Rarotonga
Sometimes your memories of a particular place are dominated by a beautiful landscape. Sometimes you remember the intense culture revealed through a built environment. And sometimes you remember a place because of the people you met there. The latter would be the case with Rarotonga.
Rarotonga was the end of the first "leg" of the voyage of the Picton Castle, the end of the first 3-month quarter. At this port there was to be a minor crew change, as three of us were getting off and six were joining. It was also the first stop in a while that was a tourist destination--with all of the trappings of such a place: resorts, car and bike rentals, SCUBA diving, bars, restaurants, and souvenir shops. In fact, after Mangareva and Pitcairn the sight of traffic and strip malls--tiny as they were--was a shock.
Rarotonga is a small island, only 24 km in circumference, with a permanent population of only about 9000 residents. It is the capital of the Cook Islands, a country made up of several small islands scattered over a large distance. The nearest neighbour island, and second most visited, is Aitutaki, a 50-minute flight away. Rarotonga is the only island in the Cooks with jet service and is the stop on a regular flight from Auckland to Los Angeles. The Cook Islands were annexed by New Zealand near the beginning of the 20th century, but are presently an independent country. However, the currency is the NZ dollar and Cook Islanders have automatic New Zealand citizenship. Because of the ties with its former ruler, many islanders go to New Zealand for higher education, and many Kiwis come for a holiday.
The first order of business for many of the crew upon arrival at Avatiu harbour was to find accommodation ashore. (Is it a good sign that the first thing everyone wants to do when they can is to get off the ship?) My tenure as a crew member was ending here and therefore I was not bound by the port watch bill; I could leave the ship immediately if I wanted. But, we arrived too late on Friday afternoon to arrange anything and most of the crew stayed on the ship for the first night. The next morning I arose early to scout out accommodation for myself plus a handful of other crew members with whom I arranged to share a house, if we could find one to rent. Lesley, a fellow crew member, and I rented a scooter and went to look for properties. This turned out to be more difficult than anticipated, as most of the accommodation was full, and this wasn't even the high season. The only things available were way out of our price range.
Fortunately, we were saved by a friend of the Captain's whom I will call J. She had some apartments and villas for rent, which were mostly full, but her daughter and family were abroad and their house was empty. J put some of our group in her apartments and set up Lesley, Kevin, Therese, Brendan, and I in the house.
J is a very interesting woman. She had a shop in town that sold island crafts and black pearls. She started in business many years ago with a small boutique that sold dresses that she made while she was raising her children. The boutique was successful, and having been a former Miss Rarotonga probably helped. After she sent her second husband packing she decided to expand her businesses and invested in vacation property development, which was why she had apartments and villas. That wasn't enough for her, because she had just started a commercial fishing venture on one of the smaller islands. She leased two fishing trawlers from New Zealand; they arrived on the day the Picton Castle left. There was an inauguration ceremony on the dock that was advertised on the local TV station, with everyone welcome.
J had an outdoor kitchen on the roof of her apartments, 2 houses down from her daughter's place, and my crew friends and I used it for several dinner parties, catered by me. I was really going native with my cooking and used these opportunities, plus dinners at our house, to practice local specialties such as "ika mata" (raw tuna marinated in lime juice and then finished with coconut cream and sliced vegetables; basically a South Pacific version of ceviche), and rukau (taro leaves--like rich spinach--braised with onions, tomatoes, and coconut cream). I also introduced J and several Rarotongans to the Pitcairn speciality of pilhi. No breadfruit was available, but grated cooked arrowroot mashed with a banana and some coconut cream made a very acceptable substitute. You may notice that coconuts are a theme in this cuisine. That probably explains why I gained at least 5 pounds during my weeks in Rarotonga.
I should probably tell you a bit more about the island. It is nice, if a bit touristy, but the residents are very proud of their culture, which they practice through a lot of singing and dancing. The Cook Island teams usually win dance contests held every year across all of Polynesia. The island is very green and hilly; only the outer edge is at all inhabited. Because the island is so small, there is no real "island weather" that makes a wet and a dry side; therefore it is all quite green and lush. There is one trail that crosses the island and passes by "The Needle", a sharp rocky point in the centre that Michael (another crew member) and I hiked. You climb up one side of the island and on the way down the other side you can stop and have a dip in small ponds fed by the stream along which you descend.
