Random Projects

Sorry about the gratuitous topless shot earler. It’s not every Christmas I get to lounge around on a pure white beach under coconut trees! It’s quite strange, not sure I entirely like it. Doesn’t quite have the coziness of a howling wind outside, open fire inside and a belly full of mince pies. Woops, sounding like I was complaining then!!

Completely prezzieless we decided to treat ourselves to a slap up Christmas Day lunch at the posh Pacific Resort just down from the road from our lovely Paradise Cove. The plan later was to abuse their facilities and pool and hire some canoes and boat about for a bit.

On the way someone had made a Christmas sandturtle on the beach. Damn, I should have thought of that!

It quicky became apparent that our plan to lounge around the pool and generally take advantage of the Pacific Resort wasn’t going to work. Signs everywhere saying “House Guests Only” on everything didn’t seem that friendly. Everywhere is really small here and even though this place was called a resort it couldn’t have more than about 10 huts and what looked like about 2 staff for each person. Too many people knew we’d only come for lunch only so our newly found Bermudian skill of sponging freebies wasn’t going to happen this time.

I’d found out that the only canoes that might be for rent were way over the other end of the island. Every place has canoes it seems except our place explaining why, when I tried a couple more places on the way back it appeared the idea of renting their canoes was pretty alien. We were a bit naughty, we really wanted to canoe over the reef on Christmas Day! Leaving our bags as unnofficial deposits and getting our “It’s a fair cop but we really wanted to canoe on this of all days” story ready if we got we busted on our return we helped ourselves to one of the pile of unnatended caoes at Tamanu Beach.

Sorry.. another gratuitous topless shot! Couldn’t help it.

Later, getting our Bermudian skills back we spent the rest of the day in the pool at Tamanu a much better place than Pacific altogether In some tiny way, as part payment, in Karma if not cash, I’d just like to recommend Tamanu to anyone who might read this. The huts look lovely, the pool is great, their canoes don’t sink and their island nights (which we have actually paid for) are the best!

I made it! Ever since choosing Aitutaki and looking it up on Wikipedia (the source of many a fact I like to blurt out here and there) and finding out this is where both Channel4’s “Shipwrecked” progamme and the “Survivor” programme has been filmed I wanted to find the islands. The plan was to find the islands (known as Shark and Tiger island on Shipwrecked) and canoe over to them.

Tiger Island (taken from shark Island)

I found them (actually called Rapota and Moturakau). You can see them, like all the islands that make up the Aitutaki atol from the main island no problem but it was pretty obvious getting there in a canoe was going to be a big job. Images of me burnt to a crisp dragging myself onto the beach of a stupid TV island flashed before me.

Of course the islands are off limits during filming but how that is enforced I have no idea. If you put your mind to it you could easily get yourself stowed away on one. I’m so sure it must happen, just never gets shown on TV. Apparently one of the past shows shows the TV islanders making it to the mainland and going on a shopping spree in the supermarket so it’s not that difficult.

Shark Island beach with Tiger Island behind

We could easily have missed this but there are 3 or 4 small boats that do trips around the islands and they all have their own routes and all generally pass by the Shipwrecked islands for photo ops but don’t stop. They stop at different islands and it didn’t look like any could get me onto the Shipwrecked islands. There was one boat that could though, “Kia Orana”. The next thing I know… here I am!

some machette grafitti from past islanders.

Silly I know, but hey!

Behind Galapagos, this place really is about as unspoilt as i’ve seen. I laughed and laughed when I found this little fellow on the beach but then felt bad. Might send it in to Greenpeace.

Oh yeah, after seeing me struggle opening coconuts (and me finally breaking Kath’s pen knife) for the last few days a neighbour here at Paradise Cove showed me how to open a coconut properly! Can’t believe it! There’s a big metal spike round the back. A quick few stabs and pulls and bob’s your uncle! Bit easier than the dogs dinner I’ve been making of it.

Free, healthy and so very “hunter gatherer”. Maybe I should audition for that Shipwrecked TV programme after all! I’ve found a new skill, coconut opener extrodinaire. With no more than a little pen knife, a rock and shear animal brute strength and cunning I can now smash and crash and bash and rip a coconut up and turn it into a cup full of milk and a bowl full of lovely white coconut in less than 3 hours!

