February 1, 2011

After a calm morning we drove out to talk to a boat charter company. A boat tour of the lagoon was part of our package form the travel agency and given our experiences with Aitutaki we thought it would be prudent to have a talk with them. Here are their headquarters:

They had us in their books, but were really in a pinch since 2 cruise ships were going to come in during the next 2 days and they had capacity problems. Since we had no special plans for the week, except for the boat trip, we offered to postpone our trip until Friday. They were very grateful.

Aitutaki was named “Most beatiful island in the world” by the founder of Lonely Planet in 2010 and is a standard destination for cruise ships in the Pacific. This little island with roughly 2000 inhabitants gets swamped with several hundred cruise ship tourists when they arrive. Most of them only stay for one day.

Aitutaki is an “almost atoll.” An atoll forms when a volcano slowly sinks into the ocean. Corals grow on the old crater and grow upwards. The conditions for corals are more favorable at the fringes, where there is a good supply of oxygen and nutrients from the open sea. Thus the corals further in fall behind in growth and form the bottom of a lagoon. When the volcano is fully submerged, only the coral ring and the lagoon are left and a true atoll has formed. If parts of the volcano still remains over water then you have an almost atoll, like Aitutaki. The main island on Aitutaki is what remains of the volcano. You can see it clearly on this satellite photo:

The main island at the top of the triangle is 8 km (5 miles) long and completely dwarfs the motus, which are the small islands made by the corals along the rim of the lagoon. Interestingly enough two of the small islands in the lagoon, Moturakau and Rapota (marked with red arrows above), are also volcanic. Both were used as filming locations for both the US television reality show “Survivor” and the UK television show “Shipwrecked” in 2006. There were only a few weeks between the end of one series and the filming of the next on these “deserted and untouched” islands.

Aitutaki was used as an allied base during the second world war. It was meant to be the last stance against the Japanese expansion in the Pacific. The Japanese never got this far and there was never any fighting on Aitutaki. The Americans built the large airport here with 2 runways. Only one is still in use but it is completely oversized compared to the turboprop planes that now land there. At 1.8 kilometers (1.1 miles) it is more than long enough to land a 737, for example. You can see the runway which is not in use as a line crossing the very top of the main island. The one in use is just to the right of the first one, it follows the entire very thin peninsula, The two endpoints are marked with green arrows above.

The US soldiers stationed on Aitutaki outnumbered the local inhabitants during the second world war. One can only imagine the impact it must have had on the small Polynesian society here.

The soldiers blasted a hole in the reef on Aitutaki, making it possible to sail boats into the lagoon and to the main island for the first time.

In the 1950s Aitutaki was a refueling stop on the “coral route.” a flight route from Auckland to Tahiti. The planes landed on water, took 45 passengers, and used three days from Auckland to Tahiti. There was only one class, first class, and passengers slept over in luxury hotels in Fiji and Samoa on their way to Tahiti or back again. Back then Tahiti was the dream destination and many passengers would sit and wait for refueling with a view of Aitutaki’s beautiful lagoon so they could continue flying for another 4 hours to reach their holiday destination in Tahiti.

Tourism is the main source of income today, but visitor numbers are still low compared to other similar destinations. About 100 000 tourists come here every year,

In other trivia, rugby is the main sport on the island, and there are 4 clubs and 8 teams, not bad for a population of 2000.

After rebooking our boat trip I dropped the rest of the family off at a beach facing the lagoon and then did an email session at the same restaurant as yesterday. I needed to follow up on some requests I had done for the New Zealand part of our trip. The view from my table was terrible (notice the diet coke, a pathetic attempt of reducing my waistline):

We spent our day at the beach.

The boys joined a Jesus course organized by the local church. We were very impressed by the results at the end of the day. Here they are during training:

And here is Adrian, doing his Galilee-dash in 17.4 seconds.

It reminded me of the old joke: Heard on the shore of Galilee lake: “I don’t care who your father is. You are scaring away the fish!”

Happy boys at the end of a long day at the beach:

See you around, folks.

Eirik

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