May 17th Cook Islands

Supper at the Tamarind was excellent. The Tamarind is located just 3 minutes from Avarua (the island center) and has an open feel to it. The yard is full of lush coconut trees with a nice breeze off the Pacific Ocean from the north. The atmosphere is great there, there is a piano player there while you are eating and the food is very very good. For appetizers we had sashimi (raw tuna in this case) and then I had shrimp, game fish, New Zealand mussels, and calamari in a coconut cream sauce with rice. Marsha had a thai peanut crusted fish with rice and veggies. For desert we had a cheese board with grapes and crackers and lettuce. We also bought the cook book that the owner wrote. She used to manage the flame tree where we ate last week but came out of retirement by popular demand and started the tamarind. The restaurant is called this because there used to be a tamarind tree growing on the property that all the local kids would eat the tamarind fruit from.

This morning we went on Pa’s cross-island trek. We started at 8 and we were done at 12. Lunch was provided and it was a hard but excellent excursion to do. Pa is a colorful character pushing 70 years old. He has done the walk 3052 times now including today. The walk consists of a straight up hike to the base of the needle (or temple) and this part takes about 30 minutes or so with lots of opportunities for photos. Pa stops and points out all of the medicinal plants along the way as well. One plant of interest was the one from which Cialis is made (Viagra’s competitor). Apparently, you just boil the leaves and drink the tea and it does the trick. We also saw a very rare flower (one of the rarest in the world) that only grows on Rarotonga and nowhere else. When we got to the base he showed us the spot where back in 2003 he took the Dali Lama. Apparently in 1999 before the millennium followers of the Dali Lama went to Tibet and dug up one of their past Dali Lamas from 900 years ago and cremated the remains and divided up into 8 urns. The Dali Lama and his followers then traveled the world looking for places with high energy to bury the urn and they contacted Pa with a special request. He picked them up at 5 am and took the Dali Lama and 22 of his followers to the needle and place of high energy on the island and they held a 1 hr ceremony and buried the urn there at the base. Since then Pa gives a few stones from the temple to newly married couples for good luck and he did the same for us. One couple he gave the stones to just wrote him a letter to tell him they won 3.75 million dollars.

From there we started out 90-minute descent. We ate lunch at the river and continued on and ended at Wigmore falls for a quick dip. Then our bus picked us up and we were home by 12:30 pm. I highly recommend this walk. It is slippery and hard but well worth it.