Rarotonga, At Sea

April 18th-19th
Rarotonga, At Sea

Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, was a nice change from five straight sea days. I got off the ship with the two new musicians who just joined last Sydney, Josh and Eric. We left the ship looking for a good place to grab lunch, and after asking some locals and finding out that there’s no where to get authentic local food, we ended up at some tourist place (Trader Jack’s I believe) where I had a very local, extremely authentic, completely untouched by the western world…Cheeseburger. But hey, it was delicious, absolutely perfect for that place and time, and I was stuck singing Jimmy Buffet for the rest of the day.
We left that place to find a beach that the waitress told us was about 30 minutes back towards the ship, which we did eventually find 60 minutes later. It was a nice walk through the island though, you get a completely different vibe and you feel like you’re somewhere different. We came across a cove with a vacant beach and tried to force as much enjoyment into the 15 minutes I’d allotted the group before I figured we needed to start walking back to the ship. I immediately jumped in the water and just tried floating around for a while. This was going wonderfully till a small fish, enticed by a small mole on my side, actually bit me and invoked a paranoia that encouraged me to get out of the water as soon as possible…stupid fish. And it’s not that it hurt, but being startled by a fish just meant that I couldn’t possibly continue enjoying floating in the water. We were out of time though, so we packed up our things and began walking back and eventually returned to the ship without further incidents.
The sea day that followed was uneventful. I just continue fighting whatever decided to make it’s home in my sinus cavity. Thanks for reading!