January 19, 2011

Ah, Rarotonga, the island paradise we had read so much about. We had set aside almost 2 weeks here with the goal of relaxing at the beach, snorkeling and enjoying the favorable climate.

Helene was an early bird, and went in to Avarua in the morning to get our driving licenses while I slept in with the kids.  She came back with only one license. Even though they just make you a new license when they see your old one, you have to be there in person, presumably because they want your picture on the license.

Helene drove us down to Muri beach where we enjoyed the lagoon:

At the entrance to the beach a tour organizer had set up these signs:

2851 km (1772 miles) to the closest McDonald´s, 10 meters if you want to book a tour 🙂

We got a couple of hours of beach life before it started raining. This is the rainy season here and we knew it was a risk coming in January.

We went back to our bungalow before I ventured out to get my driving license and find out why I had been sold non-functioning expensive internet access cards yesterday.

The only way to do that, without bringing the whole family, was for me to drive illegally without a driving license into town. We figured the risk was minimal and off I merrily went. We had passed the police station yesterday, so I knew roughly where it was, but I didn’t have a map with the station marked on it.

I kept looking nervously to the side of the road as I slowly drove forward. Driving in Rarotonga is not like driving in other places. With the one main road being circular and 32 km (20 miles) in circumference, no matter where you are going, your maximum distance covered is 16 km (10 miles), if you go in the right direction. With a normal speed limit of 40 km per hour (25 mph) you would think you would never be in your car more than half an hour. Not so. Life is very laid back and people drive slowly here. No one seems to mind if someone bumps along at half the speed limit and overtaking is done gently and with minimum acceleration.

Half way to Avarua I passed a policeman measuring the speed of cars with a laser measuring device! Wow, I hadn’t expected that. Luckily I drove like the locals and also did not take any risks, illegally driving as I was. Most stupid bank robbers get caught because they overreact when they are stopped in a routine police control. The really smart ones, the survivors and multiple bank robbers, know how to stay calm when the police are around.

I knew I was getting very close when I suddenly saw several cars in front of me had come to a complete stop. The place was swarming with police and it looked like they were stopping each and every car and checking the papers. Caramba! I was in trouble. As the line of cars slowly moved forward i could see that yes, they were actually checking everyone’s papers. OK. Stay calm now, think. This is not over yet. There was no place to turn around (if so I could just have driven around the island in the other direction to reach the police station) naturally and pulling over in a parking spot to turn the car around now would just draw unwanted attention from the long reach of the law.

Then it seemed like Odin was with me. A long line had been building up an the officers of the law suddenly decided to let several cars through, without checking papers, presumably to avoid too much of a congestion. The three cars ahead of me were waved through. As I approached I got no signal from the police officer who had waved through the others. Having learnt my lesson from bank robber movies I slowed down, let myself a bit down in the seat and smiled a question mark to the guy. We stared at each other for a few infinite seconds while i kept thinking “These are not the droids you are looking for.” before he decided to wave me through also.

Phew! I was born again. I could now concentrate on finding the police station which seemed to have sunk down into the earth. I passed the airport, which I knew was too far. As I looked for a place to turn I saw a sign with “Island Hopper Vacations.” Ah, the travel agency we are using for the trip to Aitutaki in 10 days. I needed to answer an email from them regarding our overnight stay on Rarotonga on our way back from Aitutaki, so I parked and entered the small building.

There, on one of two desks, sat Ronnie, the guy I had been emailing with multiple times since September. Cool. It’s strange to meet someone in person who you have emailed quite a bit with. You make pictures of the other person in your head. Ronnie was not at all as I had expected. He was older and less energetic, but came over as a very nice guy. We fixed the remaining hotel detail. i asked Ronnie where the police station was. He smiled and said it was just after the airport. There is a large sign. You cannot miss it. OK.

I now made my way back to Avarua, looking for the police station, which was still nowhere to be found. Damn’, I was getting dangerously close to the police control. I had not paid much attention to traffic in the other direction when I passed the control and had no idea if they checked cars in both directions or not. Closing in, closing in. Where is that station?

My heart missed a beat when I suddenly realized I was just where the control had been. They were all gone. No control anymore. And the police station was there. The control had been done just next to the entrance to the police station! Why bother moving when you don’t have to? I hadn’t noticed because I had been too focused on the bank robber thing.

Relieved I continued until I could turn, which happened to be just where the the telecom shop was, where we had bought the fraudulent non-working internet access cards yesterday. I parked there since the police station was within walking distance.

I entered the shop and loaded my brain with fighting spirit while I was waiting in line. I hadn´t gotten a receipt yesterday and was dependent on reasonable people on the other side of the counter. I knew that was not necessarily a given.

