odysseyone

Kia Orana means may you live long. If I can ever get my tongue around it, the local greeting seems much more of a personal, meaningful greeting than the no frills ‘Hello’ we say in English and other language translations. When perfect strangers say Kia Orana to you each day I think ‘yeah, thanks, I hope I live long too.’ It’s just a pity my tongue mangles it and I can’t say it back!

We have been living on the rock (as the locals call it) for almost a month and as with trying to adjust to living in any new culture, every day is full of a whole lot of weird. Rather than try and jam it into one blog, I am going to break up our weeks into individual blogs, until things become a little more normal for us and therefore less interesting.

So here is a wrap up of week one…

A few days after we arrived, Justin asked me if I had had my first ‘what was I thinking’ moment and when it was. I knew the answer to that straight away. Thoughts were vaguely swimming around in my head after we got through the drama that is the Australian airport system and were waiting at our gate at Brisbane international. I managed to push all thoughts on what on earth I was doing to the back of my mind during the flight, which wasn’t hard as we were flying premium economy, which has lots of perks. By the time we had whiled away a couple of hours in the Auckland business lounge with free food, beer, Kiwi white wine (only the best) and wi-fi, I realized we had done ourselves a major disservice as we had tasted the fruit but would never be able to afford to be high flyers again if we have to pay for it. So I didn’t really think about the Cooks until we landed at Rarotonga airport. My ‘what was I thinking’ moment happened before I had even stepped completely into the terminal, looking to my right and seeing a police woman in shorts and jandals (there is only one meaning for thongs here and it isn’t plural), having a chat with a local and paying no attention to the passengers. Right in front of me was the duty free store owned by the company Justin works for, logo plastered all over it, a reality check that I wasn’t here for an island holiday like the rest of the passengers.

If you have ever traveled internationally, Rarotonga international airport is decades behind but it is a real pleasure in the sense that no one could be bothered interrogating you, patting you down, taking your passport away or threatening to take you aside for an anal probe (I’ve had all but the last one). There is no gate confusion, no long hallways to rush down, no intrusive questions and no one there to confiscate your airport-purchased water bottle and snacks or implement any other stupid rule passed along by the USA. When you line up at immigration, you can see whether your bags have arrived with you before you even enter the country and also get a glimpse of customs, which is separated from the rest of the tin shed terminal by a few bamboo partitions. The only thing slightly menacing was the sniffer dog (sniffing for what? Imported coconuts?) and the beefy customs guys, gloving up while waiting for their first victim. We traveled with seven pieces of luggage including two bike boxes and a surfboard and I had been very strategic with where I packed things, completely expecting that at least one piece of luggage would be left behind. I was amazed to see the bikes and surfboard waiting for us while we were still lining up at immigration and no luggage was lost.

We entered the island on a one-way ticket, which is illegal and so we were also carrying an immigration document giving us authorization to do so. We needn’t have bothered. The immigration lady didn’t even check what ticket we were traveling on. We had to tell her we came in one-way, here is our letter, Justin is working for CITC… as soon as she heard the ‘magic’ name, she didn’t even bother with the letter, check the passport names lined up with this letter, just gave us a big smile and stamped us through. Customs was as easy. I tried to declare my Vegemite which he wasn’t interested in seeing, he was just very curious to know what on earth were in the big boxes. He could have opened them to check we weren’t lying but just took our word for it, looking quite bemused. We got a lot of stares at the airport and I get the feeling it’s a rare sight to see tourists (as we would have looked to everyone) arriving with a couple of bikes- there’s nowhere to ride after all.

We were tourists for 10 minutes while transferring on a mini bus to our resort, which was 10 minutes too long for me. Again, more stares because of all of our luggage. People here are very honest and the security guy who drove us to our room nicely made a loud comment and had a hearty chuckle about the amount of luggage we had. When we explained we will be living here and who Justin is working for, things suddenly got very serious. ‘Oh,’ big beefy security guy said in his mumbled, mangled local accent. ‘You are working for the big man. You better be careful. Don’t mess with the big man or he will kick your ass off the island.’ Thank you for that, it’s only the middle of the night, we’re tired and have moved to another country, been here for a grand total of 1 hour and it’s Thursday-again, thanks for FREAKING US OUT!!!!!

