Breakfast Polynesian-style is an overwater platform affair where you tuck into your pancakes, French toast and coffee while peering over the side to gaze into the crystal clear lagoon as schools of colourful tropical fish weave in and out of the coral below where you are sat.

Another couple of hours idling on a Tahitian beach is calling. The itinerary on this 23 day trip is pretty full-on so taking the book you are determined to finish this trip hardly riddles you with guilt or self-loathing!

After lunch, we are collected by William, our tour guide for the afternoon. He is going to take us around the island. Among the places he will show us is under the sea in a wonderfully named Lagoonarium. (Pictures can be found in today's album elsewhere on this site.)

Rather than swimming below us as at breakfast, hundreds of colourful fish now swim over and above us along with a few basking sharks for company.

Circumnavigating the island takes around three hours and includes a visit to the highest waterfall in the south seas islands, a surfing beach with blowhole and a museum dedicated to the 19th century French artist Paul Gauguin.

Our guide rues that due to the credit crunch, visitor numbers are down by 35% from 200,000 in 2008 to 130,000 this year.

I was going to suggest that a Tahitian retail price index that could include a £2.50 Mars Bar or a five quid bottle of drinking water will not exactly have tourist flocking in their masses during these belt-tightening times. But I didn't wish to sound churlish.

Anyway, before I did, he muttered: "Tahiti is a bloody expensive place!"

A little later, William pointed to a hillside offering wonderful vistas where a number of new large family properties had recently sprung up.

He mused: "Up there lives bankers, lawyers, doctors, dentists, solicitors.

"But no tour guides!"

As a fellow worker in the tourism industry I knew he had a point....