Wow, it’s been a while, huh? I’ve been really busy lately, which I’ll get to eventually in another post. First, allow me to finally wrap up what was my wonderful trip to the Cook Islands with the rest of the IES Christchurch group. You can find my most recent post here and my first part of this series here.
On Wednesday (21st of August), we started out our day with a few lectures. The first was on the biodiversity within the Cook Islands, and the second lecture was based on the government within the Cooks. After the lectures we headed off to the Matutu Brewery Co to see some locals run their business, and see why people choose Matutu to drink whenever they come to the Cooks. When lunch was done we hired some bikes to ride around the island. This was pretty interesting because we were able to go to different beaches on Rarotonga and stop at different points on the island that we wanted to visit earlier. We then got dropped off at a hotel / restaurant that was absolutely gorgeous. The food was to die for, the view of the sunset was unreal, and the company of everyone on the trip just made it better. After the delicious meal we had one more lecture by a man named Tua Pittman. This man is one of the few people left in the world who can navigate to places using the sun and the stars. In fact, a few years ago him and 20 other people went on a voyage from the Cook Islands to San Francisco using nothing but old navigation techniques. I could go on for days about him, but I’ll say that his voyage was put into a movie that is waiting to be released but you can watch the trailer for it here.
Our next and final day on the island, we started the day with pancakes and from that point on we got to do whatever we wanted until dinner. I spent the day relaxing on a beach and reading a book, taking a nap, and pretty much just enjoying the weather / scenery. When dinner finally came we all had a ‘progressive dinner,’ where we started at one Cookie’s home, and then worked our way towards two others. At the first place we were shown around the owner’s property where we were introduced to his family, some of his livestock, and the rest of his land. After our starters we went to another place where we had a huge main, and then our final place was to have tea and desserts. During this entire time the owner of the first person’s home we visited joined us for the other meals, and he and our bus driver played us some songs from the Cooks.
The next day we got on a plane and left for New Zealand.
Finally, in my most recent post I mentioned Nan Hauser being on “60 Minutes” to talk about whales. You can watch the segment here, with her part starting around the 6 minute mark.