By the way, I booked my accommodation about six months before departure, and it was no problem to find something nice, well located and relatively reasonably priced on any of the islands. With the exception of Fakarava. That was the only place where I felt I needed to make bookings even further in advance. A lot of places were already fully booked.
And overall, if we're talking about (decent) guesthouses as a type of accommodation, Fakarava seemed to me the most expensive of all the islands…Nothing that serious though…
I'm just going through the photos, and looking at the list of accommodations on the information sign, there's not that much available...
By the way, of the islands on the Bora-Tuamotu pass, Fakarava is considered the least busy and least developed. However, I don't think it's quite like that - I'd rank Tikehau rather first in this respect. To set the record straight, Fakarava with its 1,000 or so inhabitants is definitely not a tourist resort, just take that as a footnote. Compared to Tikehau, it's a bit more lively, there are more shops, restaurants and they're a bit bigger (especially the relatively new supermarket near the gas station), there's a bit better availability of goods and stuff.
One more thing, the only supermarket I've seen chilled beer available here - Boulangerie Havaiki had some six packs of Hinano beer in the freezer.
I wanted to show some photos from Rotoava, but it seems I've deleted quite a few... Next time I'll have to moderate my deleting, or, alternatively, take a break and start deleting photos after some time has passed...
A photo of the local church and some other photos from the village of Rotoava:
Gas station near the port, few steps from the newly built supermarket:
Something from the local classifieds:
For some reason, I was fascinated by this shop - I came across it several times on google maps during the planning process, and I thought to myself that I definitely have to check it out. I generally quite enjoy browsing small shops in places like Fakarava... Seeing what's on offer, where the goods are from, that sort of thing...
It's kind of in the middle of nowhere, about 10 km down the road south of the village of Rotoava…
Housing project at the very end of the asphalt road leading south. I have seen an identical one, in terms of architecture, on Tikehau. And now I'm wondering if there was something very similar on Mahé... When I have time, I'll try to go through the older photos... The first time I saw these houses on Tikehau, during a visit to Polynesia, my first feeling was that I had seen something like this before...
It is said that this asphalt road has been built only for the visit of the then French President - Jacques Chirac, which in the end he didn't even manage... But for a drive like this the road was fine, overall it was interesting, it didn't seem to lead anywhere, a few kilometres from Rotoava the traffic was already absolutely minimal and a car passed by once every half an hour, maybe not even that.
Source:
https://www.juliaportersteele.com/fakarava
At the housing project the asphalt road ended and continued as a gravel road. I had intended to continue as far as possible, but the swollen foot was hurting a lot, so I had to turn around and return back…