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.
We went from the airport to our hotel which was on the beach
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.
That night I fell into bed tired and a little disoriented, I couldn't believe I wasn't in Peru anymore.