After the ship left I fed and sheltered Alex, a destitute crew member (well, not really, since he had his father's credit card), for a few days before he returned to Bermuda and then went off to London to start university. J's daughter returned and I moved into a spare apartment in the building where J lived. I offered to make another dinner for J and some friends as a "thank you" for the favourable rate she charged me. Menus were always tricky because ingredients are quite limited in the supermarkets. Meat comes from New Zealand; prime cuts are expensive and therefore a lot of the cuisine is with things like chicken thighs (huge) and lamb necks and shanks. Local ingredients are not terribly varied, mostly papaya (lots and lots and lots of papayas), taro, sweet potato, and in this season, tomatoes. Several vegetables that we take for granted are expensive: small carrots and single stalks of celery are $1 each. I suppose that is mostly airfare.
Fortunately, I particularly like lamb shanks and made them in a style reminiscent of "rendang", a Malaysian dish of braised meat and coconut milk (again). Of the key ingredients, lemon grass was not available, but ginger was imported regularly. The lamb was simmered in coconut milk and ginger, with the addition of lemon peel. Oddly enough, the result was somewhat like a cross between rendang and an Italian method of braising meats in milk. But I felt that the result was truly Polynesian. It was served with all of my new specialities, like pilhi and rukau, plus steamed semi-ripe papaya tossed in butter and fresh basil (which grows in people's gardens like crazy).
At this dinner party, I met an acquaintance of J's whom I will call M. M is an American woman who had been living in Rarotonga for 6 years. Through her I was able to learn a few things about people from wealthy temperate-climate countries who come to live on small islands in the tropics. Everyone has their own story, of course, and M's was particularly interesting. Many years ago, M became quite ill with a mysterious illness. She was debilitated and had to stop working. Among all the testing to find out what was wrong was a positive result for HIV; at that time a death sentence. So, for the next few years she lived with the stigma of someone with AIDS. However, it turned out that the tests returned a false positive and the diagnosis was switched to an obscure disorder of the nervous system. However, it didn't change the fact that M was still very ill. Being part of the US medical system, contracting a long-term illness meant financial ruin after all of the insurance ran out, not to mention near impossibility of finding an employer if a recovery sufficient to ever work again was effected. Some friends of M's suggested Rarotonga as a place where one could live a simple and inexpensive life where the weather wasn't particularly challenging; a prototypical tropical island paradise. Here, M could spend the time required to recover. I found this story an interesting contrast to one I heard from a fellow I met in Hawaii once. He was diagnosed with AIDS and decided to cash out everything and move to Hawaii believing it to be a nicer place to die if various drugs didn't work. M's story, of course, was different in that her purpose in moving to a tropical island was to live.
An ironic thing about M and her decision to move to Rarotonga was that it didn't turn out to be the tropical paradise she thought. First of all, the weather is not unchallenging. Rarotonga is on the South Pacific cyclone path, and one came close enough to cause a lot of damage two years ago. M was living in a small house on the beach on the south side of the island. One would think that living on the beach with white sand and palm trees right out your front door would be a dream, but it turned into a nightmare when the cyclone stalled 20 miles off shore for five days and blew in all of the front windows. Even during storm-free years the southern winds, which carry air up from Antarctica, can make sitting on the beach or even outside anywhere something to avoid. This is not what you would expect from the tropics, but the truth is that the islands in the South Pacific have their share of bad weather. From November to January everyone is on cyclone alert, January and February is the rainy season when it can pour for days, not to mention the intense humidity, and the winter, despite being drier, can be downright chilly. Certainly, the water was almost too cold to snorkel for the entire time I was there (mid-September to mid-October). I went SCUBA diving one day (which was great; sharks and coral caves), and after 30 minutes my teeth were chattering so hard I could hardly hold my regulator in my mouth.
