21st October 2009
We headed off to explore Avarua this morning to buy some postcards and stamps from the tiny post office. After a bit of a wander around town looking at some of the black pearls, we went back to the guesthouse to make some sandwiches with the free bread that we get every morning. The lady that lives here, Moka, works for a bakery so we get loads of fresh bread every morning. She keeps complaining we don’t eat enough of it!
We took our sandwiches to Muri Beach, which is a beach on a big lagoon with a few islets dotted in it. You can wade out to the islets, but that seemed too much like hard work so we just chilled out for a bit then headed for home.
The guesthouse here used to be a family home before it became a guesthouse. The owner’s brother and his wife (Vaia and Moka) have just come back from living in New Zealand, which a lot of Cook Islanders do at one point or another, so they are currently living here. Apparently it will eventually stop being a guesthouse, but they presently have bookings up until Christmas. They live here with their three sons, Raphael, Kyle and Nathanial who is just 6 months old. They are really lovely kids and the two older boys spend a lot of time looking after their baby brother. It’s quite a free childhood, they pretty much come and go to the beach across the road as they please, a lot different to kids back home. There are also a couple of dogs running around who have a completely free run of the place outside and will follow you to the beach. There is also Matilda the pig!
Tonight we watched the new Star Trek movie with the boys - they’ve seen it hundreds of times and couldn’t resist telling us what was coming next! Then Raphael went to change and came back wearing a red t-shirt that had ‘WALES’ written across the front of it - I couldn’t beleive my eyes! They recently held the world netball championships here at the new sports stadium and each school in the area adopted a different team to support, and Raphael’s school got Wales, what are the odds? The whole team had signed the back of the shirt and they’d visited the school and learnt to make plates out of banana leaves and how to husk coconuts and so on. When the Wales team played, the school went to the sports centre to shout for them. Such a brilliant idea!