Because we arrived on an overnight flight, we could have landed anywhere and didn’t get a good look around until the morning. We had a beach front villa, so in the morning (and mercifully here, unlike Queensland, the sun doesn’t come until a much more reasonable 6.45am) we were blown away when we saw the view from the balcony. Palm trees, deck chairs on the beach and turquoise water as far as the eye can see. I think there was some slightly hysterical laughter and another ‘what was I thinking’ moment as we tried to take in what we had just done. I try not to visualize where we are on a world map too much as it freaks me out; there is really nothing out there but a whole lot of water.

Things got stranger when Justin phoned work to say he had arrived, when do you want me to come into work. His first day at work ended up being a day off to go snorkeling! A very nice gesture, but we were a little worried maybe someone was having a laugh and there was no job as no one seemed in a hurry for him to work. We wanted to get our bearings so we caught the bus into Avarua, the capital (smallest capital I have ever been to). We got the vibe things are pretty chilled out here when I noticed the bus driver was barefoot, leaning over the steering wheel, suspiciously like he was asleep. The bus appears to be a Japanese hand-me-down as there is Japanese writing on the doors and walls and a security camera, which I’m fairly confident does nothing.

Anything goes on the roads here and I can’t get a straight answer from anyone on simple road rules like do I have to wear a seatbelt and what is the blood alcohol limit. One cop told Justin the blood alcohol limit changes, depending on who you are! Every day you see something more horrifying on the road than you did the day before. I have seen teenage girls sitting on ute trays backwards – we’ve even seen a guy in a wheelchair riding in the back of a ute - other people standing up in ute trays, teens riding with headphones in and no helmet, almost no one wears a helmet on their motorbike and you’re lucky if people even bother to wear their jandals; plenty ride motorbikes barefoot. It is seeing children on the back which gets me the most angry- children without shoes or helmets sitting on the back of a motorbike and one day I saw a toddler asleep on the back with her mother riding with one hand and using the other hand to make sure the little girl didn’t fall off the back!

Very quickly the skills of living in a small town have come back to me and we were shocked how little time we had to be anonymous before people started to recognize us. Just a few hours after we wrapped up our tour of the CITC stores, we were having dinner at the resort when a waitress called out Justin’s name. By process of elimination, we figured she must work for the company as we had met no one else by this point… kept talking, hoping we would figure out who she was… no lightbulbs. I eventually had to interrupt and politely ask who she was and how we had met her. I figured we had a short grace period given how many people we had met. Only days later I had the same dilemma when someone called out my name in the supermarket. I was looking back at a middle aged woman with a teenage son, nothing was coming to me, then just before it got embarrassing I realized it was the pastor’s wife I had met at a church only the day before.

Justin was thrown in the deep end and left to sink or swim on his first day at work as his manager had gone on holidays for two weeks. He has worked with networks but never in the commercial sector and it has been two years since either of us had worked full time, so it was a little stressful to say the least. New job, new country, new culture and dealing with the reality of having to get up day after day and keep going back to work has been a bit of a shock! On the upside, he learned very quickly the basics of software and hardware specific to retail and has some interesting projects in the works.

Our house is odd. Most houses here look similar but for some reason the owner of our house thought they would break with tradition and build a house that looks like it belongs in the Middle East and not on a small island. It is concrete, with a deck half the size of the house and a flat roof that looks like it should have stairs leading up to it, with Turkish carpets and sheesha pipes on the roof. There are very few road names and no house numbers here but we have little trouble explaining to people how to find our house… ‘Left from Fruits of Raro takeaway going anti-clockwise, third house on the right past the watermelon farm, looks like a small Middle Eastern palace.’ No one has had trouble finding it so far. We call our place ‘the plantation’ as we look over a farm with palm trees and chickens, roosters, goats and the neighbour’s dog roam through our yard and his pig squealing next door. The goats have gotten a little tame and Justin found one just yesterday had jumped on the verandah to escape the rain and was headed towards our bedroom, where I was napping. Nothing like sharing your bedroom with a goat! Justin then had a stand-off with the goat, who was directing some serious ‘don’t mess with me’ bleating at Justin. But the real bane of our existence is the roosters, who seem to have missed the memo that their job is to wake us at dawn. The first night the roosters began crowing at 2am, which seriously freaked us out as we felt like we had just gone to sleep and it couldn’t be morning yet. The roosters continue to crow at the wrong times but we must be getting used to it as we are sleeping through it more and more. The positive to our location is we can hear the ocean from our house and are just a two minute walk from the best snorkeling spot on the island. It’s a real treat to be able to walk down the road, take a quick dip to cool off, and be back home in less than 10 minutes.

