Here is the best way to get soaked and have fun at the same time. You go on a luge down a mountain when its raining. You go around the curves at breakneck speed so that your luge slips and almost flips over. It gives you that epic rush of adrenaline. You race people so …
Waiheke—why not?
by Neil When my parents made the decision to emigrate to Canada in the mid-1970s, our other option was Australia. After visiting New Zealand, I’m now of the mind that they could have split the difference by moving to New Zealand and getting the best of both worlds. Don’t get me wrong, I love …
Reflections on the Cook Islands
by Neil Reflections on the Cook Islands Rarotonga, capital of the Cook Islands is a rare slice of paradise at first glance. I could see myself living there----almost. It is a place of contrasts that juxtaposes the idyllic with the distasteful. Christianity arrived relatively late in the Cook Islands, with the first missionaries arriving in …
Hobbiton
We went to Hobbiton. It was small. It was kind of hard to imagine Gandalf driving a cart on some of these pathways. But hey, who cares? We were in HOBBITON. So, we started off our adventure in the exact same place as when Frodo first meets Gandalf in the Fellowship of the ring. It …
The Maritime Museum, Auckland.
By Pippa Sarjeant-Jenkins The boats There were many different boats made by the people of the pacific nations in the first section of the Maritime museum …
Everything’s so out of wack
by Rowan When we arrived in New Zealand, the first thing I thought was “where are the chickens?” Then I remembered that New Zealand cities didn’t have chickens wandering around everywhere. It was actually quite a shock coming to New Zealand since it was so different from the Cook Islands. I had to keep reminding …
The Cook Islands National Library
By Rachel As a librarian (and because it was just down the road from where we were staying), I had to check out the national library. It is important to say, before I go on, that the Cook Islands covers 2million square kilometres of ocean and has a population of only 25,000 spread over 11 …
Un cruise sur le lagon
Mecredi le 11 octobre, à dix heures du matin un autobus nous a conduit à Captain Tama’s Lagoon Cruizes © pour un cruise à onze heures. Quand les bateaux étaient prêts à aller, notre grand groupe s’est séparer en quatre plus petit groupe pour aller sur les quatre bateaux. Quand on ses assis dans le …
Accessing the internet
It is one of those things we take for granted in Canada – that wifi hotspots are nearly ubiquitous, open, and freely available. Not the case everywhere. A bit of a wake-up call for us when we got to the Cook Islands! There were wifi hotspots but they were hotspots for a fee, and they …
The Matutu Brewery
Today, we went to a brewery on Rarotonga. It was called Matutu brewery. It was quite interesting, considering the fact that the brewery was very small, had only 2 fermentation barrels and that there would be no other brewery that I would visit that would work quite like this one. It used old machinery and …
A year of discovery 