Category: travel

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We are not alone – Remembering 9/11

Like many Americans, 9/11 had a major effect on our lives at the time.

On the morning of September 11th 2001, Greg was an extremely junior officer serving the first months of his first tour of duty on a US Coast Guard cutter patrolling off the coast of Haiti.  He was performing counter-migrant and counter-drug operations as a ship driver and a boarding officer.  24 hours later Greg was off the Coast of Louisiana boarding cargo ships looking for bombs.  A year later he was recruited into the new field of counter-terrorism operations in the US Coast Guard.

Tiffany was a senior cadet at the Coast Guard Academy getting ready to graduate and take her first tour onboard a cutter stationed in the Pacific Northwest.  The Coast Guard missions she had trained for 4 years to accomplish were no longer the primary missions she would perform in that job.

Since then a decade has passed.  We received our honorable discharges, Greg started and sold a business and Tiffany became a leading sailing instructor.  We sailed across the Pacific Ocean.  A few months ago Greg was in New York for 36 hours and he gave up some sleep to see the World Trade Center site.  Neither of us had ever been and it seemed a good idea to at least see the location where the event that shaped our military careers happened:

Continue reading “We are not alone – Remembering 9/11”

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National Population – 1300

Alofi, Niue

Notice anything different about the description of where we are?  Normally we give you the city, the island and the country.  In Niue though, the island IS the country.  With a total number of 1 island and a total population of approximately 1300 citizens in country at any one time, this island-nation is a very different experience from the other countries we have visited so far.   There are more Niueans in the main New Zealand city of Auckland than there are in Niue.  It’s actually kind of funny because the Miss Niue beauty pageant is actually held in Auckland and broadcast live over the internet & TV back to the home country.

This isn’t too surprising being as all Niueans are dual citizens of New Zealand, there are only so many jobs a nation of 1300 people can support, and finally, Niue, along with The Cook Islands and quite a few other island chains out here are all protectorates of New Zealand.  This basically means that, though the Kiwis play it down a lot, the tiny little country of New Zealand is a major regional power player in the South Pacific.  It’s basically France, the USA and NZ that own something like 80% of the islands out here.  Which is really impressive that: Continue reading “National Population – 1300”

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3 Miles Straight Down

Enroute Niue

Couple things from this video:

First off, that little scrap of paper with the photocopied hand drawn chart of the reef?  It’s photocopied over and over and passed on from one cruiser to the next.  It is literally the best and only chart available for Beveridge Reef.  There may not be too many unexplored places left on this globe but there are at least some places less explored than others.

Two, did you hear those numbers?  Again to remind you, these islands are both very tiny and extremely far apart in a vast ocean.  It’s 120 miles to the next island, 500 back to the one we came from and the nearest land?  It’s only 3 miles away…straight down.  So a hand drawn map from who knows when Continue reading “3 Miles Straight Down”

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A Different Breed of Nomad

Avarua, Rarotonga, Cook Islands

As we depart Rarotonga we think we would be remiss if we failed to mention Robyn in more detail.

Remember how we said we found a group of fellow sailors our own age? Well, that wasn’t completely true. We found a group of other sailors and Robyn. See Robyn got here to the Cooks the same way most sane residents of North America (she’s Canadian) would: by plane. When we ran into her she had been living on Rarotonga for several weeks spending her days working in an organic farm part time, her evenings relaxing at her hostel or partying with the locals and her free time enjoying the island paradise she decided to call home for a few months. Yes, you heard us right. Months. Robyn wasn’t a tourist, she was a temporary resident. Continue reading “A Different Breed of Nomad”

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Area of Totality

Avarua, Rarotonga, Cook Islands

Before we get too far away from the whole Cook island currency thing we should add an important afterthought. Not only is the money in this country VERY gender specific, it’s also incredibly friendly (no not like that). How friendly? Here’s an idea.

Here my friends is why it’s a good idea to travel during a global recession: everything is cheaper! So not only are things reasonably priced here in actual dollars, Continue reading “Area of Totality”

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No Wonder They’re So Fit!

Avarua, Rarotonga, Cook Islands

The Needle track is an all day hike through the heart of Rarotonga and over one of its largest peaks.  Now as many of you have already learned with us, Polynesian islands are formed by volcanoes and island volcanoes do not generate gently rolling hills.  How steep is it?  Well it’s a 7 km hike (so say 3.5 miles) and they recommend at least four hours.  So your travel speed is estimated at under a mile an hour.  Oh and yeah, tropics remember so it’s a tad warm to boot.

 

Having gained experience with this type of hiking in the Marquesas a while back, we were fairly confident that we had a good amount of experience with this kind of trekking and we were right…

…Except for the chickens.  Which if you haven’t caught onto yet, really seem to be a running theme on this island. Continue reading “No Wonder They’re So Fit!”

