Aitutaki lagoon in its many shades of blue
A cook’s tour
Brian Johnston sets out to explore the remote and happy Cook Islands, lost in a vast expanse of Pacific Ocean.
Arriving on any Pacific island comes with a feeling of remoteness and charm, but nowhere is this feeling more apparent than touching down on Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, one of just 15 islands in a group flung across two million square kilometres of Pacific Ocean. As you pass through customs, you have flowers draped around your neck. Next day, you wake up to a sunny sky, white-sand beaches and coconut groves. The food is surprisingly sophisticated and the cheerful natives speak English, with distinct New Zealand accents. Best of all, there are no crowds, least of all on the beaches.
Read a book under coconut palms, pluck mangoes straight from the trees and wallow contentedly among reef fish: doing nothing much of anything is the highlight of a Rarotonga holiday. After all, this is a tiny place – the coastal road that rings the island is just 32 kilometres around, dipping right down to a dazzling lagoon.
A traditional fire dance at a resort show
A drive around Rarotonga is characterised by the clipped hibiscus hedges that line the roadside, by fat women on motorbikes, laughing, and by the cloying smell of smoke – burning off garden clippings, it seems, is something of a national habit. The road itself is the usual Pacific tangle of small businesses, one-pump petrol stations, tackle shops, convenience stores and, rather more prettily, a collection of little churches painted gleaming white, surrounded by coconut trees bent in prayer over gravestones. Charmingly, many homes feature family grave plots on their front lawns – black or white granite and plastic flowers – ensuring that locals can continue to converse with dear, departed relatives out of their living-room windows.
The speed limit on the island is 40 kilometres per hour, according to signs, but it isn’t as if anyone needs reminding – cars drift along at an even more indolent pace, sluggish in the tropical morning. As an alternative to the coastal road, you can explore the older, inland road. It is even less travelled, and wanders through fields of taro and pawpaw and the odd banana plantation. You can hire cars, motor scooters and even bicycles to get about, or take to the Cook Islands Bus, which runs regular services around the coastal road in clockwise and anticlockwise directions. The bus will pretty much stop or set you down anywhere you ask.
Several companies can escort you on a variety of tours that take in the island’s chief sights, among which are eyesores such as the Chinese-built police station and courthouse – along with the only prison, which currently houses just 14 inmates, including two murderers. If you had a suitable project, you could hire these prisoners as labourers for just NZ$28.50 per day: reputedly, they’re in demand among islanders wanting lawns mowed and houses painted.
Frangipani growing by the roadside in Rarotonga
Meanwhile, Mr T’s Tropical Tours will take you around the island in an old school bus and show you the local life, plants and agriculture, with insights into Rarotongan heritage, traditions and history thrown in. Tangaroa 4x4 Adventures will take you up into the hills for spectacular views over the coast and feed you a traditional umu lunch of taro and chicken. You can also visit the Cook Islands Cultural Centre with its sacred marae, house sites, arts and crafts and theatre.
Certainly, one of the most amiable things to do in Rarotonga is visit the weekly market, held in what passes for the capital, Avarua (actually, just a spot on the coastal road where a few more houses and shops than usual cluster). Utes are reversed to form market stalls – most, it seems, presided over by wrinkle-faced women with garlands of tiare flowers in their hair. Kids slurp ice-cream and dogs lie in the shade, tongues lolling.
Browse the market’s food stalls and you can cobble together a tasty lunch of meat skewers, pancakes and coconut curries with huge plastic goblets of lurid-hued drinks. Eat it at picnic tables as you listen to local singers. The market also sells clothes, crafts and mother-of-pearl jewellery, as well as the black pearls for which the Cook Islands are renowned, and handmade quilts known as tivaivai that can take months to make.
Exploring Rarotonga's lagoon
Most people who visit Rarotonga do little more than take a few languid tours and browse the markets before retiring to enjoy the myriad delights offered at their resorts. But the lagoon that rings the island is worth some exploration. The best snorkelling is generally on the south side of Rarotonga; two of the best areas are the oddly named Fruits of Rarotonga site, which has lots of bigger fish, and Aroa Beach, with its colourful reef fish and coral.
Consider combining your stay on Rarotonga with a visit to one of the outlying islands in the Cook group, of which Aitutaki, some 220 kilometres to the north, is the most popular.
Check-in at Rarotonga airport is the way it should be everywhere: no queueing, no conveyor belts, no endless walkways. As you board the plane, rainbows dance across the mountains. Less than an hour later, you’re skimming down across a spectacular lagoon.
Watersports at Pacific Resort Rarotonga
As you step into the tiny airport on Aitutaki, the heat envelops you like a hug. Visitors hop into vans whose drivers sport hibiscus behind their ears and head off to various resorts, all just minutes’ drive away. By the time you get to your bungalow, its TV and phone will already seem like strange artefacts from another civilisation – lurking, ignored, in grey plastic while outside, colour blossoms.
If Rarotonga is laidback, Aitutaki turns this attitude into an art form, and visitors are soon absorbed into the languid pace. The island has just a few thousand inhabitants, and life here is definitely lived in the slow lane. The only traffic on the road is likely to be a family of cackling hens, running for the shelter of a coconut tree. Kids loiter by the roadside just so they can wave and giggle at the occasional passing car.
On Sundays, they turn up for church in crisp white shirts, with smoothed-down hair. The biggest excitement on this island is the Saturday night disco down in the tiny township on the harbour, where shy teenagers shuffle in a tin shed to the sounds of an amiable DJ. But really, Aitutaki is a place for lazy lie-ins, folk fond of leisurely walks along white-sand beaches and sitting by the shore, quaffing cold beers as the sun sets in a blaze of colour.
If you can rouse yourself sufficiently, paddle a kayak around on the lagoon, where the surf booms and there isn’t a soul in sight across an expanse of extraordinary blue. The lagoon is, in fact, Aitutaki’s biggest drawcard, considered by many to be one of the most beautiful in the Pacific. Its edge – which runs for 45 kilometres around – is sprinkled with tiny sand islands known as motu. One Foot Island is a particularly fine spot: you can get off and walk about this Robinson Crusoe playground, admiring the scenery – and the serenity.
Maina Motu has coral formations just offshore so it is great for snorkelling though, in all honesty, the underwater life elsewhere on the island can be less than wonderful, with a great deal of dead coral and scanty fish life.
It’s above water that Aitutaki really shines, with a vivid array of lagoon colours in great streaks of indigo, turquoise and green. Take a day-trip by boat on the lagoon and be amazed.
Never has the middle of nowhere looked so beautiful. •
Photography by Brian Johnston and Cook Islands Tourism
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