Crossing the line
Saturday, April 2nd, 2005Nadi – Rarotonga
It seems innocent enough at first glance, and it seems perfectly logical as well. Well, it’s neither. Yes, deep down in your sensible self you feel that it all makes sense and that all is well, but on the surface, having the same day twice is the funniest and weirdest thing ever. What’s the big deal you ask? Who cares about two days in your life having the same date? Well, nothing’s the big deal, and nobody cares about the date, but it’s still a pretty cool thing to experience. You waste away all of one Saturday, then hop on a 3 hour flight, and lo! thanks to the international dateline, it’s the same Saturday from the beginning all over again.
Or, if I was very pedantic, it’s still Friday the day before when I get to Rarotonga, as it’s still before midnight, which somehow makes it all even better. At first glance Rarotonga must be a boring place, as it looks like the whole island has come to the airport on Friday night to live it up and stare at the new arrivals, but as it turns out, it’s just that the airport is tiny, and since there’s not many flights in and out of Raro, you get the full turnout of hotel shuttle buses and the likes for every single flight.
Anyway, Rarotonga is the main island of the Cook islands, or at least the most famous one. It’s all of 32km around, of volcanic origin and surrounded by a coral reef. Around 8000 people call it home, and live a life of leisurely “island time” ease. And coming from NZ, there’s a perpetual feeling of familiarity as well – the Cook islands might be an independent nation, but for all practical intents and purposes they’re an outpost of New Zealand. The paper money is kiwi dollars, the supermarket has exactly what you’d expect to see on the shelves of a kiwi supermarket, and there are more Cook islanders living in Auckland than there are living on the Cook islands themselves.
Saturday is market day in Avarua, the capital town of the Cooks, so off I go to get a taste of the island life and more importantly, the island food – I’m starving. Well, not for long, I fork over 6 NZ dollars for a meal of chicken curry, taro and kumara, expecting a tiny plate of food, you know, the sort you get at cheap food stalls the world over. Instead, I am faced with the daunting prospect of having to beg the kindly old lady ladling out the food to stop. It’s not the lady that’s daunting, it’s that not getting as much food as you can for your dollar goes against the very grain of my backpacking body. “Shush! I haven’t even given you the taro or the kumara yet, bro” the lady tells me, before finally handing over enough food to feed a rugby scrum. The Cook islands are actually quite a bit on the expensive side, so this amazing amount of food probably represents the best value meal I’ve ever had in my life and it’s pretty tasty too. It does go a long way towards explaining why the islanders are twice the size of your average caucasian, and I don’t mean that they’re all fat either.
How good a value the market food stall was becomes painfully obvious when I wander into the supermarket to stock up on some food for the next week. Some pasta, a loaf bread, tomatoes and an onion set me back what feels like the GDP of small African nation. Why oh why isn’t the market on every day?
The shopping done I waddle over to the bus station to catch a bus home – at least navigating around the island will be easy, Rarotonga has one main road around the island, and all of two buses. The simple life for me…