Day 1 - Tsunami, Scooters, Clear Blue Water

Around 10ish we were woken by a phone call from the property management cleaner who was on her way over, we got out of bed (Blaise cursing the roosters) and got dressed. The cleaner showed up and we headed out to explore the Muri area of Rarotonga. As we were walking out the cleaner received a phone call and told us casually that there was a Tsunami warning for the west side of the Island. Ooookay. At this point we didn’t know about the earthquake or how bad Samoa would be hit.

We walked quite a bit, there is only one main road on Rarotonga, did the east coast, was on the south coast and I was starting to get sore feet. We waited for a bus, turns out the word “island time” seemed to be appropriate, it seemed to take forever to get there. It was $4 per person one way (no on and off privileges) and while on the bus looping the island Blaise and I decided a scooter was going to be more economical over the long run. We rented one from Budget for the rest of the week.

We wanted to get some local info from the surf shops on where Blaise could kite but no one seemed to open. In fact a lot of them looked boarded up and abandoned. Again later on we realized that people had prepped for a tsunami and shut up shop.


We bought some groceries, we had a plan to use our kitchen a lot and not eat out a lot, headed home, dropped off the groceries and headed back to one of the nice white beaches we had seen on our walk that morning. We set up towels, went for a walk/swim in the crystal clear blue lagoon water and were blown away by the number of fish that swam around us. Blaise was like a small child pointing out fish here and there…after his initial nervousness about them circling him. Some tanning, I headed back out to take photos of the fish, the water was so clear that some of them turned out! Have to come back here with snorkeling gear; have to get Blaise some snorkeling gear.