Warm welcomes in the Cooks
On the hunt for the Cook Islands’ famed kura and kopeka, Pamela Wade finds that it’s also the friendly people that make Atiu, the Cooks’ third largest island, so special.
By the evening of my first day on Atiu, I’m returning waves from people I’ve met. On the second day, I even recognise the dogs. Although this is the third largest of the Cook Islands group, it’s still tiny: only 421 residents and 20km around, a trip of less than an hour, even puttering slowly on a scooter, swerving around fallen coconuts and braking for chickens.
Birds are the only things that move fast here, and there are plenty of them.
Atiu’s other name is Enuamanu, island of birds, and there are two species in particular I want to see. A picture of the first, the kura, a lorikeet, was plastered across the side of the little Air Rarotonga plane that brought me here.
Red, green, blue and yellow, the kura should be easy to spot, but my host Elaine and I peer in vain into the leafy depths of the mango and mahogany trees. We’ve just missed them, according to the men drinking nearby, perched on a circle of bottompolished tree stumps under a tin roof. They invite us to join their tumunu, or bush beer club.
When the missionaries arrived in 1821, they took a dim view of the kava-drinking that was customary then.
The men of Atiu were reluctant to give up the ritual and turned instead to brewing orange juice deep in the bush. The exact recipe is a secret, but hops, yeast and sugar are involved, producing a surprisingly light and pleasant drink.
Ceremony is still important, and Elaine and I take turns to empty the small polished coconut cup, passing it back to the barman to refill from his plastic bucket.
It’s all too easy, but frowned upon, to get drunk on this fruity beer, and the barman in the middle of the circle keeps a close eye on proceedings, calling a halt between rounds for a prayer to be said and community issues discussed.
Hopes are high that some of the recently reintroduced kura, formerly extinct on Atiu, are breeding in the surrounding orchard. When dark comes through the trees and the men begin to sing, we give the leader of the group a donation towards the next brew and leave the tumunu.
Choosing to have dinner cooked for us at Atiu Villas, though each garden villa has its own kitchen with a well-stocked pantry, we learn from the hotelier, Roger, about the unusual geology of this flat-topped island.
Around the central plateau, an eroded volcano, is first a ring of taro water gardens surrounded by another of fossilised coral called makatea, now overgrown with jungle and hiding many secrets.
Marshall shows us some of them the next day, and the first is quite gruesome.
Careful of the jagged and scratchy makatea, we follow him off the red dirt road into the dense rainforest, stopping by the buttressed trunk of a massive banyan fig tree.
‘‘Down here,’’ he says, and we squirm through a narrow opening between tree roots and rock into a cave. Strapping on headlights, we follow Marshall into the darkness. Our lights catch strange limestone formations and then, in a shallow side cavern, three skulls staring eyelessly back at us.
Rima Rau is a burial cave where the bones of Elaine’s ancestors have been laid to rest for centuries. Stained yellow by the ochre in the rock, they’re surrounded by a jumble of other bones, and as we look around we light up even more skulls and bones fitted into hollows and on rocky shelves in apparently random fashion.
Some of them are in such tight spaces that Marshall speculates only children could have placed them there, but he cannot explain why some of the skulls have large holes.
It’s all a little creepy, though he and Elaine are very respectful, and I’m glad to climb back out to the vivid green of the jungle above.
We haven’t finished with caves, however. Marshall takes us on a longer walk over the makatea.
He’s full of local gossip, stories about night hunts for the big and fearsome coconut crabs, and tips about decorating dance costumes. And when the path stops abruptly above a fern-fringed chasm, he helps us down a ladder to stand at the entrance to Anatakitaki Cave.
Leading us through green-tinted airy caverns hung with stalactites and tree roots, he shows us an underground swimming hole where the clear blue water stays a constant 23 degrees in a cave lit by
Adark recess at the back is where Atiu’s other remarkable bird lives. The kopeka is a tiny swift, constantly in flight outside which, when it swoops into the pitch-black depths of the cave to roost and nest, emits bat-like clicks to find its way home by sonar.
As we stand waiting, we hear its calls switch to clicks, as it disappears past us.
That’s the kopeka ticked off, but the kura is still eluding us. If anyone can help, it’s ‘‘birdman’’ George.
He picks us up in his battered ute and we bounce along the dusty road through clouds of butterflies, stopping to spot birds, hear history and learn about medicinal plants. He points up at the green nuts of a coconut palm.
‘‘They’ll taste like Sprite’’ he says and, next
moment, is climbing up the trunk to unscrew one for each of us.
Husked, the tops swiped off with his machete, the fresh sweet milk is a delight. This is morning tea, island-style, and then we bump away to lunch at Tamanu Beach.
In the shade of a rocky overhang on deserted white sand lapped by blue-tinted water, he lays out our picnic on to woven leaves: passionfruit, baby bananas, pretty sliced star fruit, sweet green oranges, and wedges of papaya which, with a squeeze of lime and a sprinkle of soft fresh grated coconut, tastes sensational.
It’s delicious, healthy and the setting is so glorious that it doesn’t matter that he hasn’t been able to find us a kura, though he tells us where to look.
Later, Elaine and I set off on little mopeds for a circuit of the island, through small villages with
houses of lime green and yellow, white-washed coral churches and neatly trimmed verges and hedges.
We pass taro swamps, Arabica coffee plantations, pigs and cows tethered in the shade, and wave to other riders: women in bright pareus (sarongs) with babies clinging on, men slung with hoes and machetes, and the local policeman in his uniform, all unhelmeted.
We dip into thick jungle, the sun spotlighting emerald green ferns, and out again to zip through the barred shadows of coconut palms, the white foam of the reef just metres away.
And finally, just where George said we would find them, we see a pair of cartoon-bright kura, high in a mango tree.
That should mean that we’re ready to leave, but it doesn’t.