PS. Did you know my favourite word in the world is “Cocosnus” (which, rightly or wrongly) I pronounce “coco snoose”) which is coconut in German! (please ignore any spelling miskakes)

We added to our free coconut diet today too. As well as paw paw, breadfruit, bananas and coconuts, mangoes are everywhere here. The mango was just dangling over the road in front of us, clearly wanting us to take it too! Not quite so easy though, the mango is now outside in the sun, it’s not quite ripe yet so I’m trying to rippen it up. It will be mine… oh yes!

What a stroke of genius! We booked this ages ago and I’m so glad. Coming in to land on the tiny plane from Rarotonga to Aitutaki I knew we were in for a treat. Crystal clear coral ringed blue waters, coconut fringed white sand beaches etc etc! I didn’t even care that no one turned up at the airport to pick us up as arranged. As the numbers thinned and we became conspicuous as the last people not in uniform outside the tiny airport so many people offered to help. Two different people got on the phone and called our place. Everyone knows everyone else here! No answers, then two separate people offered us lifts. We turned up a little later in the back of one of the airport staffs 4×4’s to find the receptionist of paradise cove very surprised to see us. I’d heard about the legendary “Island Time” used here but a whole year is a slightly different kettle of fish. She’d managed to book us in for December 2009. We all laughed.. it had happened a few times recently.

One other reason to like this place after some of our more strenuous trecks we’ve done (we do seem to pic the hardest ones!) There are no mountains. There is one slight hill though but it’s only 124m high. Great views from up there!

and this was our view from the hut…

We’ve been pretty much cut off from news, and TV just hasn’t figured in daily life since I can remember but there has been the odd occasion (well once so far) where vegging out in front of the TV seemed like a fantasic idea. Can’t do that here though, the TV channel got turned off two months ago. Probably a good place to buy a second hand TV. The shops all shut at 4, nothing’s open on a Sunday, there’s one internet cafe and wifi is the stuff of wizards and witches. Brilliant stuff.

Aitutaki is an atol, the top of an ancient sunken volcano. Aside from the mainland there are loads of smaller islands, mostly uninhabited, formed from other sticky up parts of the volcano. Here’s just a tiny taste of one of the amazing islands we got a boat out to…

If you want they will take you out and leave you on one these for AU$45 each. Pick the right one and you could be only people on it all day.

One of the best swimming/paddling places on the mainland I think was this one by the airport called Ootu beach. It looks out onto the swanky Aitutaki Lagoon Resort and Spa (above setting up a table on the sand bank) but the rest of the island is reassuringly down to earth. Apparently Aitutaki’s lagoon is on the list (or one of the many lists) of the top 100 places to see before you die! The lagoon is so shallow in most places I paddled of to take a look and can confirm it was a real table with real plates and glasses and stuff.

At least three buttons on my camera have been troubling me. No idea what they did. I know it’s not a very manly thing to do but I finally read my camera manual today. Frankly I’m amazed I’ve ever been able to take a picture. Now don’t expect any great change in picture quality, that still requires some skill

Really we can’t really say we’re visiting Tahiti here in French Polynesia. Just three nights altogther and only really one day and we’re not leaving the capital Papeete. From Easter Island you can only go to Chile or Tahiti so this is a necessary stop between Easter Island and New Zealand for us. Really it’s a pain as it’s so expensive. I lost a lens cap on my camera. Guess how much a lens cap is in Tahiti? £18! A bagette is about £5. It’s very French which means great food, even in the supermarket and we stocked up on french bread and brie for our Tahiti rations.

Great market too.

The coins here in French Polynesia are huge. Like proper chocolate coins some of ‘em!

After 3 months of attempting to speak Spanish, or what could be more accurately described as Spanglish, converting to French was pretty difficult. My first attempt at asking for a drink came out in what can only be described as Spanfranglish or Franspanglish, one of those anyway. And getting out the habit if saying Hola to everyone, I might as well forget about it!

The place were staying though is amazing. Tiny little hotel/hostel (it’s got one dorm room as well as a couple of double rooms). Called Fare Suisse, run by a Swiss guy. Such good service, amazing breakfast (got to pay for it but you can’t have everything). Non-international flights to Aitutaki have a 16kg weight limit so we had to do some serious backpack kulling. Ever since our first huge backpack sort out in Mexico where we got rid of about 14kg our bags have been about 25kg each so we still had some work to do! We were so greatful when Fare Suisse could keep our bags for the 3 weeks we’d be in the Cook Islands. Needless to say though, although my backpack was exactly 16kg my hand baggage was not far off that too! Hope nobody notices.