Tiffany and Greg Around the World
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”
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!”
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!”
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.
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”
En route Rarotonga, Cook Islands
Before we enter the Cook Islands you may be curious where they take their name from.
The fact that you don’t yet know means that we have been horribly remiss in failing to enlighten you about Captain James Cook, one of the most amazing explorers in the history of the planet Earth. Ever. No exceptions or qualifications or riders necessary. Dude’s at the top of the heap. Though Greg cannot find any hard confirmation, similarities to names of captains of starships with almost identical missions are more than likely not coincidental. (Ok look, both went “boldly where no man went before” and ended up stumbling across insanely sexually open women, both were captains, both came from poor backgrounds, both were pretty handy in a fight, one ship was “Enterprise” the other “Endeavor” I mean come on!)
If you spend any time in any part of the South Pacific you will find bays, islands, mountains, heck entire countries named “Cook.”
The man has his own line of island beers named after him! (and they’re good beers too!)
Well why is that?
British Captain James Cook basically discovered the entire South Pacific. Yep. Whole thing. Not exaggerating. Everything from the Marquesas to…and including…Australia. Thousands of islands, millions of square miles of open ocean, almost all of it gets attributed to him and his sailing ships. Oh and he didn’t sail because, like us, it sounded like fun to get mugged by a freaking Kracken in the middle of the night. He sailed because “back in the day,” that was the only option. Pop his name into a Google search sometime and do a little reading on this guy. He’s scary amazing and was wicked smart. Sailed off into the blue back in the day when a lot of people would bet even money that that you would fall off the side of the planet and your odds of actually figuring out where you were with any accuracy was about a billion to one. Have you ever tried celestial navigation? We took a college course in it and we still wouldn’t put even money on it as a reliable means of navigation.
It’s a better way to go than calculating local apparent noon, trust us.
He came back from the unknown with accurate charts, detailed accounts of hundreds of plants that no one had ever heard of, places that defied the imagination and some of the most interesting cultures of humans on the planet hereto unknown to Europe. Oh wait, he also discovered a continent for the Western world…which, being as there are only 7 on the planet and 3 were “discovered” by either being rigidly attached to or being Europe…look it’s impressive. Here’s a rough approximation of what he explored for the British Crown
We’ve been sailing for months and we haven’t even managed to hardly scratch the surface of what this guy pulled off…and we had charts and a GPS! Now granted, some of those charts have likely not been updated since he last dropped by but the point is, what we’re doing is considered ambitious and we actually know there is land out there. He didn’t. When his ship hit a reef because literally no one had ever charted those waters before, he didn’t just pull into the marina for a haul out and refit…oh no, this dude beaches his ship, tells his crew to put their big kid pants on and start chopping trees on an unknown island for replacement parts. And let us tell you what, rebuilding a tall ship by hand in the middle of the greatest expanse of nothing on the planet with 10 trees on the island wasn’t any small feat.
After defying death on a mostly daily basis for years at a time on 3 voyages off into the great blue unknown, he finally died in Hawaii when he was attacked by locals while exploring. After a vicious battle the islanders killed him and ate his remains in order to grow stronger, a local custom. They sent some of his remains back to his First Officer who returned them to Britain for burial.
So the reason everything from the bay we’re in, to the island it’s attached to, to the country that owns it, to the beer in our hands is named Cook? Because if you discovered 1/3 of the entire planet you’d probably call dibs on a few islands too.
…and we’d agree you’d earned it.
Like this article? Check out our exploration of the capital of the Marquesas in the entry Next Stop: Taiohae Bay, Nuku Hiva, French Polynesia for more history on the Europeans in French Polynesia.
En-route Bora Bora, Society Islands, French Polynesia
Before we return to Bora Bora to experience Battle Fortress: South Pacific as a cruiser instead of a “normal tourist” let us take a moment to draw attention to a particular little point of interest that we figured out on our first trip here:
But hey, maybe those numbers aren’t hitting you with quite the magnitude that they hit us. It’s in kilometers even, so how far is that? Aren’t kilometers shorter than miles anyway? (PS- yes, they are. 1 kilometer = .62 miles, but still, that’s a long way!) So let’s avoid the numbers for a second and cut to the skinny: after all this time, we’re only half way there, give or take. Even then we’re assuming “there” is Sydney vice Moscow, Europe, India or any other arbitrary point of land. So Tiffany attempted a more graphic presentation to provide some perspective on our total distance traveled vs distance left to go in this ocean.
The word “size” takes on completely new dimensions when you are dealing with the Pacific Ocean. We have previously described to you the continent-sized island nations that are in abundance throughout the Pacific, but we haven’t actually described the size of the ocean itself. When we were working in Coast Guard Pacific Command both of us had the phrase “millions of square miles of open ocean” listed under our responsibilities but that number is just to big to get a grip on. Seriously, can you picture in your mind a million square miles of water?
The Pacific Ocean is the largest single body on our planet. You mean body of water, right? No, no we don’t. We mean the largest body of ANYTHING on our planet. North America pales in comparison, the Atlantic Ocean really shouldn’t share the same last name and Asia isn’t much more than, if you’ll excuse the somewhat appropriate pun, a drop in the bucket compared to the vastness of the Pacific. In fact, speaking of continents, we have been told that if you took every single scrap of dry land on Earth and put it into the Pacific, you’d still have room for a second Africa!
One of the things we learned on this journey is that some things cannot be accurately described…or even filmed. How do we describe to you a barren desert larger than anything else on this Earth filled with salt water? How do we show you what it feels like to know you are on a 50 foot ship and that for days, if not weeks, the closest point of land in any direction is two miles straight down? Everest could get dumped into this ocean and no one would ever find it!
This ocean borders our home country. In the past it has protected us and even today she feeds us. We have sailed her for quite a while now, but nowhere near as long as many others have. The Pacific is huge, diverse and amazing…and we’ve only come less than half way across her.
Huahine, Society Islands, French Polynesia
In French Polynesia, the boys may get a bay, but the ladies get a whole island, as Tiffany explains
As this island is not a famous as her sisters, the real joy of Huahine is that she provides a sample of what “normal” Society Island life is like. Setting out on a hike to do a bit of exploring, we saw some amazing sights, Continue reading “Overly Friendly Locals in Polynesia”
Bora Bora, French Polynesia, South Pacific
What better place to spend the birth of our nation than on American Battle Fortress: South Pacific!?
The Bora Bora yacht club, owned by an American and a Frenchman, (PS – oh yes, there is a yacht club in Bora Bora and yes, we hung out there for a while and yes, we got some official stickers and finally, yes, it is as awesome as it sounds.)
Anyway, they were nice enough to throw us an “as American as we can be in French Polynesia” BBQ.
Some parts were spot on…if not a little odd for the backdrop.
Onward to Bora Bora, the island you’ve all heard of and dreamed about – we’re actually going there!!! For our first visit with Tiffany’s Mom, we’re going by plane. And as we already knew, Tahitians don’t have the same dress code as the rest of the world! Here’s business casual as defined by the airport attendants:
Yeah, not your typical power suit!
Oh, the Air Tahiti Nui planes have a great symbol on them. It’s the Tahitian tiaré flower, one of their native flowers that has seven petals. It smells wonderfully like a gardenia, and can be found growing all over Tahiti. Tahitians are really into their flowers and “flower language”– The tradition shows that if a flower is worn on behind the left ear means Continue reading “Bora Bora here we come!”