Things are not like Australia here, where people generally phone ahead to see if they can visit. You can’t walk around in your underwear in your house here, as you never know when someone might show up. Within hours of moving in, we were forced to deal with the relaxed nature of rental agreements here when we found the owner’s relatives in our yard, doing last minute wiring to the new carport. There were tag-alongs as well including a lady Justin works with – whose brother owns the house – and their son, who looked incredibly bored hanging out at our place in a camp chair. They’re friendly fellows and have dropped round unannounced at random times since, but did a bit of a cowboy job with mismatched doors, a dodgy paint job, things falling down already and drain pipes that balance precariously on chunks of concrete. I’ve seen them blowing in the breeze and wonder how they will hold up in the next wet season.

The first few days in the house, I felt like every time I went outside I got caught up in a conversation. A middle aged lady and elderly lady walked past and instead of just saying ‘nice carport’ (everyone on the entire island seems to know there is a new carport) the middle aged woman stopped for a long chat. She is a Kiwi Maori who lives on a remote outer island on a sustainable farm. She is apparently visiting but if feels like she might never leave as it has been a few weeks now and she is still here. The flights are very expensive to and from her island to ‘the big smoke’ that is Raro, so I figure she must be making the most of it.

When you move to a new place, you invest most of your energy trying to find similarities to home to make life easier for you. There are plenty of differences that are frustrating, so you try and ignore them to cope, but then there are those things that are different in a good way, and I love it when you find these little nuggets of gold, as they make the move worth it. Town is always a little hive of activity, as it’s pretty much the only place with a couple of shops and supermarkets. Wandering around, I have seen small school children in uniform either barefoot or just wearing jandals to school, kids singing a Maori song in unison with their heads out the bus window, big mamas on scooters with a flower headdress and roaming dogs racing up and down the street, stopping to do a quick poo on the well manicured church lawn before running off again.

Island time has been hard to figure out. Some things are done surprisingly efficiently and other things are excruciatingly slow or not done at all. I’ve come to the conclusion that island time means something will be done when someone feels like it, so if they feel like being fast, great, if not, you just have to wait.
For example, Telecom connected the telephone far quicker than we were expecting but in their efficiency, didn’t bother to book an appointment to see if anyone would be home for the install. So I’m out for a morning walk a couple of days after moving in and Justin phones saying “Where are you? Telecom is at the house. Hurry up or they might never come back!” So I’ve run back to the house to make sure I don’t miss them and find two young guys in Hawaiian shirts, hanging out on my verandah. I apologized profusely but they didn’t seem bothered at all. The neighbour later explained they had been sitting there for ages but not to worry, they refuse to book appointments and enjoy the excuse to do nothing!

I am getting the vibe that the government here is completely incompetent and even a little corrupt (not sure how that makes it different to most governments). One ridiculous con here to get a few more tourist dollars is the requirement that all visitors get a Cook Islands driver’s license. This is a joke, as every other country I have been to is happy to see your Australian or international driver’s license. I have refused to do it until Justin gets his first pay and am therefore driving around illegally, but Justin got the license as he is in a company vehicle. Because he wanted a motorbike/car license, he had to pay for a motorbike test as well and borrowed a bike off a colleague. He said he had to try to keep a straight face as the examiner stared straight ahead, avoiding all eye contact, as he rattled off the speech he has probably given a million times over, raving on about road safety in the Cook Islands, which is a contradiction in terms (Cook Islands has the second highest road fatalities in the world per capita). To get his motorbike license, Justin had to weave through some cones and was warned there was a trick STOP sign somewhere he would have to keep an eye out for and abide by. Justin said the STOP sign was right in front of him, just facing the opposite direction, so it wasn’t too difficult to find the ‘hidden’ STOP sign.

So concludes a lengthy wrap up of week one. If you’re still interested, my musings on week two is on its way…