Have decided to make this more of a diary - I think the entries will get shorter and shorter as we do less and less ... Monday Arrived at 6am local time to ukulele player in 1 storey airport 'terminal'. Low key is too harsh a description for immigration procedures - feared that we might have to hand over tent due to contamination with US dirt but just waved thru. Half way round 32km perimeter road to guest house (selected from Guardian Saturday Travel Supplement a year ago), green and damp. arrived to torrential rain with forecast for more during our stay! Lovely place with garden full of lush vegetation - had coconut from own tree! 60m from lagoon - I should refer to Leighton's query at this point as to why one might want to drop in on Cook Islands - apart from being about as far from any other land mass as one can practically be, try seeing your 1st lagoon with the Pacific breaking on the outer reef in the distance and not being overwhelmed - pretty special! Views of Muri Beach, Rarotonga Shopped locally - pretty expensive as everything shipped from NZ - triangular $2 coins; very much based on local fruit and variations of corned beef - Lonely Planet said it would be Spam - but settled for paw paw and vegemite sarnies in the end. Tuesday Really lazy breakfast of fresh fruit and then the most incredible first experience of snorking off one the islands within the lagoon - could walk to it but for the strong sideways tidal current. The fish on view were straight from Finding Nemo - the Moorish Idol was really beautiful. we seem to be as much of interest to them as they to us! Next time putting more sun block on back of calves as floating on one's belly for an hour is lethal. Then off on hourly bus service to 'capital' of Averua - we caught the Clockwise service and later returned on the anti-clockwise service as we liked the route so much. Not a lot to see in town, so back to Are Mango for more paw paw (papaya to Barbara) and fresh coconut milk from green coconuts from garden. Corned beef hash and a bottle of NZ merlot for dinner with owner's banana and coconut cake for desert, finished off with locally grown coffee - actually from Atiu rather than Rarotonga but small point. Wednesday More of same - think it a case of getting used to this rather than bored! Cook Islanders very friendly and handsome bunch, with a NZ accent that took us by surprise! Thursday More snorkelling, more reading ... Friday Weather disappointing - had hoped to walk over the top of the island, but it was in cloud, so instead we cycled right round - 32 km. There are two roads - an outer and an inner. The outer road is "busy" and the one used by buses and anyone wanting to get a move on, though you can stand for several minutes and not see a thing. We chose the inner road which is less frequented and less well maintained, and allows you to get more of an impression of how people live - their smallholdings and so on. Saturday Another wet day, worse in fact. Went to the weekly market and had coconut curry followed by an ice cream waffle. Sunday Flew to Aitutaki - a 50 minute flight north. When we checked in we were a little concerned to see that our boarding passes gave us seats 1A and 1G. However these proved to be the only seats on row 1 - it was a 15-seater. The departure lounge We did not need to be invited into the cockpit Monday Yet another soggy day, but found a gap in the rain to hire a scooter and go for a quick ride round. The only instructions we were given were to take care not to park it under a coconut tree - CI driving licence is CI$2.50 (about £1.5) Tuesday A better day - more scooting, have now seen the island - it is very small but set at top end of an enormous lagoon, unlike Rarotonga which lies concentric within its lagoon. It is significantly less affluent and developed than Rarotonga, and very very quiet and beautiful. We are staying in a bungalow right on the beach in complete solitude. Went kayaking in the lagoon and kept grounding it on lumps of coral as lagoon so shallow - moored up alongside a lump of upstanding coral next to the reef but to nervous to peep over the edge as need stop is NZ or several 100m straight down! Bungalow on the beach To absent friends View from the porch Breakfast on the porch Not Route 66 Aitutaki town centre Wednesday Last night we spent an hour or two sitting on the water's edge watching the sun go down and playing with the innumerable settings on the camera - here are some of the results; they are for real! You can even see the clouds at the edge of the world being lit up - can see why folks thought the world flat; in fact there are a few religious groups on the Islands that seem to perpetuaute that myth!. The original Methodist missionaries in 1830 brought smallpox & dysentry which wiped out 70% of the population within 30 years and they then used this to persuade the local inhabitants to take up Christianity to save them from these pestilences! Nice one if you can get away with it - very strong tradition persists to this day to celebatre the Sabbath, to the extent that bus service on Rarotonga (there isn't one on any other island) is timetabled to get folks back from the bars before midnight on Saturday, and the Church on Aitutaki holds protests to stop inter-island flights on Sundays.

Wednesday A day spent on the lagoon. We were taken to some of the motus, or islets, and treated to the best swimming and snorkelling yet. About to find Nemo That is me The sea really is this colour

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