Cannibalism is Alive and Well in Rarotonga!

Avarua, Rarotonga, Cook Islands

Mooring up in Avarua, not as easy as one would think, even for salty dawgs such as ourselves.

The Cook Islands are also the first place we came into contact direct contact with the history of cannibalism in Polynesia.  The practice is alive and well, just not exactly after a fashion you would expect:

To be fair, we can’t really blame the chicken.  It was a really good Indian restaurant.  We ate there about 3 times in 10 days.

It provided an interesting contrast to the immaculately designed and hand carved fixtures inside the Catholic Cathedral about a block away

Aside from being a cruising destination, Rarotonga is also a tropical playground and vacation mecca for their sponsor country, New Zealand.  This means they had a nightlife that while small, was a really good time.  Normally we aren’t much for the night life scene except something else interesting happened while we were in Rarotonga: we ran into other sailors our own age.

This may not seem like a very big deal but think about it for a second, when was the last time we had people our own age around?  As we’ve pointed out before, most cruisers are much older than us and volunteer crew typically don’t make it this far out into the Pacific so it is a rare event for a group of younger people to actually run into each other with a few consecutive days in port.

Most importantly (well at least most importantly to Greg) – at this point, Rarotonga is the first island nation we’ve been to with that all important element to any tropical paradise with aspirations to be an all-night party hotspot:

A 24 hour fast food restaurant.  How did the French not get this?

Like this article?  For more about the day to day living on the islands check out our time on Rangiroa, French Polynesia in “Polynesian Ingenuity, Progress and Church!“