Cook Islands, Rarotonga: Kayaking into a Tree on the Lagoon

All of our friends and family reading this journal entry should already know heaps about the island of Rarotonga in Cook Islands. If you don't, you just may have to click back a couple of journal entries to catch up on that journal entry. Even if you aren't a friend or family member, you may still want to click back to our first journal entry for Rarotonga, because we won't be repeating anything we have already said. Sorry!

Cook Islanders have been renowned as friendly, outgoing people who retained a strong sense of their heritage and traditional ways. We really came to see this during our second trip to the island when we got to know several of the staff working at Pacific Resort's Barefoot Bar. Three of the Cook Islanders in particular, Poko, Eiau and Bruce, were really fun to chat with and hang around whilst spending a lot of time in the bar writing travel stories, trip planning and catching up on emails. During our last few days on the island, we spent time each day at the resort bar and ended up mixing in Cook Islands and New Zealand beers with iced coffees and other drinks.

We rolled out of the restaurant holding our stomachs because they were about to burst from the overindulgence

Towards the end of our time on the island, we ended up getting free food and drinks at Barefoot Bar and, at one point, we could have sworn that Eiau was trying to get us drunk, because she "accidentally" made extra drinks on several occasions. Besides the three Cook Islanders we got to know, we also chatted with a Ukrainian girl named Viktoria, who had been working on the island for several months and was enjoying her life away from her home country. The bar was really nice, situated right on the beach with views across the lagoon to a couple of motus.

Since we had only managed to explore the lagoon once during our previous Rarotonga trip, we absolutely had to get out on the lagoon a second time when we returned to the island. Amanda, the manager of Aremango Guesthouse, where we had chosen to stay, let us use one of her two-person kayaks, and we paddled out across the lagoon one afternoon when the weather had cleared up. The trip was great, we spent a couple of hours paddling along the shallow lagoon with crystal clear turquoise water, and we even made our way out to the lagoon and outer reef's edge.

We decided a swim was necessary after a couple of hours of kayaking, so we headed towards one of the motu beaches to park the boat. Just before we arrived at the beach, our paddling synchronisation failed us miserably and we ended up running into an overturned tree stump that was sticking up out of the lagoon. The kayak actually got stuck on the stump and Dan had to hop out of the kayak into the water so he could pull it off the tree. That situation would have been fine, had there not been a large boat full of people beside us, watching the entire thing!

After we safely beached the kayak, we swam in the lagoon for a while and learnt that it was actually possible to walk all the way across the lagoon from the motu to the main island's beach, Muri Beach. There were some interesting fish that we saw whilst swimming and alternating turns with the one mask and snorkel that we had brought with us. Why we didn't bring two sets of masks and snorkels still amazes us to this day - d'oh!

We ate out a couple of times at Pacific Resort during our second trip to Rarotonga. Both times, we shared a kid's meal entree of fish and chips, but the second time we substituted the chips for extra fish, which was mahi-mahi both times. Substituting the chips for more fish wasn't a problem and we only had to pay a couple extra New Zealand Dollars to do so. In case you are wondering, the official currency of Cook Islands is the New Zealand Dollar, but there are a few Cook Islands notes and coins still in circulation. Okay, we mentioned that factoid before in our first Rarotonga travel journal entry, so we just did what we said we weren't going to do in the first paragraph of this story!

Besides the occasional eating out, we cooked the remainder of our meals in the large kitchen at Aremango Guesthouse. Eggs, sandwiches and pasta were again the standard fare for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and we took advantage of the free tea and coffee at the guesthouse. Another time we ate out was when we had lunch at Raviz Indian Cuisine. Raviz was located in the main town of Avarua and we ordered way too much food, but were extremely gluttonous because it had been so long since we had Indian food, if you didn't count the dinner we ate in Auckland during our one night stopover before travelling to Cook Islands, which we didn't count. Food at Raviz was great and we rolled out of the restaurant holding our stomachs because they were about to burst from the overindulgence.

Since Raviz was part of our day trip to Avarua, we may as well tell you about the rest of that day. We used the local bus that circled the island to get to the main town; the bus journey took around half an hour, tops. As soon as we arrived in town, we located a shop called Tuki's, recommended to us by Amanda, so we could buy some DVD films. We also bought a couple new t-shirts each, so we could wear some clean new clothes whilst watching our illegally copied films that had been imported from Thailand. After shopping, we changed money into Fiji Dollars for our upcoming trip there, and that was when we hit Raviz for Indian food.

Blue Note Cafe was our next stop in Avarua. We had a couple of soft drinks there and did some writing for a couple of hours until it closed. After that, we walked further in the direction of Muri Beach around the island-circling road to a bar called Chillis, where we had Steinlager beers and played a couple of games of pool whilst waiting for the next island bus to take us back to our guesthouse. Once we were back at our part of the island, we visited Pacific Resort for the last time to spend some more time on the laptop there and say goodbye to our friends working at the bar. We had several free drinks that evening, given to us by Eiau and Bruce; it was a memorable last night!

Before leaving for the airport on our last day, we packed up our things at Aremango and put them in the DVD room. Our flight was not scheduled to leave until the afternoon and we had several hours to kill before Amanda took us to the airport. We didn't want to swim and get our swimming trunks (that's the same as a swimsuit for the Americans reading this) wet, so we opted to watch a film in the cosy DVD room instead. Amanda had the movie "The Princess and the Warrior", which was a German film with Franka Potente. She was a good actress so we thought we would give the film a chance. Five minutes into watching the film, Dan remembered that he had seen it; much later in the film, Kyle realised he had seen it, too, but we ended up watching the entire thing again since it was quite enjoyable and we had forgotten the ending.

During our first week in the guesthouse, we noticed a large wasp hovering around outside the door to the DVD room when it was closed, and entering the room as soon as the door was opened. We soon found out that the wasp was building a nest on the rafters inside the room and we told Amanda about it on the day we had left to go to Aitutaki. She knocked the next down and saw that it was full of baby spiders, and told us that it had been a spider's nest of some kind instead. We didn't think much about it again until we returned to the guesthouse that second time and saw the same wasp hovering around the same closed door, and entering the same room when it was opened.

That second time, the wasp had gotten smart and was building its next behind one of the stereo speakers that was next to the television. We helped Amanda take the nest off this time, which we now knew was definitely a wasp's nest. It was full of baby spiders, too, but they were all paralysed from the wasp's sting and would serve as food for it or for any baby wasps that might pop out of the mama. The gross thing was that the bodies of the baby spiders were as big around as a 5p coin, or a dime. If we counted their legs, the spiders were as big around as a 2p coin, or a quarter. Imagine how large the adult spiders would be if the babies were that big!

Our flight to Nadi International Airport on the main island Viti Levu was uneventful, but we did play several rounds of in-flight trivia against many other passengers on the plane. Dan won one of the games and Kyle got second place on quite a few of them, coming really close to winning one, but narrowly getting beat out at the last moment from some dork in row 20. When we arrived in Fiji, it was late in the evening and there were hundreds of people waiting in the customs hall at the airport. It took us over half an hour to get through immigration, and since we had no idea at that time as to where we were going to visit during our time in Fiji, or where we were even staying that evening, we had to figure something out quite quickly.