odysseyone

I could blame my busy life on taking another 2 months to write another blog, or I could admit that some of that ‘island time’ has rubbed off on me and maybe I’m taking a little longer to do things than I used to.

Week two….

A couple of days after moving into our house the water was cut. I pretended I was cool with that and I could tough it out like any local, but after a couple of hours I got a bit worried it might not come back on that day and as we were still boiling water for drinking at the time, I phoned our land lady. When I asked if this was normal (I wanted to know if I should be expecting this to happen more often) she just laughed at me and said, “Only in the Cook Islands.” How helpful. She did phone her in-laws on the main road and found out they had their water cut as well so it could be major works. Great. She warned me to run it for awhile when it came back on and I’m glad I did, as it ran brown for awhile. And we were drinking this! The local newspaper editor – who naturally is the source of all information, conspiracies and otherwise – later told me that the farmers further up the valley often run it dry as it comes from the mountains towards the ocean. So if you live lower than a farmer, bad luck. When they run out of water at the newspaper, one of his staff often gets on her scooter and heads up the valley to the farm which has left its water running and turns it off.

Let me tell you about the fires. We live on a remote island and should therefore have some of the cleanest air on earth. Unfortunately not. The locals burn fires to get rid of their garden waste like lawn clippings, coconuts and palm fronds, but they often also thrown in plastics, tin and any other garbage they have. You know a burn is imminent when you see a large pile of green waste and garbage building up. Occasionally they use fuel to burn it faster (but that can be dangerous and a young buy was evacuated to NZ a couple of months ago from petrol burns) but mostly they just let it smoke and smoulder. Sometimes you see children doing the burning and watching over the fire and a few times I’ve seen young boys burning the rubbish, sitting next to the fire with their pet pig. They like to wait to burn on very still days, so the smoke hangs in the air all day. And they don’t care where they do it. You can see these burn piles being built up right on the side of the road, so when you drive past the smoke fills the car and in the village next to ours, where most tourists stay, they burn right outside resorts so the smoke smell filters through into expensive restaurants. If I’m lucky on a burn day, the smell just wafts by, but on a bad day it smokes out the house and everything I eat tastes like ash and it stinks out the washing on the line so you smell like a campfire.

Over the last few months of living here, we’ve had countless confirmations of our suspicion that the government here is all about trying to look like they are doing something while doing nothing at all. A Kiwi friend (who has lived here 7 years) confirmed this, saying the government tries to show the world that they are ‘almost’ first world and should be taken seriously, doing just enough to continue to receive grants that get wasted, while doing nothing to improve the lives of the people. It infuriates me, as the improvements that need to be made here actually aren’t that hard and the time wasted trying to find ways to look like you are doing something while doing nothing, you could actually do something positive! I have many examples and I’ll cover them in future blogs, but here’s just one for today. They have a version of roadworthys here, called warranty of fitness. Considering this island has the second most dangerous roads in the world per 100,000, you would think this warranty of fitness would be taken seriously and the government might do other really basic things, like enforce wearing seatbelts and helmets. But no. We hadn’t had a warranty of fitness by this point but a friend who had one done told us that all they do is check your seatbelts work (even though people laugh at you if you wear them), check the doors and the boot open and check your car can go into reverse. I’m a little concerned about when our warranty of fitness comes up as they aren’t going to actually look at anything that would KEEP ME SAFE!!!!

Justin got his car in week two, a silver Mazda van big enough to carry about 10 people. Seems like a bit of overkill but he’s happy to have another van. My first time driving it was into town, where the speed limit is 30km/h. I know this seems very slow, but it can actually feel too fast in Avarua on market day. Town is actually a very dangerous place to drive on a Saturday morning and 30km/h feels lethal! Even though the speed limit is very low here (max 50km/h around the island) there are many hazards, much more than you would get on a road in Australia or NZ because ‘Highway 1’ here is the only road that circumnavigates the island. It is where children play, people walk and exercise, cyclists ride and cars, motorbikes, tractors and people towing boats drive. In town it is double lanes both ways (woohoo!) and on market day there are tourists walking all over the road, driving scooters and looking at the scenery rather than the road, cyclists doing an island loop, kids running onto the road and dogs and chickens hanging out there too. It is a surprisingly busy town and it’s not even peak season yet. I couldn’t believe it, but on Saturdays you can’t get a car park at the supermarket or the market after about 10am. It’s like Christmas Eve in the shops at home, except it’s like this every Saturday.

