Aitutaki 2025

We slept quite well last night with the ceiling fan on but no need for aircon. One of the local roosters did his rounds in the early hours. He seemed to be going to each unit and crowing outside before moving on. For breakfast we headed off to the Koru Café about 8:30 for a Gourmet Breakfast Bun (Fried egg, cheese and bacon on brioche bun) and a Long Black. We left with two large sausage rolls and a plate of salad which will be tonight's dinner. Back at Ranginui's, we finished off breakfast with a plunger of our own coffee (we brought some ground Kaikoura Star coffee with us) and did our daily puzzles (Wordle and Unolingo). Today's Wordle was a bit tricky but Miriam finally got there, albeit with assistance from me. The weather was perfect today with blue sky and no wind so we decided to have a go at a few water sports. I tried paddle boarding for the first time and managed to get going pretty easily. My balance from windsurfing obviously helped. We also tried a double kaya...

  Our flight arrived in Rarotonga 7 minutes early at 1:33pm Saturday after a very smooth flight. We bought four bottles of Chardonnay and a bottle of Gin at the tiny Duty Free store and found ourselves at the back of the immigration queue. This is quite a good plan because they have a priority queue for returning Cook Islanders and, when they have been processed, the staff started feeding tourists from the back of the long snake line to that booth! Our Boeing 777 was quickly re-loaded for the return flight to Auckland and the above picture is of it taxiing out while we waited for our local flight to Aitutaki. We only had an hour or so to wait and we were off to paradise. The first glimpse of the atoll And here we are back for the fifth time! The temperature is around 26C and just a few clouds. Dylan ferried us off to Ranginui's Retreat where we have been put in the same unit (No. 4) as last time. The proprietor Steve (Dylan's father) is currently in Thailand trying to get his r...

With a leisurely Saturday ahead, we did our final packing and headed for Christchurch. A quick stop for lunch at The Caves gave us a chance to consider whether we had left anything critical behind. In which case we could stop in at the house to collect it before finally driving south! We arrived at the Motel around 4pm with some St Pierre's sushi plus a few beers so we didn't have to go out for dinner. We needed to get to bed early since the alarm had to be set for 3:30 am! When it came to setting our alarm, we had a small challenge since the clocks move forward an hour at 2am for daylight saving. Luckily, the system figured it out for us and we did indeed get woken at 3:30 as planned. This was the first time I had set an alarm on my new phone and we were surprised and pleased to find that the default alarm was not a boring tune. Instead we had the Bixby lady wishing us Good Morning followed by the current weather conditions. Air New Zealand then TXTed us to advise that our Chr...