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A License for Awesome!

Avarua, Rarotonga, Cook Islands

There are two ways to explore Rarotonga: you can either rent a scooter and drive the one road that goes around the island or you can hike over the mountains and straight through it.  Each trip takes about a day.  Being as we had more than 2 days, we did both.

Now the first thing you have to do to rent a scooter in Rarotonga is probably the best part of the whole experience.  You have to get your Cook Islands’ driver’s license.  Which of course involves a rigorous and lengthy 20 minute driver’s exam and a government fee.  This very arduous test is broken up into 4 critical parts:

1)      Drive down road (remember, they drive on the wrong side!!)

2)      Go around roundabout (definitely the curveball for us Americans)

3)      Come back down road (other side! Other side!)

4)      Turn off road.

It amuses us that the people who are approved by the government to administer this exam are the scooter rental companies; who are coincidently the exact same people who have the most financial gain to realize upon the student passing the exam.

“But wait” you may protest. “I already have a driver’s license!” Continue reading “A License for Awesome!”

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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: Continue reading “Cannibalism is Alive and Well in Rarotonga!”

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Sex and Currency

Avarua, Rarotonga, Cook Islands

That’s the flag, So where are we now?

Yep, still in the middle of the blue stuff.  Oh but hey, now we’re in the left-middle.

The Cook Islands are a lot different than what we’ve come to expect from the South Pacific.

First off, everyone speaks English!  That’s right, the Cook Islands are a protectorate of New Zealand, a member of the British Commonwealth, so therefore they are English-speakers!  Which means Greg’s months of struggling to order burgers with fries on the side instead of in the bun are finally over.

But like their neighbors over in Tahiti, there are just some parts of Polynesian culture that simply persist despite all foreign influence.  Why these parts revolve around sex remains a mystery to us, but these Cook Islanders ain’t letting go of their freedom of expression anytime soon!

Ok so the dude on their dollar?  That’s Tangaroa, their EXTREMELY well endowed god of fertility and fishing.  No, seriously, if you want to get fish or get laid apparently this is the guy to see.  And it’s no real big secret why; brother-man always has his fishing rod!

He is not only a god in their pantheon, he was also selected, in all his well-endowed glory as it were, to be the international representative of the Cook Island tourism department!  As a result, he is on everything: the money, the maps, the government buildings.  Everything!  If it has to do with tourism baby, the naked tripod guy is prominently featured.  If this doesn’t finally prove that Polynesian culture’s perception on sexuality are superior to our own, then you’re just not paying attention!

Oh and just in case you were worried about sexism in their exploitation / utilization of nudity in the monetary documents; put your mind at ease.  The naked chick riding a shark is on their 3 dollar bill:

Like this article?  Check out our series on “Sex and Jesus” for more on the Polynesian perception on acceptable sexuality in normal society.

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Fish guttin’ bikini

Enroute Avarua, Rarotonga, Cook Islands

Greg is not a big fan of traditional fishing.  Not because it hurts the fish (as my friend Paul once said “if God didn’t want us to eat animals, why are they made of meat?”), not because he doesn’t like fish (bit of a sushi freak actually, except in Mexico) but because, as Tiffany so aptly put it, “There is a reason it’s called fishing and not catching.”

Look, normal fishing is boring.  Greg needs something else to keep him occupied.  Which is why shipboard deep sea fishing is so perfect for him.  The philosophy behind fishing on a sailboat is actually rather simplistic:  take a hook, attach it to a line, drag it behind the boat while you’re transiting.  Some people don’t even bother with a rod and just go straight hand line.  Greg is completely down with this style of fishing because it actually allows us to get something else done and sometimes you get to participate in “catching” without wasting your whole day staring at a line in the water.  Only downside is that the ‘sometimes’ is not as often as one would think.

In Mexico we had some really good fishing off of the Baja Coast. 

And we nabbed two fish at once sailing to La Cruz 

But ever since we started sailing towards Tahiti pickings have been somewhat…slim.

For the past 3 MONTHS.

Now you can justify that pretty easily.  As we’ve established, the Pacific is a big place and it’s mostly empty.  So, logically, there aren’t very many fish out here compared to the size of the ocean and most of the fish out here aren’t just hanging around; usually they are migrating from one place to another.

All this adds up to deepwater fishing underway being a mixed bag and, to understate the fact, an extremely unreliable means of providing substance for one’s crew.

But baby when it hits, it hits big!

And that’s exactly what happened a few days sail out of Bora Bora.  In the dead middle of nowhere.

Catching a fish is a huge boost to crew morale.  A big mahi-mahi like that will provide a great fresh barbeque under the stars and they don’t get any fresher than flopping on your stern!  Now imagine how we felt when we realized we had actually stumbled into a school of them: Continue reading “Fish guttin’ bikini”

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