There is one other main road here – if you could call it that – the back road. It doesn’t circumnavigate the entire island but it goes most of the way and used to be the main road. It is much quieter and where we prefer to cycle, walk and jog. A lot of locals live on the back road and connecting roads, as much of the front is taken up by tourist accommodation and restaurants. There are plenty of average-looking and nice homes, but also homes that initially shock you as they are more like a shack and don’t look fit for habitation. There are no building codes here, so people just make a home from what they can afford. For those who can’t afford much, we have seen open homes without walls or windows, with a number of people living an open room with a concrete floor. Many homes have shipping containers in the yard, which I guess they use for storage. There are places with tarps hung to keep water out and roofs secured with bricks or ropes in case of a cyclone. There are some places so rundown that you assume no one lives there, until one day you notice someone in the house. I guess I shouldn’t be shocked by the poverty as it exists in Australia as well, it’s just that in Australia it can be hidden away in the centre of the country where very few people see it.

Justin had to work the first Saturday we were here and on the Sunday we were invited to a BBQ at the general manager’s beach bach. Because land can’t be bought and sold, some families have a number of properties including the one they live in and their beach house, which is about 10 minutes down the road. This family rents out their beach bach and because there were no tourists in it this particular weekend, they had a party there. There’s no point giving us the address because there isn’t one, so she drew a mud map, which was slightly helpful. Because there’s no postal system, and therefore no need for addresses, people give verbal directions or hand drawn maps, which are never drawn to scale and aren’t always that easy to follow. One friend didn’t even bother trying to tell me how to get to her house the first time- she just met me on the main road and I followed in the car. There are about 9,000 people here and I think that justifies naming streets and putting up numbers, even if you don’t want to deliver the post. The same friend created a sign and named her previous street because she was tired of explaining where it was. Our street is actually one of the few with a name but the sign is only on one end and because people don’t bother learning street names here as they rarely exist, it doesn’t help us anyway.

Anyway, back to the BBQ. Everyone there was really big drinkers so I figured they might be able to answer the mysterious question about the blood alcohol level for driving. Still no clear answer. One guy who has lived here a long time told us there is only one RBT machine on the island and it is at the police station. If the police pull you over, you then have to drive to the station for the test- kind of defeating the purpose of getting a drunken person off the road. He said in the good old days, if they pulled you over and asked if you had been drinking, you said yes and then they offered to drive you home in your own car, saving money on a taxi. He was even allowed to get back behind the wheel of the car drunk to drive up his driveway, as he warned the police that his dogs don’t like strangers.

Justin often has to go to the company’s stores to do IT fixing things and occasionally has to go to the pharmacy. A number of times he’s been mistaken for the pharmacist and so people ask him for drugs and advice. He’s tempted to hand out random medication to someone sometime just for a laugh. There are no laws here about pharmacies so it isn’t necessary to employ a trained pharmacist, and the company he works for is the only one in the country to employ a NZ-trained pharmacist. You can buy any medication you like over the counter without a doctor’s prescription. Justin said it’s not a job he’d want to do, as you get people walking towards the counter hunched over, pouting and looking generally miserable and telling you their problems in a whiny voice. He’s overheard a number of people’s complaints as they share the intimate details with the pharmacist and learned far more about some patients than he would like to know!

There are plenty of great things about living on a small island. We live on a very quiet street with no street lights, so the stars are brilliant and the full moon lights up the yard almost like daylight. In a couple of minutes, I can walk to an almost secluded beach with turquoise water and on a low tide, we can often see schools of fish swimming close to the shore. We can walk along the beach on low tide to Muri, the neighbouring tourist village, and stop for an afternoon drink at a restaurant or bar overlooking the lagoon. Our afternoon walks are fascinating, watching ducks guiding their ducklings across the road, birds and chickens eating newly planted crops, pigs slowly grazing or lying in muck while piglets run around them, goats eating down the grass and dogs on patrol. If we walk on the beach, we often end up walking a dog – not by choice - as they roam the island and will walk with you whether you like it or not.

So that’s a wrap up of our first fortnight on Raro. I’ll try not to make it another two months before I write another blog!