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?
Morning! It is Sunday at 11.30 in the morning, it is very quiet here as everyone else has gone to church. The beaches are all deserted so we decided to go for a swim! It doesn’t feel that hot compared to other days but its still a lovely 28oC! We are deciding whether to stay here an extra week and maybe stay in Samoa and Tonga less (the guide book scared us rather a lot…) It’s a shame we have a deadline to come back otherwise we would extend our time everywhere!
We are staying in a backpackers place- like a youth hostel in the uk. We have made a few friends already and we played cards with them most of yesterday evening when we had torrential rain for 3 hours!
We have been on a bus journey round the island…. we only wanted to go 10 minutes up the road but ended up going all the way round because the bus only goes clockwise after 12.30pm on Saturday! (it only takes 45 minutes to go round anyway so we weren’t too disappointed!)
The money is NZ dollars and i have never seen triangular coins before!
Thats all for now, we are off for some lunch and some more relaxing as everything is shut today!
Bex and Andy
(Are you all jealous yet? wait till you see the pictures!!!)