Another problem for M in Rarotonga is that is was not inexpensive. At first it was--six years ago--but in recent years the prices have skyrocketed. M was lucky to find a house that was owned by someone who had left the island and allowed her to live there in return for keeping it maintained, plus a modest rent. But a tourist who last came six years ago would be shocked. There are beach bungalows that rent out at thousands of dollars per week (all prices in CAD). They are nice, but I could never afford them. They all have kitchens so you can cook yourself, but you probably don't want to when you are on a short holiday. In that case you would go out to restaurants where the average main course would be in the area of $20 to $25. A cup of tea and a piece of cake in a café is about $10. And trying to save money by doing your own shopping is difficult when a 250ml jar of peanut butter is $4. A normal-sized jar of mayonnaise is about $7. A loaf of plain sandwich bread is $4 and a slice of deli ham is $1. Most people drink UHT milk (in tetra-paks) because fresh milk is $5 per litre (the airfare thing again). The only things that are not expensive are papayas ($0.65/kg), cabbage, and fish (mahi mahi, tuna, and swordfish, all delicious, at $10/kg). For some reason that I never understood, bananas were $10 per bunch, despite the fact that they grew all over the place.
It has been my profound disappointment on this trip to see how places around the world are transformed by tourists with too much money. A particular location will draw visitors perhaps first based on natural beauty. This brings the adventure travellers, looking for places off the beaten path. Eventually they get written up in guide books, which attracts more people. If there is jet service, visitors will come from all around the world, and many of them demand high comfort and are willing to pay. When this happens, the locals go crazy building high-end properties to make a buck off the people with the most money. There seems to be a never-ending source of these well-heeled vacationers, and this starts an inflationary spiral. I could never understand how it was that Rarotongans could afford to live in their country, but so many of the residents are connected with tourism or black pearls, which command artificially inflated prices, that there is a lot of money around. As well, everyone seems to have an uncle or cousin who fishes or has a farm and they get a lot of their basic food supplies outside of the normal cash system. But, I rant.
I had almost daily tea-and-Internet dates with M while I was waiting for my next ship to come in and M was preparing to return to the US. After six years, M had finally achieved her goal of gaining back enough health to try a re-introduction to the work world. A lot of rest and a modest but determined exercise regime allowed her to try a normal life again. The hold-up for the past two years was due to a feeling of responsibility for repairing her cyclone-damaged house, which was difficult on her meagre monthly budget and the fact that trying to hire someone to help on the island seemed to be impossible. You try to track down someone who can do repairs by talking to friends, and then try to pin down a date. They promise to come in two months, but they never do, or start but never finish.
M also had a very interesting take on her fellow expatriates. At first she joined the community of outsiders, until she found them to be a discontented lot. They seemed happy to have moved to a small tropical island, but the reason for the move was usually some profound dissatisfaction with their previous life, and it carried through to their present one. After a year or so, M preferred to avoid that group.
By getting to know J and M I really felt that I was also getting to know Rarotonga. It can be summed up by the fact that it is a small town. Everyone knows everyone else, and like all small towns there is a lot of petty politics and fighting. J was constantly locking horns with government people over the expansion of her business empire, and she personally led a movement to force a former prime minister to resign after she suspected that he had tried to murder her! (A long story that I won't get into... she didn't succeed, but made his life hell.). I have no doubt that J herself would make a fine prime minister, and I would be disappointed if I didn't read that she had tossed her hat into the ring in a few years.
J is someone who grew up in a small community, went to New Zealand for education, and returned to improve the lot of her countrymen, hence the fishing start-up. M is someone who came from outside, looking for a paradise to help her regain her health. What she found was new challenges, but she met them and is going back to try a modified version of her previous life.
I was in Rarotonga mulling over my Picton Castle experience and wondering what would be coming up next. On my limited budget I shouldn't have kept my deluxe 125cc Suzuki scooter for the whole four weeks, but riding on quiet roads through taro and papaya fields was irresistible, warm wind whistling through your hair and all (no helmets on Rarotonga, but low speed limits). Having wheels gave me an intense feeling of freedom, which I needed at the time. That, plus J and M, is how I will remember Rarotonga.
2:44:36 PM 
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