Aitutaki, The Cook Islands

Kia Orana! Nov 9 to Nov 13 we got to hangout on this cool little island. Finally a place the speak English!!! My friend Chris Hornbeak told me about this little jem and we decided it sounded the coolest out of all the cook islands. And man we couldn't have picked a better place. It took us 7 days to get there and pretty much down wind sailing.

 This is an aerial view of the island. I didn't take it. I found it on google but it gives you a better idea of the island. At the top is the main landmass where all the people live. The highest elevation is like 200ft. Not very tall... Everyone there pretty much rides motorbikes since it is a very small island and any where you want to go is pretty close. We rented some and I had way to much fun just riding around looking at the palm trees while playing white horses by the Rolling Stones over and over.  Also you can see in this picture is that there are some motus (lil islands) and between them and the main island there is a HUGE pretty lagoon. All of that area is beautiful. Tons of pretty coral and fish! They also have giant clams.

 

Again we found such humble and friendly people and got invited to a bunch of events with tons of yummy food. This was by far my favorite place besides Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas. Its pretty unspoiled out of all the islands I've seen in the Pacific. I highly recommend visiting it someday! We realized though that it was pretty late in the season for us to just be getting to the Cook islands and having so much more distance to cover to get out of the hurricane belt that we randomly decided lets head to New Zealand and go adventure "down unda" so we left on the 13th and had to cross 1900 miles!

Bora Bora

"The most beautiful island in the world"

Man does it live up to its name... The entire outer reef around the island is filled with crystal clear turquoise water lagoons.  But in the middle of this entire beautiful island stands two beautiful peaks. Which allow you some hiking if you have been missing a little bit of land ;) We tied up the boat on a bouy in front of this cute little hotel that also acts as a marina for sailors called Hotel Marina Taina. They had an infiniti pool and free wifi for us to use, I felt a little spoiled. There are several little motus sorounding the main middle island. Everywhere you look you see the classic little villas on the water where you can jump right in from your back porch. Its cool but that’s all the people seem to build as hotels and they are everywhere. Which is kind of ugly in my perspective but hey that’s what people dream of staying in. One of the days my dad and I packed up a cooler with a few beers and some snacks and decided to motor arround the entire island in our dinghy. One of our stops was at The Meriden Hotel. They have a turtle clinc here just like the one on Moorea, BUT they allow you to swim with the turtles!!! As long as you don’t touch. There is a huge lagoon where they keep turtles that are being healed. There are about 20 in there from tiny babies to big adults. It was so cool. One even climbed on to my back and scared me real badly. I was afraid I was going to accidently hurt it.

We had been planning to leave Bora Bora on the Nov 1 but some how it just turned out to be a holiday and we couldn’t check out of the country. We had moved our boat to Vaitape the only boat harbor. A bunch of kids were hanging out on the end of our dock and we got to talking with them. Pretty soon our boat was overloaded with 20 kids jumping off and paddling around on our kayak and surfboards. We all hungout the whole afternoon playing ukelele and having soccer matches. It was really fun hanging out with people a little closer to my age. (No offense dad) It was still difficult to really talk to them because very little spoke much English and when 20 kids are yelling at you in french to do things with them it gets overwhelming… But me managed and ended up staying there for the weekend till Monday when we could check out. Monday came we got everything done and just left immedialty. We felt like our stay was over in Bora Bora and needed to get moving.  We were also excited to get to a place where people speak English. AITUTAKI, COOK ISLANDS!!