Its 11 am and 33 degrees…
After all our lazing on the beach we decided to do some exercise, we walked across the island, we caught the 9:30am bus after a late night out in the Banana Court (the local club). We got off just outside town and started to make our way into the centre of the island, its a few miles on the road until you reach the ‘Jungle’.
The road walk was a nice steady climb past the islands power plant (a shed with a couple portable generators in it it seems), past some farms and to the ‘car park’ at the top. From here on in it was scrambling over and under trees, up banks, down banks, vertical scrambles up tree roots. Apparently a path but more like a mud slide. We made our way up the 7k and 350m height gain up to the Needle, a 60 metre high rock looking over the island, fantastic views of all the coast!We stopped there with a couple of american guys for lunch, then started to make our way down, this point was pretty much the half way point of the walk. Scrambling down, or ‘falling’ was just as hard if not harder than going up! Sliding down banks, paddling through streams, ending with a little paddle in Wigmores pool, a waterfall at the end of the hard part. All left for us to do was walk out on the road and back to our Hostel! showers and a good nights sleep.
Tomorrow we’re leaving the Hostel to go stay in a beach hut for Becky’s Birthday! (Toilets and Showers of our own! Hurrah!)
Here are some photos of the Island.
Hope you like them!
Its a lovely friday afternoon and we’ve just come into town to do a bit of food shopping. Working out if food here is more expensive is a bit of a struggle, all that mental arithmetic to convert dollars to pounds…
We’ve had a relaxing week touring the island and chilling on the beach. One day we hired bikes and cycled the 36k around the island, in the heat it wasn’t as easy as we expected, we also cycled though a small amount of torrential rain, which was refreshing. On our tour we cycled on the inner road first, past the prison, which oddly wasn’t on our tourist map, the prison really represents life here, 2 foot white picket fence with no gate. We joined back on to the costal road by the airport just in time for a Air New Zealand Boeing 747 to take off infront of us and take us off our bikes, we hear that it’s called jet blasting and an evening of fun here on the island so we’re going back with others to sit at the end of the runway and wait for a jet to land. Next was into town, locked up our bikes and had some lunch, the afternoon was taken up with us gently finishing our ride back to the hostel, the one road around the island is really nice, with great views and every now and again a little layby with toilets and drinking water.
Another day was taken up to snorkeling off of Fruits of Rarotonga, the fish certainly aren’t shy and swam round us in swarms, I made friends with a Picasso Fish that seemed to follow me for hours. Stuart you’re right, best cafe ever!
More days, sitting on the beach, swimming in the lagoon, playing cards with Germans (Sven just because we don’t speak german doesn’t mean we didn’t know you were passing tips to Phil). Watching movies when the rain comes.
The hostel’s very friendly and entertainment is provided by the 3 year old daughter of our host who stays up late and climbs anything that stays still, cars, rooves, plants, us if we stand still long enough, as with everywhere we’ve been in the last couple weeks (only a couple weeks?) we’ll be sad to leave.
So we’ll leave it at that, more to say, don’t want to bore you all.
We’re off to foodland!
Speak to you later!
Bye Dave and Sin, Paul and James, and Sven, have safe trips.
PS. Anyone heard about Fiji?
