Where are John and Kara?: Rarotonga, Cook Islands

Another beautiful morning in Paradise

Today’s blog is being posted from the beautiful Rarotonga, Cook Islands. We arrived safely last Friday and are staying with Kara’s grandparents Pa and Jillian in Matavera. Island life or ‘island time’ suits us and we have found the locals very friendly and welcoming. Although the weather thus far has been terribly warm and very humid (with humidity peaking at 95 today) we have been treated with patches of rain! Who would have thought that rain would be a treat? Raro has offered us plenty of time to relax and catch up on some much needed sleep… but as active relaxers we are in training mode to bicycle around the 32km island next week and have been out in the garden pulling out last years passion fruit vines, as well as checking out the marine life every day.

A lovely bunch of bananas

Kara having a breather from the bike training

John trying the local ‘Matutu’ lager by our favourite
swimming spot at Titikaveka

Or perhaps they are checking us out? John passed his Rarotongan motorbike drivers license, after riding the motorcycle 6km to the police station he was just asked to ride around five cones. There was a slight delay as we couldn’t find the registration sticker on the bike so missioned it to the cook island bank to purchase a new registration after three tellers and an hour later (island time) we bought a new sticker for $2 and then realised there was one on the bike already!

On the way to get his motorbike licence

The slightly pinkish John trying some local ‘star fruit’

John has also been attempting to master the traditional island art of coconut husking… its taken quuuuuite a bit of practice but now John can husk open and grate the coconut out, in about 10-15 minutes – Pa’s record is 3 seconds for the husking and although we wont be trying some locals can even do it with their teeth. (After the coconut is grated the milk is squeezed out and eaten as part of an island dish called ikimata- or sometimes we just eat it straight from the coconut). Today we joined ‘Pa’ (Kara’s grandfather) on one of his daily cross-island trek. Further updates to follow from the island!

The steep cross-island mountain trek

Top of the mountain

The back garden

Although already it feels like a lifetime ago, we can’t forget to mention our previous week at the sunny Bay of Plenty on Kara’s parents farm up in the lower Kaimai Ranges. It was a fantastic week that went way to quickly. Over the week John helped to build a ‘mooobile home’ for the new calf that was purchased at the calf auctions (see a photo of the cow Hazel, Kara named below). This was quite a feat. We also had the opportunity to let our pyromaniac tendencies loose and spent several days manning numerous bonfires across the paddocks – thick wet logs of wood require much persuasion to stay alight! We really enjoyed the farm work and will continue to look for farm work opportunities on our travels. Farm work is physically tough and as Kara remarked you need to be mentally tough too to keep going. It’s a positive challenge and we hope to stop in again soon.

Tot siens,

John and Kara