We do love our sunsets over an ocean.  We had worried about not being on the west side of the island, but we could see the sunset from the beach right in front of the Moana Sands.  It made the perfect end to perfect days!  As in the Florida Keys, we would see other folks coming down to check out what God was giving us for a last show of the day.  The only difference was that in the Keys we would be with a lot of people.  On Raro, a lot of people means a dozen.

Well, I don't know if we will ever get back to the Cook Islands, but we did enjoy ourselves a great deal.   The island of Rarotonga was beautiful and from what I can see the other 14 islands may be even more so.  One of the great things about the island were the people.   They were nice and open to us tourists who were a bit lost and confused.  When we visited Maui last year, we were amazed that everyone we dealt with was from the mainland.  The sailboat operators, snorkel gear sales staff, etc.  On Raro this is very rare.  Almost the only people living on the island who are not native Cook Islanders are married to them.

People ask if we were bored and we were not.  The closest to this were the two days while we were forced to stay inside due to the cyclones, but we read and played games then.  We did not do everything that we had hoped to do.  The cyclones cut into our time.  Of course, they did add to our adventure!  We had hoped to take the cross-islpand hike, visit the Cultural Center, learn how to sail a boat, take a 4x4 across the mountains and take a sightseeing plane around the island.  Of course, we may not have been able to do all of this even without the cyclones.  All of those do cost money!

The Cook Islands do have their own form of money, but they don't seem to use it.  They use New Zealand money.  A couple of years ago an NZ dollar equaled about 1.80 USD.  Today that is down to about 1.25 USD, which is not a good sign for our economy.  In the paper one day they were talking about new teachers.  The starting salary was $16,000 NZ.  Since almost everything on the island is shipped in, nothing is really cheap.  Gas was about $5.00 USD per gallon.  (Of course, you would not use a lot there.)

I would encourage you all to check out the Cook Islands on the internet.