On the morning we left for Atiu we arrived at Rarotonga airport bright and early to board our tiny Air Rarotonga plane. There were only three seats across, enough room for about 18 passengers. We sat right up at the front behind the cockpit, the plane was full of locals returning home to their island or visiting friends and family, we were the only 'foreigners' on board. The little plane bumped and rocked along the runway and soon we were high above the blue Pacific once more. Forty five bumpy and noisy minutes later the tiny island of Atiu finally came into view through the cockpit window and we touched down onto the rubbly runway at Atiu airport. We taxied back up to a little wooden hut that 'Welcome to Atiu, home of the Kopeka' painted on it. A small group of locals stood waiting, their arms full of flower leis waiting to greet the passengers. Roger, the owner of Atiu Villas, stepped forward as we got off the plane, placed leis around our necks and told us we had just become the only tourists currently on Atiu.
We spent the afternoon discovering the deserted walking tracks and beaches of Atiu. The only living beings we saw were a few wild pigs snuffling around in the trees. There is only one place to eat out on Atiu, and fortunately it was were we were staying. We wandered round to the restaurant at 7.30pm and there, sat at our table were two other tourists who'd arrived on a later plane that day, seems our privileged position as the only tourists on the island only lasted a couple of hours. The couple, Laurie and Noel, both in their fifties, from Long Island, New York, turned out to be good friends during our stay on Atiu. They'd only been married a few years, Laurie had been a teacher and had spent most of her life travelling, she'd visited an amazing 140 countries over the years and was still going strong with plans for further trips on her return to New York. Roger joined us for a drink after the meal and asked if we'd seen any wild pigs that afternoon, he said some of them could be quite viscious but that if we looked in our cutlery drawer we'd find a good hunting knife that we were welcome to use to kill a pig if we wanted to, and what's more, if we managed to get the pig back to the villas, he said he'd be more than happy to barbecue it for us. We decided to pass up on that offer. Apparently the reason there are so many wild pigs on Atiu is because during the Sydney Olympics a lot of the islanders went over to Australia to volunteer and never returned, leaving their pigs to run amok on the island and get more wild with each generation. We met another interesting character over that meal, in the shape of Einstein, Rogers cat. Roger informed us that he was always getting into fights, and by looking at the state of his face it seemed he always came out on the losing end. He took a particular shine to me, or may be it was the nice looking chicken on my plate. Throughout the meal I struggled to push him off each time he came perilously close to flipping my chicken off the table. It wasn't easy as he was almost as big as a dog. Roger offered to lock him away, but I just laughed good naturedly through gritted teeth and said that it was fine. Half his top lip was missing too, revealing a single fang which gave him rather a menacing sneer. I tried not to look at his scabby eye and chewed ear as it wasn't doing much for my appetite. All in all, poor Einstein wasnt someone you'd want to share your dinnner table with too often.
The next day we booked a tour to explore the caves that were home to the kopeka - the indigenous bird of Atiu. We realised that a few more tourists must have arrived on the island when the jeep pulled up and there were about ten people squeezed into the back, including Laurie and Noel. The kopeka is basically a bird that acts like a bat, never touching ground, it flies around all day and at night hangs upside down from the roof of the pitch black caves. It finds its way around the caves by making a clicking sound that 'bounces' off the walls. We all turned off our head torches to see how dark it actually was, and it was indeed pitch black, so dark that after a few minutes people started to lose their balance, the only things visible were the little 'glow in the dark' patches on Noels trainers.
On the way back to the jeep I got talking to our guide, Marshall. Originally from Devon he'd emigrated to New Zealand and met and married a Cook Islander. He told me he only had a small family, just seven children, which is indeed a small family for a lot of Pacific Islanders, who often have up to fourteen children, some of them adopted. Adoption is a common occurrence in the islands, a friend or relative can request to adopt a baby from a couple who are expecting one, or sometimes couples offer to have children for those who can't have any. Unlike Europe, and much of the 'Western' world, the biological parents keep in touch with their child as it grows up, the child is fully aware of who their 'real' parents are, and may even go back to live with them eventually.
Another interesting custom is the giving of names. Parents do not always choose the name of their child, often it is a relative who requests to name the child before it is born. Also, when a person gets married their in-laws will usually choose yet another name for them, so needless to say, a lot of the islanders can end up with many names, some of them quite unusual.
After the Kopeka Cave trip, Roger had invited us to a 'Tumunu'. This is basically a meeting of local village men who regularly gather together to drink their own brewed 'bush beer' and discuss village issues. There are several Tumunus on Atiu, fortunately the one we went to was very open and friendly to women and foreign visitors. On most of the other Cook Islands the Tumunus were eradicated by the missionaries in the late 19th Century, but the Atiu islanders managed to keep theirs going, which probably explains why they are always held in tiny, well hidden bamboo huts in the jungle. They follow a set procedure which involves everyone sitting round in a circle with the 'barman' in the middle. The 'barman' is in charge of distributing the bush beer which is brewed and stored in a big bucket. It's made with oranges and sugar and drunk from half a coconut shell which the barman fills up and passes round the group. Any member of the group who feels he's had enough can 'pass' when the coconut shell comes round to him. This doesn't happen very often though, the beer is delicious, and tastes more like orange flavoured wine rather than beer, but can apparently give you a hangover from hell, or so we were told. While the beer is passed around the village men usually sing a few island songs and play music on what looked like home-made instruments - very entertaining! Each member of the group then takes it in turn to introduce themselves and say what they do, were they come from and why they came to Atiu, the village men also introduce themselves. Once this is over it becomes more informal while everyone chats amongst themselves and enjoys the bush beer which seems to get passed around quicker and quicker as the night wears on. When it's time to leave each member must make a contribution to the Tumunu, which is usually either a donation of $5, a bag of sugar and some oranges towards the next beer brew, or an offer to dig over one of the islanders Taro patches. We took the easy, $5 option.
A couple of days later we fancied some exercise and hired a couple of mountain bikes to ride around the island. It was a great way to explore and made us realise how sparsely populated Atiu is. It took us about three hours and we only saw four people the whole way round. On the way we passed the airport, as it was Sunday there were no flights in, or out of, Atiu. The place was deserted. It was just an open sided hut so we went in, I even had my photo taken behind the check-in desk which was basically just a work top with a phone and an 'Air Rarotonga' sign above it. We coud have rode our bikes up and down the runway if we'd felt like it, there was no-one around to stop us. It was all a far cry from Heathrow.
All that exercise had given us an appetite, but unfortunately all we had to eat back at the villas was, pasta and tinned tuna and tomatoes. It was expensive to eat in the restaurant every night and unfortunately the food supplies in Atius' shop were pretty minimal. We imagined this was because most of the locals were self sufficient, owning their own pigs and chickens and having lots of land to grow their own fruit and vegetables. When we spoke to some of the other visitors it seemed their eating habits were similar to ours, a blow out at Rogers restaurant followed by a couple of nights of tuna and tomatoes. Getting hold of fruit wasn't a problem though, as we'd 'gone native' and picked our own paw paws from the wild trees growing around the island, and collected ripe coconuts that had fallen from the trees. Charlie learned how to husk coconuts while we were on Rarotonga, and they were deliciously creamy.
All too soon, our week on Atiu was over, Roger drove us back to the airport and we waited for our flight to Aitutaki to be called. Presently a woman carrying a baby on her hip wandered over to us and said 'You can get on the plane now if you like'. We soon realised that there was a grand total of four passengers on the plane, including ourselves. It was a crystal clear day and 45 minutes later we were banking over the unfeasibly turquoise lagoon of Aitutaki...
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