A Postcard from the Edge of the World

The cock he crew in the morning, he crew both loud and shrill and I awoke in Rarotonga, many miles from Spancill Hill.

Shortly afterwards several more roosters joined in to provide a veritable dawn chorus. Except it wasn’t dawn. It was about 2am and while many people describe this place as a sleepy little island, you’d have to wonder how anybody ever gets to sleep with the colony of early rising wild chickens that populate this place.

Perhaps the chickens are just as confused about the time zone as the tourists. Most visitors to the Cook Islands come from or via New Zealand. To get here you cross the International Date Line and Auckland becomes 23 hours ahead of Rarotonga (the main island in the Cooks). That means that you gain a day when you arrive here and lose it on the way back. It confuses the hell out of most people, particularly these days when you’re in constant communication with friends by mobile text messages. It’s difficult to remember that it is Thursday here but Friday in Australia.

I don’t remember there being so many chickens when I was last here in 1996. Mind you a lot has changed in the world since then. The internet, mobile phones, satellite TV and globalisation come to mind. All these have touched the Cook Islands too. Heineken for example, is available in every shop and bar. Globalisation means that one brand dominates every market. Apple in computing, Coca Cola in soft drinks etc. It’s just a shame that when it comes to beer that the fizzy tasteless rubbish from Holland had to win out.

As a country, the Cook Islands have grown up. Back in 1996 there were just two resorts and they were full of Americans stopping off on their way to New Zealand or Australia. The occasional independent traveller like myself (we hated being called tourists but that’s a subject for another day) wandered into the country and had to do with whatever lodgings we could find.

These days the place is full of boutique hotels, backpacker lodges and houses for rent. But it has managed to retain its small island charm. The local tourist board call it paradise and I’d largely agree if it wasn’t for the bugs and the spiders. I can’t imagine that God would have included them in his design of heaven.

I’m trying to be all Zen Buddhist about this and consider that all God’s creatures have a place in the choir, even insects. But I’m writing this with a can of mortine in my hand trying to stem the incessant attempts to suck blood from my pale skinned body. My ankles seem to be the favoured destination of these vampire like creatures. My lower leg area has received more hits than the BBC website. But everything is part of the buffet of the universe and we eat animals, so I guess we can’t complain too much when they eat us.

But on the positive side, the sun is shining, the sea is a dreamy shade of turquoise and the beer is cheap. We’ve rented a house near Muri beach which is the picturesque highlight of island.

Back in 1996, there were a few Utes on the island, now there seems to be more cars than people. Tiny silver Nissans usually. Tourists who rent them must get awfully confused when they stumble out of a café late at night and see twelve of them parked beside each other. There are some bigger cars too but it’s hard to see the point when the speed limit is 50kmph and there is only one road and that’s only 35km long.

Wild chickens are everywhere except in the cooking pots of locals. All the chicken in the shops comes from New Zealand and the ones wondering around the streets seem to be revered in the way that cows are in India. You get attached to them after a few days and our daughter was fascinated by them. So when we saw a chick stumble and break a leg on our lawn one day it became the saddest afternoon of the holiday. The chick’s mother tried desperately to drag him back to wherever they were nesting. But nature is cruel and as the mother hen grew more desperate you could see that the chick was getting weaker. We buried it in a hedge among some wild flowers.

Heineken is not the only thing to make inroads here. The Chinese are also around and not the ones who run restaurants with MSG laden food. The Chinese government are investing millions in the islands, as they are anxious to get their hands on a rich seam of cobalt that runs under the sea between the islands. Rather intriguingly they have agreed to pay for the judiciary and Police Force which explains why the courthouse is the flashiest building in town and the police drive around in sparkling new four by fours. The communists in Eastern Europe believed that the way to control a country was to keep a tight grip on the interior ministry and the Chinese have obviously learned from this.

But the highlight of the trip is the discovery that fish burgers are a culinary speciality here. They are delicious and I’ve had at least one every day I’ve been here. Needless to say chicken burgers are pretty rare here. And as much as I’ve grown to like the fluffy little things in the past week, if they crow again at 2am tomorrow, I might be tempted to open the islands first branch of KFC.