaipahi Garden and waterfall before boarding a boat to see where the Olympics surfing competition will be held. After that, you’ll visit Fenua Aihere, a wild part of the island, accessible only by boat or foot, and Vaiau River, home to virgin forests and a freshwater swimming pool.
Where to Stay in Teahupoo
Ahead of the Olympics, organisers considered revamping a Teahupoo hotel that had been closed for 26 years but scrapped those plans in favour of housing the athletes on a cruise ship instead, reports The Inertia.
The Aranui 5 will be a floating Olympic village, with 103 cabins that can house up to 254 people. The vessel will be anchored about eight kilometres northwest of the event site in the bay of Varirao.
“It’s pretty awesome to hear that the Tahitian locals rejected the idea to build all new accommodation just for the Olympics and decided to preserve their beautiful environment to keep everything as it was found,” says Peruvian Olympian Lucca Mesinas told The Inertia.
“Huge respect to them for standing up for themselves and what they believe is right.”
A small village, Teahupoo has limited accommodation, though a range. On the more basic end are homestays, which let you live like a local. Tahurai Homestay is owned and operated by a family native to Teahupoo. On the nicer end are lodges like Vai Iti Lodge, Kia Ora Lodge and Vanira Lodge.
Where to Eat in Teahupoo
During the Olympics, it’s likely many local huts selling food will pop up, as Mick Fanning told surfing mag Stab in 2016 about other surfing competitions the island has hosted. The dining options are limited, but many of the accommodations serve food.
“If western clubs, restaurants and nightlife are what you’re after, it’s a 45-minute drive to Papeete [a town] — too far for most pros,” Fanning told Stab.
Tahiti’s cuisine is based on fresh local produce and both sweet and savoury dishes, often made or flavoured with vanilla or coconut milk, reports its tourism board. Its unofficial national dish is poisson cru, raw tuna marinated in lime juice and coconut milk. Other favourite dishes include chicken cooked with spinach and coconut milk and Tahitian suckling pig.
Related: 7 of the Most Remote and Romantic Resorts in Tahiti
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