Kiwiland!

Friday July 31st
     So on the plane we passed over the dateline and just kind of skipped the rest of Thursday. This always happens when we fly to NZ. Once Dad left the U.S. on the 24th of December and landed on the 26th. We all knew that he did that because it was so cheap but that didn't stop us from teasing him about being the 'Grinch' that hated Christmas so much he just skipped it entirely.
Even though I've grown up in the U.S. I've always felt equally American as Kiwi, growing up my parents always surrounded me in everything NZ. We watched rugby and cricket instead of american football and baseball, we ate pavlova on Christmas, and always celebrated ANZAC day. My brother knows the Haka. It always seems amazing to me just how much culture such a tiny, tiny island has. So coming to NZ feels like coming home, especially since we did actually live here for eight months.

Here we are four years ago back when we lived there with my cousin Michael. Sometimes it seems whenever we come back like we never left. As we emerged into the airport I became nostalgic of when I lived there.

Me and My brother, I was just thirteen at the time, on our Davidson 28 sailboat

Me on the Milford Track, a four day trek through the New Zealand forest. At this specific hut I got over 200 sand fly bites, mostly around my ankles until they swelled to abnormal sizes. I am particularly tasty and they were the nemesis of this hike.

You have to love my Aunt's Pavlova. This picture was taken on Christmas day, during the middle of summer in New Zealand. After this we all went down to the beach to cool off.

As I remembered all these old memories I wondered what new and unexpected ones I'd create this time

Parting is such sweet sorrow!

Thursday July 30th
      We spent the morning snorkeling and here's a photo I found online of my favorite fish that I saw
You can just tell it's saying "I don't care that I'm half an inch long, I'm still going to try and beat you up!

     Dad Kayaking
Then it was sadly time to go to the airport, and I couldn't believe that this time had passed so quickly. I was really going to miss the amazing reefs and coral of this place, I was really going to miss the laid back lifestyle and the beautiful scenery, but I wasn't going to miss the roosters.  

This is literally the airport

#Island Life

I hope I come back soon

Into the Wilderness

Wednesday July 29th
      I was a little sad this morning as I had spent yesterday mostly apart from my family. But luckily today we were going to walk across the entire island, and I was too excited about that to worry about yesterday. That's the thing with travelling there's always a next adventure, and you'll never run out of amazing things to do. I was also happy that I was finally going to spend some time with my family who I'd seriously been missing for the last month as I was in Peru by myself.

These trees at the beginning of our hike were so strange! Like something out of Dr. Seuss

It was pretty steep

And then it got steeper

And somehow steeper

Then it became less enjoyable and more just terrible

And just when we were all hating life

It was worth it.

The more effort that you put in the more satisfying the result

My mother is in her element here. She's climbed mountains and glaciers all over the world.

We could see from ocean to ocean, and it was breathtaking.

And just when we were feeling proud of ourselves we realized how many roosters had done the same climb. Literally everywhere. There is no escape from the roosters. 

Another Dr. Seuss looking rock. Also wow after spending a month in freezing cold Peru in the winter, I am REALLY white!

Then from mountains to beaches

"Our memories of the ocean will linger on long after our footprints in the sand are gone"

If you don't like where you are, change it! You are not a tree

Waking up in Paradise

I'm Tuesday July 28th
      Although I don't know why I bother to put what day it is in the titles anymore, I'm on island time! The days don't matter! What wasn't on island time however was the scuba dive I had signed up for, and that started promptly at 8. I am the only one in my family that can scuba dive so was doing this alone. I woke up disoriented, I had been dreaming about Peru and couldn't figure out why there was a loud rooster in my bedroom back in Cusco for the longest time. But then I opened my eyes and realized that I was in Rarotonga, the Cook Islands, and that there was a rooster literally beneath our open window cock-a-doodle-doing directly into our room. That was awful. But it wasn't just one rooster, oh no, there was a whole dissonant choir of off-key roosters out there this morning, a side effect of the hundreds and hundreds of stray roosters that roam this island freely.

Here's one such rooster walking along the road like he owns the place
       I was predictably the last one there. being late is my most prominent characteristic, so everyone else on the dive had to awkwardly wait while I suited up and got all my gear together, ugh. 

The view from the boat was breathtaking. If this isn't paradise I don't know what is.

