Rarotonga

Now this is strange.  We put our clocks one hour forward and one day back, on the short flight from Auckland, as we crossed the international dateline, leaving on Wednesday and arriving on Tuesday. 

The Cook Islands is an independent nation of just 60,000 or so people, but only about 15,000 live on the islands, the rest mostly in NZ, which looks after their foreign affairs and defence.  Most who remain live on the largest island, Rarotonga, where we were headed.  It is also the most mountainous, with jagged peaks of a collapsed volcano.  This erupted from the deep ocean floor and is 4000m high, but only 500m of this appears above sea level.  It is an oval with one road 32km long that you can circuit in well under an hour.  In fact there are two buses that do just that, one with the destination board showing ‘CLOCKWISE’, the other heading ‘ANTICLOCKWISE’. Offshore is an almost continuous reef that keeps the ocean swell at bay, creating a shallow vivid blue lagoon that has become a great attraction to visitors.  Almost the entire island is lined with villas and hotels, all very low key, with their toes in the white coral sand.

We rented a little wooden villa on the south side, intending just to pootle around: long walks on the beaches, paddling in the shallow waters, cooking up some local produce.  This worked out fine the first day, the weather at the end of the  dry season being perfect, with vast fluffy white clouds scudding (is it only clouds that scud?) across an azure sky, coconut trees gently swaying over silver strands and all we could expect of a Pacific isle.

However that little idyll didn't last long.  No-one had told El Niño that it was still the dry season. Next day got darker, greyer, then drizzle kicked in, then rain.  By nightfall it had turned into a raging cyclonic storm: it sounded like someone was playing a fire hose over the roof, and the whole little wooden building seemed suddenly vulnerable.  Though the wind dropped by morning, the rain continued, heavily, endlessly.  It was the kind of tropical rain at soaks you in seconds.  36 hours in and it was still raining.  We discovered later that 225mm had fallen, almost twice the monthly average and about what we get at home in 4 months. Just as it seemed to be all over there was an almighty thunder and lightning show on the second night, the worst in at least 5 years, apparently.

The last few days returned to tropical calm, and the water miraculously soaked away into the sand and coral limestone of the island, although for a while the lagoon looked like the inside of a teapot, filled with dead plant material washed down from the mountain by many streams.  Next day it had gone and all was clear and pristine blue again. We hired a car and toured the island, visiting the main town and Muri Beach, the best of them, with little palm topped islets off shore, like a cartoonist’s idea of a desert island, framing the view and the shallow sandy lagoon. Inland there is a lot of agriculture, tropical fruit and veg mostly and a few goats, and homes of the local people along sleepy lanes.

In the afternoons we lazed in the impeccable garden of the property.  The whole island is meticulously maintained, a matter of local pride, with manicured lawns and tropical plants, and the villa was no exception, thanks to Bev, the little Filipino lady who looked after it and visited occasionally.  We also had a constant round of other visitors: friendly local dogs, cats, mynah bird couples, hens and cocks grubbing around (the cocks here seem to have no sense of timing and doodle-do every 5 minutes) and on the day after the rain about a thousand dragon flies filled the garden. We also found that any food left out brought hordes of the tiniest ants I have ever seen, requiring great diligence. Frigate birds swooped overhead by day, and geckos nonchalantly wandered across the ceiling at night.

But soon it was time to turn our thoughts to the long trek home, back over the dateline, up through SE Asia, then home to winter and dark days.