Kia Orana

A few interesting tidbits that I haven't been able to include in the other posts:

The native language on the Cook Islands is Maori. Kia Orana means "hello" and is the easiest phrase to learn. Rarotonga is the capital of the Cook Islands and has a population of about 9,600. For this population size, we were quite surprised to see the number of churches we did. The Cookies are very religious people and we thought it would be need to experience church so on Sunday, we dressed in our best vacation Sunday wear and scootered off to a Cook Island Christian Church. The service started at 10am and was done just after 11am. The Cookies were nicely dressed with some men in full suits. The women wore colourful dresses and generally all wore hats with flowers around the brim. The service had a lot of singning in both English and Maori. The sermon itself was in both languages as well and I think that was done to help all the tourist guests understand what was going on. The church itself was plain inside, but nice. I'd say there were probably about 20 Cookies in attendance and for that little number, man could they sing loud!

The island is lush green, with a tropical rain forest in the centre with mountain peaks. The road around the island is only 32 km. This is definately a place to visit. It is absolutely beautiful! There are so many other islands that form the Cook Islands with the other most popular one being Aitutaki. We considered doing a day trip there, but the weather wasn't cooperating enough for us to risk spending the money to head over there. The resort we stayed at had a sister resort on this island and another option was to split your time between the two. Perhaps next time....hey Ziad still has a valid driver's licence for a year....

Alas our time in Rarotonga came to an end...I had to say good-bye to the beach and say good-bye to the lagoon and fishes. It was a very sad time indeed. The worst part of this was that wake-up was 4am to catch the shuttle to the airport and everyone knows how much of a morning person I am! Even worse was the scheduled wake-up call never happened...but thankfully the alarm clock was set and unfortunately the plane was not missed. Great memories, and awesome pictures to keep those memories alive.

Next adventure started 4.5 hours later, but in actual reality started the next day due to that invisible International Date Line. Next up.....New Zealand.