Chilling in the Cook Islands

Typical. 5 days of a beach break about to start and Keith goes down with Man flu. As such, the blog gets shelved for a while and we decide to limit our activities to just 'improving our laziness', as Milo, the Executive Chef at our hotel, the Nautilus Resort, quoted an answer by a 'posh' Englishman to his question 'What are you doing today?' So, our plan for the week is complete rest, although we will explore the village of Muri, as well enjoy the beautiful beach and lagoon. We arrive in the evening and from our room, we have direct access to the beach, so we stroll the few yards down to see the view. We notice a guy walking down the shoreline, with some dogs alongside him. We say 'hello', thinking he is a local, but it turns out he's a young lad called Jason from New Zealand and the dogs have just followed him along the beach! He was rather drunk, but very amiable, so we had a nice conversation before he went off to get another beer. Although he was staying at our hotel, we never saw him again.

The following day, we investigated the village and beach. It did not take long, as Muri is pretty small, but there were a few shops to look at and a number of places for a meal and drink. We stumbled upon a rather tatty hairdressers cum beauty shop, where the girl also did massages, so Diane had a foot treatment which she said was fantastic and insisted Keith had a back massage - that he said was extremely firm, but theraputic. Our day ended with a nice meal in the hotel restaurant, which is where we had the first of many chats with Milo.

We tried to sit on the beach most days, but the weather was, at times, indifferent, with a strong wind some days and, on a couple of occasions, rain in the afternoon. But, it was always warm. We used the hotel's kayak one day, to paddle around the small uninhabitated island that was just off the shore. The water was very shallow and calm, given the lagoon that surrounds Rarotonga, but beyond the reef, we could see huge waves crashing down and bouncing against the coral. All very dramatic. Diane tried her hand at paddleboarding again.

Bastille Day was celebrated at the hotel while we were there, mainly because Milo was French, we think. There was a special evening meal, that we partook of, with a couple of guys performing music; one singing and playing a guitar and the other a beat box. We heard a mixture of French songs and English ones - it was all very entertaining. Another evening, we ate at an Asian restaurant, The Rickshaw, mainly to have some spicy food. It was a very busy place and we were fortunate to get a table. The food was pretty good, but the portions were huge!

There was a museum nearby, that detailed the history of the Cook Islands, that included some old film of life before tourism. They had some fish tanks and, in one, was a stone fish - it's so ugly, but you can see how well it is camouflaged; in fact, we were told that these fish are in the lagoon, so wearing sea shoes was essential.

Our 5 days here seemed to come to an end before this part of our journey had started; it was a shame that Keith was still suffering with his cold / flu, but at least we had some days in the sun and rested quite a bit. So, it's off back to Auckland for a couple of days, before we head off for our final leg of our adventure to South America and Chile.