Back to Raro
The next day was our flight back to Rarotonga. We saw Theresa there again and her brother-in-law from Aitutaki was there too, a nice guy.
Then a weird thing happened.
A flight landed there and all the tourists got off. An older couple was walking by us and the bro-in-law said to them, “Hello” and they either didn’t hear him, ignored him, or thought he was talking to someone else. Then he said to them again with a smile, “Did you just arrive?” And the old white dude just looked at him for a second and kept on walking. It was STRANGE! I think the old guy didn’t know why he would be talking to him, so he was confused and just kept going.
It was SO weird to see what happened from the bro-in-law’s perspective. I looked at his face afterward to see if he was annoyed and he wasn’t. I told him, “We aren’t used to people being so friendly.” I felt bad that the old guy didn’t say hello because bro-in-law was being so nice.
View from the plane.
Then it was back to Rarotonga and stayed at the Aroko Bungalows which were very nice, aside from the insane stream of ants that would come under the door and congregate on microscopic particles of foo on the kitchen floor. They weren’t that bad though, since they stayed away from everything except the kitchen floor. That is, until I found them swarming by the hundreds on a frying pan in the cupboard that we must not have cleaned well enough….
We got another motorbike and went to Paulina’s Polynesian Restaurant in Avarua. It was the only real island food we had. Jim had the popular raw fish with lemon and I had coconut chicken, which was ok. Both came with the dark green spinach dip and taro(?).
Later we walked along the beach and watched 2 cool dogs trying to catch fish in the shallow water. Then the sky turned an amazing purple and blue color. The sky was always beautiful at night there.
Jim loungin’ by the beautiful night sky.
The next day, Jim went diving, but in the morning we rode to a store and got a delicious hot baked muffin and scone. For the rest of the week we did that, too.
When we were flying down the street on the motorbike, we saw a huge pig!
I went to town, sent on a shopping mission to get flowered shirts for everyone. Later that night we had great pasta at “That’s Pasta” with a nice couple from our hotel who run a B&B in Christchurch.
The next 2 days were overcast and rainy, to our dismay. There isn’t much to do when you can’t go in the water or on the beach in the sun! We did more shirt shopping and Jim was on an endless quest to find His Perfect Shirt, but it never happened. At one store, the Japanese lady working there kept asking us questions and then asked why I wasn’t tan if we had been there a week. Hmph! But then she gave us a great tidbit of information. She said to take the ferry to Moorea when we go to Tahiti because it is fast and not expensive and beautiful there. Cool! We had no clue what we would do there!
Finally it was the day to leave and we tried to waste time and wait for the 11 pm flight. The flights in these islands are always at CRAZY times!! It can mess up your body clock even more!
We flew the 2 hr flight to Tahiti and arrived at some god-awful time like 2:30am.
Tags: Cook Islands
Kelly