Great cure for hangovers

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Having failed to rid ourselves of the hangover that dogged us throughout Easter Sunday, following Dave & Char's wedding we settled into the excellent Air NZ flight early evening and vegetated throughout the flight drinking beer and watching Avatar. We were looking worse in Rarotonga than when we took off and slumped into bed for some much needed recuperation.

When we woke up, it was Easter Sunday and neither of us had a headache. The Internatinal Dateline is the greatest hangover cure ever, you get to have another try at the same day.

Unfortunately, there is nothing to do in Rarotonga on a Sunday, let alone Easter Sunday. Easter Monday offered little more. It's funny how the societies which introduced hellfire and eternal damnation to the pagans in the Pacific Islands now have 24 hour lifestyles and rapidly dwindling church attendance but the islanders go about life as if God is just a smite away. Christianity ... Bless it!!

We survived the first two days on coconuts, papaya, guava, bananas, mango and advocado all fresh from the garden of Tiare Village which Adrienne is happy for you to help yourself to and even supplies an implement to get the fruit from the higher branches. She also gave us a machete for getting into the coconuts ... and amazingly Paul still has all his fingers.

Full service was resumed on Tuesday. So we decided to hire a scooter and explore the island. In order to do this Paul had to pass a driving test and get a driving licence. The test involved smiling sweetly at the lady behind the hire desk, that was the easy part ... handing over $20 was a lot harder ... but Paul now has a 1 year driving licence as a souvenir.

Circumnavigating the whole island took 45 minutes. And that was only due to the 30mph speed limit. It's not quite Paradise, but it's a pretty good attempt. Plenty of white sand beaches fringed by palms and shielded from the breakers by an almost continuous ring of coral just offshore. The centre of the island is made up of mountains swathed in forest which you can hike across but in 32 degrees who wants to do that.

Unsurprisingly, we spent our days snorkelling and lazing on the beach, with a few dives thrown in to break up the constant rays from the sun. Most of the days were spent at Aro'a, which is busy, well by Cook Islands standards, but it has a great beach and brilliant snorkelling. There are plenty of reef fish, a few trevally and the occasional moray eel. Watch out for the Picasso Triggerfish in the breeding season, they are protective of their young and one chewed on Paul's foot for getting too near!! The butterfly fish also nibble, but gently.

We went diving with Tommy. He is not a dive-leader, he is a Titan Triggerfish and he's as docile as they come. He has woked out that rather than defend his space, if he lets divers in they dig out urchins for him to eat and make his life easy. He'll even let you stroke him in return for food.

After driving more than 9,000km in 9 weeks it was nice to relax on an island with one road that is a 32km loop, meaning that you can never be more than 16km from your destination. Add to that, white sand, blue skies and friendly people and you can guess why Rarotonga was hard to leave after 10 days.

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Photos

Aro'a beach
It was a hard job but someone had to sunbathe on this awful beach all day!

Tiare Village
Our home for the week.

Coconut palms and white sand
Another busy beach.

Tommy & Nic
Tommy was on the scrounge for urchins.