Me excited to go scuba diving. I cringe at how red my face is and how white the rest of me, but that's what happens when you spend a month in the high Andes of Peru in the winter and have to cover up the whole time!
     The trip was anticlimactic though, I still had a small cold from the kids in the kindergarten where I volunteered in Peru and so I had enormous trouble equalizing, or dealing with the pressure of the water on my ears, and so I could only go down for one of the two dives which was incredibly sad as Rarotonga is one of the best places to dive in all the world. The first dive was totally worth it though, beautiful reefs, fish of all colors, and even a sea turtle attacking a jellyfish! That was the highlight. I of course couldn't take my own photos but here's a photo of what it looked like that I found online. It was kind of weird though, like what is there to eat on a jellyfish?
Another photo from online of the Rarotonga reefs
       There were tons of fun people on my dive and even a free diver who saw a three meter long hammerhead shark on the second dive that I didn't do, I'm not sure if I'm sad or glad that I didn't see it...
       During the dive I meet a guy named AJ who's from Auckland, New Zealand and he's six foot nine! He's the tallest person I've ever met! Anyway so I was talking to him and telling him how sad I was that our family didn't have a scooter and so he kindly offered to take me on a scooter ride later on, and I eagerly agreed. I thought it would be a fun, friendly kind of event.

Here we are on the boat
    Later in the afternoon, AJ came over and took me on his scooter up to this inland waterfall and then for a hike.

The 'waterfall' that has dried up because of the lack of rain recently.

The top of the hike where we sat down to enjoy the view on an extremely spiky bush.

The other side of our view.

A new adventure begins

Monday July 27th
       Or is it the 28th here in Rarotonga? I'm not sure if we passed the international dateline or not... No, apparently we did not. It's still the 27th.
        Our plane landed at sunrise. It touched down in the beautiful Cook Islands, a small collection of islands somewhere in the Pacific Ocean closer to Australia than the Americas. The sun was rising as we descended onto the tarmac like the dawn of this new adventure. As I stepped off the plane onto
the tarmac (there were no terminals in the tiny airport) a traditionally dressed native dancer greeted us.

My dad walking into the airport
    We went from the airport to our hotel which was on the beach

My brother, who spends every waking moment sailing or thinking about sailing even though we live in landlocked Colorado, dreams about these moments when he's back on the beach watching the waves.

He also enjoys rope swings :)

So do I :)

Mum does not 

We went for ice cream afterwards, orange chocolate chip is both our favorite flavor, but you can't get it in the U.S. so we always eat WAY too much when we go back to NZ! It's the small things that I didn't even realize how much I missed in Peru, like going out to get ice cream with my mum.

    Since my luggage was lost on the flight from Peru we went into the one and only town on the island to buy some new clothes and a bathing suit for me. It's amazing what a small and isolated place Rarotonga is. There are only thirteen thousand people on the whole island, and Rarotonga is the biggest island in all of the Cook Islands. I thought Peru was isolated, but it's nothing compared to here. And with that extreme isolation comes a really laid back, and relaxed atmosphere. Time is not important. There are two buses that travel clockwise and counter-clockwise on the only road all the way around the edge of the circular island. The middle is covered in a tropical rain-forest that blankets steep mountains. 

It almost reminds me of the Wii resort island. Everyone here gets around on motor scooters, but hardly anyone wears helmets.
     I was looking forward to getting to buy lots more clothes, but everything here is ridiculously expensive, a side effect of how far away it is from everywhere else, and so I ended up only getting the necessities. The supermarket was also a let down, I thought a tropical island would have a bountiful supply of different kinds of foods, but the shelves were as barren as those in the supermarket's in Peru! In fact the whole island was a lot worse off than I had imagined, poverty and obesity are high, there are practically no opportunities, and people seem to have no ambition. It was interesting seeing the different kinds of poverty and comparing them. In Cusco although everyone was poor, everyone worked hard and there was always a lot of things going on, in Rarotonga people seem content in their laid back island lifestyle even if it means they are poor, because there just aren't a lot of opportunity to improve their lifestyle. There were a lot more similarities between Cusco and Rarotonga than I would have imagined, the biggest similarity I saw was all the stray dogs, there are just as many here as in Cusco! But here there are also hundreds and hundreds of stray roosters which is very different!
     I had really enjoyed the laid back atmosphere the whole day, once on the bus into town I had stood up to get off prematurely and the bus driver turned to me and said
      "Just relax, you're on island time now!" and me and everyone on the bus laughed, but then once I had gotten the clothes we were forced to wait no less than two hours and ten minutes for our bus, and no one was laughing. Island time.
       

Me, waiting for the bus and writing in my journal as the sun set, with my blue Peru bag featuring a llama because everything from Peru had llamas on it.
      That night I fell into bed tired and a little disoriented, I couldn't believe I wasn't in Peru anymore.