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Groundhog day
Entry 25 of 25 | show all | print this entry |
We got Saturday 5th February twice, leaving Fiji at 10.30pm on Saturday and
arriving at 12.30am on the same day. Neither Saturday was much to write home
about.
Arriving in Raratonga turned out to be groundhog day in another sense because
for the second time in our lives we had arrived at a holiday destination just
ahead of a hurricane (or cyclone as they are known in the South Pacific; typhoon
in the North Pacific). Back in 2001 we arrived in Cuba about 24 hours of
Hurricane Michelle. This time, we arrived to find everyone preparing for the
arrival of Cyclone Meena. Meena was widely predicted to be meaner than Cyclone
Sally back in 1987 (a pun the Cook Island Times were to get a lot of mileage
from).
We were staying at Papa Rau's Guesthouse which turned out to be more like a
shared house than a guesthouse, complete with kitchen, living room, DVD player
and dog. It was a good gig.
Air New Zealand was laying on an extra flight out to Auckland - at considerable
expense - for those freaked out by the weather forecast. Frankly the thought of
a dignity-free free-for-all at the airport didn't appeal but two of the couples
at the guesthouse opted for it. Just before they left they offered the shopping
they had bought earlier for sale to the rest of us and we scavenged through it.
Waiting for a hurricane is the worst bit; I found myself bidding on a packet of
enchiladas, blackberry jelly, pork and pineapple sausages and 2 litres of fat
Coke - all items it would never occur to me to buy normally - but I feared it
might be a couple of days before we could get to a shop again. "Fat Coke?" said
Paul incredulously. Well, maybe, but I knew from the Indian experience that a
person can survive for a surprisingly long time on nothing but fat Coke. I was
worried about the power going off. And running out of mixers for the vodka.
Like war, a hurricane is 99% tedium. We made and ate supper. I persuaded Paul
not to eat the biscuits I had bought in case the power went out and we couldn't
cook. We watched an astoundingly bad film starring Billy Bob Thornton called
Bad Santa. At 10pm, bored of waiting to metamorphose into Lauren Bacall
and enact my very own version of Key Largo, I went to bed.
I woke in the middle of the night. Meena was caterwauling but the dog was quiet
and the fan was still on. I went back to sleep again. The following morning we
lay in, since we knew we would still be imprisoned if we got up. When we did get
up we discovered a tree in the garden had just fallen over and our landlord,
Atua, had called round and warned us that we needed to have a bag ready for
evacuation just in case.
Paul and I went off to pack our evacuation bags. Neither of us was in the least
bit bothered about preserving our clothes: frankly after 5 months they are
mostly a bit threadbare and we are sick of the sight of all of them. I checked I
had our Laos silk hanging and my copy of the Bather's Pavilion Cookbook. Paul
packed the CDs containing the photos. We both added clean underwear and our
toilet bags. I packed Middlemarch, my long standing solution to any situation
where I fear running out of Something To Read.
But Meena had already veered off by this stage and by the afternoon we were out of the house and surveying the damage. Not as bad as predicted.
At this point one of the people who had left to fly out appeared. The plane had
arrived about 10pm, made one attempt to land, and then given up and flown right
back to Auckland. The passengers had then been taken to an evacuation centre
where they had spent an uncomfortable night on the floor. He was not a happy
bunny when we reported our event-free night.
There is not much else to report about Raratonga. It is a beautiful volcanic
tropical island set within its own lagoon. The people are charming, the
atmosphere is laid-back and the food is awful. You can snorkel and dive and do
walks although of course we did none of this. (Paul did a bit of snorkelling and
found it was not as good as the Ningaloo reef).
On Thursday night we went to an Island Night - a touristy dance evening. The
Cook Islanders are supposed to be the best dancers in the Pacific, and I must
say they are pretty impressive. It is easy to see where all the myths of
Polynesian free love came from: for sex-starved sailors who had been reduced to
staring lustfully at dugongs, the sight of Polynesian women wriggling their hips
must have made them think they had died and gone to heaven. No wonder the place
got a good write-up.
For us, at the risk of sounding completely insufferable, two weeks lounging
around on the beach is quite enough. Frankly, travelling around Australia is not
an experience which requires a lot of recovery from and both of us get bored
with beaches pretty quickly. We are looking forward to the US and have revised
our itinerary to add in Virginia and North Carolina and leave out the Florida
Keys.
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