January 20-29, 2011

For over a week we had some very calm days on Rarotonga. The whole family had a counter reaction to all the great experiences we have had so far. We have met so many nice people and seen so many great sites our brains were saturated with all the impressions. Here we were, on a tropical island, with a fantastic beach and snorkeling opportunities, yet all we wanted to do was to stay in the house and just be together.

Once I had got the prepaid internet thing working the next challenge was to find a good way to use it. I didn’t want to purchase a separate prepaid card for each of the three laptops, the iPads and the iPods.

I purchased an Apple AirPort Express when we were in the states. It’s an ingenious little device that does one thing very well. It looks like a charger and all the electronics is in one unit that you plug in directly. Then it has a single RJ45 standard ethernet plug. Plug it to the mains, plug in an internet connection and you have a WiFi zone. Couldn’t be simpler, and it really works.

I figured that depending on how the net provider checks how you are logged in, it might be possible to share the connection from one MacBook if I connected it to the AirPort device. I plugged it all together and turned on internet sharing on the MacBook. It actually worked! Presto, a new Wifi zone we all could connect to. Me happy. Here it is, plugged in to the right, it’s the thingy with the green light. Never mind the mess, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t expecting any guests right now.

For the first few days we stayed a lot indoors. The weather was completely unpredictable. The sky would go from clear to covered in a few minutes, rain could show up without warning, and then disappear again in a Houdini-like fashion. View from the balcony during heavy rain:

We established a home schooling routine and did schooling every day. Teacher at work:

I found a good implementation of the board game “Risk” (Lux Deluxe is the name) on the net and the kids and I played many games. Isline became a very sharp player during the week and beat us all several times:

We also got out a few hours every day, mostly in the afternoon when the heat was less intense, and tried out the different parts of Muri beach. Here is the eastern part where there is mostly sand:

Further to the west the beach is more rocky, but snorkeling is much better:

We all enjoyed swimming. Getting used to the temperature of the water was not an issue!

My beautiful and happy wife:

We were occasionally surprised by rain while on the beach, but who cares in this temperature? Hey, Warwick, I’m actually starting to enjoy getting wet instead of freaking out and fearing for my life. It is essential to have an umbrella when it rains, so you do not get wet. Oops, too late:

Most of the time we cooked our own food. Supermarkets were reasonably well stocked and we could get most basic things. Almost everything on Rarotonga is imported, mostly from New Zealand, and pretty expensive.

Iseline learned to make an omelet and scrambled eggs all by herself during these days. Proud chef:

Ready to taste her self-made scrambled eggs:

We also went out to a few restaurants. There’s lots of good fish to be had on Rarotonga. Sails restaurant on Muri beach was very good, as well as Trader Jack’s in Avarua.

Both are beach front restaurants. Here we are at Trader Jack’s, waiting for the food to cook:

Life has been far too good here and my waist diameter is steadily increasing.

We had lunch one day at Sails and saw these model sailboats in the water:

A bunch of people older than us were remote controlling them. They seemed very serious about it and kept going the entire time we were there. It was difficult to understand the attractiveness of this activity. They did not seem to fight or race each other  in any way, but were just extremely concentrated while they mindlessly sailed these model boats around:

I hope I find more meaningful things to do when I get older.

We went over to a playground in Avarua one day and the kids burned some calories:

There were gekkos everywhere, they would come crawling on the outside of the mosquito nets of the windows in the evening. Once in a while the kids reported that they had seen one catch an insect with its tongue:

They are amazing climbers and can effortlessly stay upside down attached to the ceiling. They have very large numbers of microscopic fibers on their feet that attract to the surface they are on, probably using the molecular scale Van der Waals force.

They are unique among lizards in making chirping sounds to communicate with each other. They sound like birds.

Geckos also have a quite special defense mechanism. When cornered it will drop its tail! The tail wiggles vigorously and attracts the attention of the attacker while the gecko runs for it. A new tail will eventually grow back. We caught one with a bowl one evening, and when we lifted the bowl its tail was detached and wiggling like crazy.

We even caught a baby one and put it in a wine glass for a while. No tails were hurt in the making of this photo:

Helene went to the movies with the boys one evening to see the latest Harry Potter movie:

All in all we’ve had a great relaxing week on Rarotonga. We all needed to recharge our batteries a bit.

Eirik

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