When I explained my case and was ready to release my anger the woman behind the counter smiled, turned to her colleague next to her, and said “We really need to talk to the printers about this.” Then she turned to me and explained that the letter “p” is printed in the same way regardless of its case. Did my card have a “p” in the password? It sure did. In fact both the ones I had tried had a lowe case “p” in the password by pure coincidence. If I had tried the third card yesterday it would have worked!

I had brought my MacBook and I tested then and there, and sure thing, with a lower case “p” it worked like a charm. Maybe they should consider warning people about these “p”-s instead of having almost every 11th (closer to 10.7579 actually) card not working (assuming equal distribution of all upper and lower case letters and the digits)

Getting two cards in a row with a lower case “p” should then happen in only one of 115 cases. I had won in the inverse lottery!

Check out these lovely lower case “p”-s:

Afterwards, getting a license at the police station was as easy as waiting in line for a good while, smiling to the photographer, and paying the 20 NZD. I had the same feeling I had when they handed me my shiny new driving license in Legoland when I was about 7 years old:

The waiting in line was a relaxed experience where nothing seemed to hurry for anyone. Well, I wasn´t in a hurry either, so I just went with the flow. Thor Heyerdahl thought that Polynesians and South Americans had many things in common. Their view of time is one of them. On second thought, maybe it is modern Western society which is the odd man out here?

Notice that the license says “Government of the Cook Islands Transport Act 1966.” The Cook Islands is a former colony of New Zealand, but is now independent for all practical purposes. More than 80% of the population is ethnic Polynesian, or Maori as they prefer to say here. This is the first place we have been in the Polynesian triangle where the Polynesians rule and decide their own future and current politics.

I had a conversation with an ethnic French inhabitant in French Polynesia and that conversation bugged me for several days afterwards. We spoke about possible independence for French Polynesia. There is an independence movement on some of the islands, but it does not seem very strong. The argument this person had for continued French colonial rule went somewhere along these lines: French Polynesia is completely dependent on the French state for subsidies. If it became independent there would be too few people and too few resources to sustain a decent standard of living. Thus France is being kind and the people here are better off with the status quo. It was all summed up in the statement: “I bet they would miss their nice cars.”

I suppose this is also a good summary of why the independence movement is not very strong. What do you want, freedom and poverty or a continued good life? The argument seemed valid, and then and there I nodded my head and agreed.

The conversation wouldn’t let go from the back of my head afterwards and it was later that i realized that it was the French and other westerners before them that had taken away the possibility of living a good life without financial support from France. People in French Polynesia have been massacred, taken as slaves, stripped of their religion and culture and made dependent on western imported goods for several generations. Maybe France has a historical debt to the Polynesian inhabitants?

Reading up on Cook Islands history and politics has given me a wonderful surprise. What the French have failed to do with French Polynesia, and the Chileans with Easter Island, the New Zealanders managed to execute on way back in 1965. The more I have read about it, the more impressed I have been. In 1965 New Zealand and the Maori of the Cook Islands struck a unique deal. The Cook Islands became a state “in free association with New Zealand”. The terms are quite extraordinary:

New Zealand continued to support the Cook Islands financially with the expressed goal of keeping the general living standard on the Cook Islands on par with the general living standard in New Zealand for as long as it was necessary. This is still continuing today, with considerable sums being transferred every year. Imagine the commitment from New Zealand and the implications.

The Cook Islamds became a democracy with its own government with full control over politics and internal affairs.

All Cook Islands nationals are also New Zealand nationals (dual passport).

Foreign policy and defense remained the responsibility of New Zealand, and the currency is the New Zealand dollar. However, the Cook Islands government can, at any time, declare that it will from now on take over these responsibilities. In addition, and this a cool part of the deal, New Zealand cannot relinquish these responsibilities as long as it is wanted by the Cook Islands.

What a deal, huh? And in 1965!  The world was very different in 1965. Six years later the supreme court of the Northern Territory in Australia would rule that the aboriginals had no right to any land in Australia.

My hat is off for New Zealand on this one. If you are a nerd like me, you might want to read more about it. I found this very interesting paper on the implications of the deal.

It is only my speculation, but maybe history had taught the New Zealanders a lesson after they had themselves been part of the British Empire? And maybe they also had a bad conscience from the treatment of the Maori in New Zealand? New Zealanders of western descent are after all living on land taken from the Polynesians.

The rain continued, it was typical tropical on and off rain and it was very heavy at times:

We used the opportunity to do some home schooling. We haven’t done as much as we should after Christmas, so it was time to get the daily routine started again.

Eirik

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