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ABOVE: Rarotonga RIGHT: Pacific Resort, Aitutaki BELOW: Storytellers Eco Cycle Tours
w SEE: BY LAND AND SEA It’s not all about the good looks, of course. For a cultural and historic grounding, Te Ara – the Cook Islands Museum of Cultural Enterprise (£10), is well worth visiting. It acts as both a hub for local artists and growers, and a museum that delves into the human history of the islands and of Polynesia as a whole. This includes the extraordinary
navigational and shipbuilding feats that led to the inhabitation of the far-flung Pacific Islands while Europeans were still too scared to venture out of sight of the coast. For exploration of a slightly
less intrepid kind, Raro Buggy Tours (£38 per person for a double) gives guests the control of a rudimentary metal buggy with a noisy engine, then heads
off the main round-island road to indulge in some gleeful splashing in the mud. Those who throw themselves into it come out very muddy indeed, but everyone gets to visit a waterfall and the near- ruins of the Sheraton resort that never opened. The latter, as with much on Rarotonga, is very much about the storytelling. This is taken up a gear with
Storytellers Eco Tours, which explores the island by bike (£38). The routes are adaptable, but will often visit a secret swimming hole under a waterfall, a little beach where there’s usually not another soul, and plenty of spots where there’s an excuse to expand on a legendary tale of ancestral exploration. But a large part of the tour is about fruit, which grows in such abundance that there seems to be no issue in just picking it off trees in gardens. Over on Aitutaki, Punarei
Cultural Tours (£41) also throws in a lot of fruit, while having a bigger focus on the cultural side of things. The exact itinerary depends on numbers, but may include a visit to a marae – a traditional ceremonial ground where mysterious standing stones
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travelweekly.co.uk 5 April 2018
It’s the sort of place you feel quite happy ambling around, with nothing really stressful to worry about
may either be a barrier, a grave site or a representation of an ancestral family tree, depending on interpretation. If enough people book, there will also be a meal cooked in an umu – an earth oven where the meat and veg is buried underground to cook. But, frankly, no one comes
to Aitutaki to explore inland. The lagoon is staggering, and Bishop’s Cruises (£49) is among the operators that head out to its furthest reaches. These include the islet where seaplanes would stop to refuel in the 1950s, often with the likes of Marlon Brando and John Wayne aboard on the way to Tahiti, plus a fantastic snorkelling spot and the hugely photogenic One Foot Island.
PICTURE: WILLIAMS PHOTOGRAPHY; DAVID KIRKLAND
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