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”
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”
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”
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…
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:
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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”
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.
In the United States, if we want some lettuce, we go to the fridge and get some lettuce
(what does this have to do with Polynesian life? Stay with me a sec.)
Fridge empty? Fine, we go to the grocery store. But what would we do if the grocery store had no lettuce? What if all the grocery stores had no lettuce because there was none to be had? What if we couldn’t go to the farm, organic or otherwise, to get our lettuce because it was literally impossible to get to one via land?
Well then I’d guess we’d just have to sit on our happy hands and wait a few weeks / months for the next delivery, now wouldn’t we?
Alright, take that paragraph above and replace “lettuce” with everything from “milk” to “vegetables” to “paint” to “beer” to “wheels for my car” to “computer monitor” to “gas for my stove” to anything you use in your daily life.
You can now understand what we mean when we say the supply ship plays a very critical part in the lives of Polynesians.
The M/V ARANUI 3 makes 16 trips a year to resupply many of the Marquesan islands and a couple of the Tuamotu islands. “Oh, that’s a lot of trips.” No, no it is not. Imagine that only 16 times a year, basically once a month, you could get fresh vegetables or a new TV or your favorite book series or just about anything over the size of an airmail package. Think of the mindset shift for a purchasing consumer. First off, you’d better be darn sure you want whatever you’re ordering, because it isn’t $5.95 shipping and handing, we can tell you that. After having to deal with the Polynesian internet “service”.These people have to order things far enough in advance to get it delivered to Tahiti (which is not exactly on the beaten path to start with) early enough for it to get onto this ship so it can get delivered. The boat only comes by 16 times a year and if your package isn’t onboard when the ship leaves Tahiti, well, guess you’ll just have to wait another month then, won’t you? So that new bike you want to get your kid for Christmas? Might want to think about ordering that around September or so. Just in case there’s a delay somewhere along the delivery chain (sure that never happens) or just in case the weather’s bad on the day the delivery ship shows up and it can’t make any deliveries so it leaves to make it’s next appointment (because we’ve be told that does happen).
Sure stores stock stuff and here on Rangiroa there are more stores than on most islands (about 3) but they each don’t carry much, and by “not much” I mean “not much beyond basic living necessities like clothes, food and cookware” and none of them are specialty stores. You want your XBOX 360 video games or a replacement laptop because yours broke? That you special order and wait for the boat.
Did we mention that the supply ship also has to enter the port via the the aforementioned narrow pass of tidal death? It comes inside the lagoon and anchors off the pass and deploys small boats, since it’s too big to tie up at the shallow pier. Then it uses its crane to put things into the small boat. You know the video arcade grabby claw? Ok, play that game, except if you screw up, you lose the island’s ration of potatoes for the month, retail value several hundred to several thousand dollars. We did mention this game is being played on a fluid maritime environment where nothing is stable, right?
We have heard stories of new cars and trucks being dumped overboard during transfer…oops!
When the stars do align and the delivery ship can drop anchor, release its tender boat and actually make deliveries, it’s a big deal that a good part of the whole village turns out for.
These people get their supplies from outboard motorboats. The Port of Oakland or New York, this is not.
People buying and selling, right there on the dock. Why? Because if there are 50 wheels of cheese to be delivered to Rangiroa this month, you want to make sure you get your cheese before it’s all gone.
