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Published: August 20th 2008
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Amuri Beach
This was along the beach closest to our villa I slept terribly last night. I think it was because there seem to be more geckos in this villa than the last place, plus there seem to be more creepy crawlies in general. That combined with the fact it was so hot all night stopped me from relaxing as whenever I lay on top of the covers I was thinking about all of the things that might crawl on me.
We decided not to hire bikes today and instead to have a fairly relaxed day. We started with a breakfast of boiled eggs on the deck overlooking the ocean.
Around 11am we set off with our beach bag packed to get a closer look at the lagoon. It was beautiful. More turquoise than Rarotonga and there seemed to be more fish everywhere. We walked along the beach for a while until we got to the Pacific Resort and then we joined the road to carry on to find the road up to the highest peak. We walked for what felt like miles in baking heat and had to keep stopping every ten minutes to put on more sunblock.
Eventually we found the tiny track up to the highest
peak and started our trek. The road was slippery with gravel and was really steep in places. Due to the heat we had to keep stopping in the shade every few minutes. Why did we decide to walk up it at 1pm, the hottest part of the day?! Eventually after about half an hour we reached the top and it was worth it to get an amazing view across the lagoon on both sides of the island. We took lots of photos of the islands below and cooled down a bit in the breeze before tackling the trek back down. As we neared the bottom I slipped and landed on my knee making a real mess of it. We had some antiseptic cream but no plasters so I carried on with blood dripping down my leg.
We headed to the beach at the bottom of the track. Matt decided that the lagoon looked too inviting after the hot walk so he jumped in. I quickly followed as it was the only way to cool down. Salt water and wounds = pain, but at least it washed some of the blood off my knee.
We headed back towards our
This was the highest peak on the island.
It doesn't look that high from the picture but believe me it was! villa and called in for a cold drink at a beach bar on the way. We tried to find some more bread in the local shops but again they didn’t have any so we left empty handed.
We finally reached our villa around 4pm exhausted. We bumped into Paul and he couldn’t believe how much we had managed to do in the heat, and was shocked that we’d walked into town last night.
We headed back to sit on the sofas on the deck and did some whale watching. The previous day Paul had shown us where to look out for the whales as they migrate with their young past the island and we had actually been lucky enough to see some sprays from the whales at the time too. As the villa was on a hill it meant we were privileged to a view that most tourists don’t get to see. We weren’t sure how long we’d have to wait to see the whales again, but surprisingly after sitting looking out for about ten minutes I saw a large spray of water in the distance and grabbed the binoculars. Sure enough there was a whale and it’s
calf swimming along the other side of the reef. They both kept spraying right up into the air - this was even visible without the binoculars but with them it was amazing. After a little while the mother dived deep down with a flip of it’s tail. The calf followed it. A few minutes later they were back and then repeated the dive again. It was breathtaking and both Matt and I were transfixed. Matt even managed to get some of it on film.
Eventually they dived down and didn’t come back into view which was good as it meant we could do something else instead as whale watching becomes a bit addictive.
We called around a few tour companies to price up a lagoon cruise for the following day. It seemed that the NZ delivery they were waiting on for flour and other food also included fuel. Most of the lagoon tours were being scaled down and some had stopped operating altogether. Luckily we managed to find one that went to all of the islands we wanted to go to so booked that for the following day pleased that we’d managed to sort it out before they’d
all stopped completely.
I wanted to grab some dinner locally and be back before the sun went down as it had been a long day. At the end of the drive was a take away cabin that offered chicken and chips or fish and chips. Tonight we settled on chicken and chips (for a bit of variety!) for a bargain $6 each.
We headed back up to our villa and settled down with high expectations after the amazing food the previous night. We were disappointed. The chips were packet chips this time, and the chicken was small pieces of chicken in breadcrumbs deep fried to death. It was fine as we were starving but it wasn’t a patch on the food the previous night.
Paul had dropped off some dvds for us to watch as the TV didn‘t get any signal. We hadn’t watched anything for over two weeks so decided to have an evening of watching dvds while we lay down and rested our aching muscles with a bottle of wine.
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