Day 24: Does Rarotonga need a bookkeeper and TV research guy?

We have a new favourite place.
Getting ashore was a minor drama due to the heavy(ish) swells, which meant we could only run tenders from the port side of the ship. It took a couple of hours before we made it to shore, and we were on tender #12 out of 30 or so.
While not as visually striking as Bora Bora, Rarotonga is much cleaner than Bora Bora or Tahiti, the people seemed friendlier, and even the dogs look healthier and happier. Sure, they all sound like New Zealanders when they talk, but nothing in life is perfect.
We wandered through the main town before catching our tour and looked inside a few shops, which were clean and affordable (eg nothing like French Polynesia), then headed back for our tour
Our tour was a glass bottom boat on Muri Lagoon. We had a highly entertaining guide, Barrone, who joked and played the ukulele when he wasn’t doing the tour guide thing or swimming under the boat.


The lagoon is so shallow you could walk across most of it, which made navigation tricky. Once out on the reef they moored the boats and let the snorkelers swim for half an hour or so while us aqua-phobic types watched the action through the glass bottom.

Afterwards we went to one of the islands for lunch, where the boys cooked up swordfish, bananas sprinkled with fresh coconut, potato salad, papaya, and limes. It was simple, but tasted fantastic.

The limes led to a minor tragedy. The local limes are green on the outside as you’d expect, but orange on the inside. Emma saw one poor woman bite into one thinking it was an orange.
Apparently her face looked like - well, it’s hard to describe, but you can probably guess.
Emma had the sense to ask before biting into one. Smart girl.
They also showed how to crack open a coconut, and demonstrated six of the 375 (!) different ways of tying a sarong. As the pics below demonstrate, this is a man who likes his work:


Emma’s comment was “I feel like I’ve been picked up and placed into a postcard”.
Interestingly every Aussie couple we’ve spoken to, four of them, say they intend to come back.
We’re couple number five.