Wonders and blunders

When King Bhumipol died just before we set off to Thailand, should we have seen this as a portent of things to come?  Though it had little effect on our trip in the event, this has been one of the most accident prone holidays ever. 

Starting of course with Ian’s terrible fall on my birthday, which meant changing our itinerary as he was in too much pain for a long flight (we will draw a discreet veil over the accident that led him to be washing underpants in the shower when he slipped), we were dogged by a series of near disasters, natural and man made.

In Hokitika, the worst rain anyone could remember, lasting 24 hours.  In Rarotonga, a near cyclone out of season; followed by an extreme lightning storm next day. Then there was the M7.8 earthquake in NZ that destroyed the railway we were about to take, leading to more route changes.

There was the car crash we saw and helped the driver, miraculously uninjured, if dazed.  We saw two further accidents on our NZ leg.  People seem to run off the road there very frequently due to lack of attention - and I nearly got us undesirably familiar with a 10m wide native kauri tree after a long day at Milford Sound.

Then I left my camera, including Ian’s birthday gift lens, in a restaurant, only realising when it was closed and we had to move on.  Our hotel kindly arranged to pick it up and courier it ahead to catch up with us. In Rarotonga I thought I'd locked the villa and lost the key (with dinner merrily boiling away on the gas) only to discover I'd put it in the door of the identical unit next door. I also managed to set the pan on fire on another occasion and nearly incinerated the whole tinder box villa, but got it out fast so no damage. As far as losing things go, we have lost 3 hats between us but nothing else of significance.

For a finale, I almost couldn't get the flight from NZ via Malaysia to Bangkok as the check in people insisted I needed a full blank page in my passport for the arrival stamp.  In the event when I arrived at KL this wasn't a problem.  And then when going to board the onward flight three planes were allocated to the same gate, with only one security X-ray machine, so that there was a vast maelstrom of passengers trying to queue in a big spiral, that inevitably dissolved into a frantic scrum as a second machine opened up.

Despite all this, we have had a fantastic time with many wonderful memories that will stay with us forever.  I think particularly of Mount Cook and Milford Sound; an afternoon at a winery high above the lake at Wanaka; the beach at Bang Sak; the villa and view at Koh Yao Noi; birds and plant life rich and strange; spectacular sunsets and dark, southern night skies; and the people in three particularly friendly countries, Thailand, NZ and the Cook Islands. Not to mention my witty and occasionally curmudgeonly Ian, the perfect travelling companion as we start our fortieth year of knowing each other.

Now we have a few quiet and, with luck, trouble free days, as we break our return journey in Thailand.  We'll never forget this trip, for the best and worst reasons. 

Rarotonga

Now this is strange.  We put our clocks one hour forward and one day back, on the short flight from Auckland, as we crossed the international dateline, leaving on Wednesday and arriving on Tuesday. 

The Cook Islands is an independent nation of just 60,000 or so people, but only about 15,000 live on the islands, the rest mostly in NZ, which looks after their foreign affairs and defence.  Most who remain live on the largest island, Rarotonga, where we were headed.  It is also the most mountainous, with jagged peaks of a collapsed volcano.  This erupted from the deep ocean floor and is 4000m high, but only 500m of this appears above sea level.  It is an oval with one road 32km long that you can circuit in well under an hour.  In fact there are two buses that do just that, one with the destination board showing ‘CLOCKWISE’, the other heading ‘ANTICLOCKWISE’. Offshore is an almost continuous reef that keeps the ocean swell at bay, creating a shallow vivid blue lagoon that has become a great attraction to visitors.  Almost the entire island is lined with villas and hotels, all very low key, with their toes in the white coral sand.

We rented a little wooden villa on the south side, intending just to pootle around: long walks on the beaches, paddling in the shallow waters, cooking up some local produce.  This worked out fine the first day, the weather at the end of the  dry season being perfect, with vast fluffy white clouds scudding (is it only clouds that scud?) across an azure sky, coconut trees gently swaying over silver strands and all we could expect of a Pacific isle.

However that little idyll didn't last long.  No-one had told El Niño that it was still the dry season. Next day got darker, greyer, then drizzle kicked in, then rain.  By nightfall it had turned into a raging cyclonic storm: it sounded like someone was playing a fire hose over the roof, and the whole little wooden building seemed suddenly vulnerable.  Though the wind dropped by morning, the rain continued, heavily, endlessly.  It was the kind of tropical rain at soaks you in seconds.  36 hours in and it was still raining.  We discovered later that 225mm had fallen, almost twice the monthly average and about what we get at home in 4 months. Just as it seemed to be all over there was an almighty thunder and lightning show on the second night, the worst in at least 5 years, apparently.

The last few days returned to tropical calm, and the water miraculously soaked away into the sand and coral limestone of the island, although for a while the lagoon looked like the inside of a teapot, filled with dead plant material washed down from the mountain by many streams.  Next day it had gone and all was clear and pristine blue again. We hired a car and toured the island, visiting the main town and Muri Beach, the best of them, with little palm topped islets off shore, like a cartoonist’s idea of a desert island, framing the view and the shallow sandy lagoon. Inland there is a lot of agriculture, tropical fruit and veg mostly and a few goats, and homes of the local people along sleepy lanes.

In the afternoons we lazed in the impeccable garden of the property.  The whole island is meticulously maintained, a matter of local pride, with manicured lawns and tropical plants, and the villa was no exception, thanks to Bev, the little Filipino lady who looked after it and visited occasionally.  We also had a constant round of other visitors: friendly local dogs, cats, mynah bird couples, hens and cocks grubbing around (the cocks here seem to have no sense of timing and doodle-do every 5 minutes) and on the day after the rain about a thousand dragon flies filled the garden. We also found that any food left out brought hordes of the tiniest ants I have ever seen, requiring great diligence. Frigate birds swooped overhead by day, and geckos nonchalantly wandered across the ceiling at night.

But soon it was time to turn our thoughts to the long trek home, back over the dateline, up through SE Asia, then home to winter and dark days.