Australasia > Cook Islands > Cook Islands > Rarotonga > Articles > Small is Beautiful

Goodness me what a small world Rarotonga is! Only 9000 people on an island the size of Lake Rotorua. Not only has every second person lived in Auckland, they all seem to be related, know people you know and can even produce a relative of yours if they try. How people go about the daily business of having affairs or squandering tax-haven money is beyond me.

My guide, who can arrange just about anything since a) Rarotongans are very accommodating and b) she’s their cousin, smiles enigmatically when I ask. How they do anything nefarious or naughty, I discover after five days and many puzzled conversations, is pretty much with everyone knowing.

And in any event, most of them don’t. Most of them operate under a strict unwritten code of social restraint. And if you don’t believe me, go to church on Sunday - the Cook Island Christian Church, since they’re the only denomination on offer where your presence is expected. From five in the morning ‘till five that evening three services are held as well as Sunday School, youth group, women’s fellowship and probably more besides. And everyone is there. At any one of the many churches on the island, the pews are full of shiny black heads, braided, oiled or beautifully bedecked with a woven hat.

At the Titikaveka church I visited, the choir led the singing - which is to say that 40 voices with the muscular strength of David Tua filled the room, stopped my ears and swelled my heart with the sheer grandeur of their song. Sweet and clear it isn’t. Nor is it the passionate and pained rendition of the gospel singer. Rarotongan lungs belt out the songs so loud and so strong and in a kind of eternal tuneless harmony that I am reminded of a journey or a voyage, as if I might hear their voices on another island altogether.

After that take a tour of the island. And as you drive yourself around in your hired car or motorbike (the preferred form of transport for tourists), notice how neat and tidy everything is. How trim the lawns, how clean the streets, how lacking in graffiti. Actually graffiti did make it to Rarotonga in the 80s along with rap and some kids back from Auckland with big ideas. But it was stamped out by a voluntary squad of youth police who were keen to keep Raro clean - and succeeded.

While beetling along the 75 km of road on the island (32km right around) you may come across the house known as the cleanest property on Rarotonga. And no wonder. The very grass looks as if it fears for its existence, the hedge features butchered branches and a few daring leaves. Flowers are nowhere to be seen. It’s the show home of the health inspectors, who tour the island four times a year to see if your house and grounds are up to scratch. If not they’ll leave a note in your letterbox along the lines of 'pick up the rubbish' or 'mow the lawns.' Their commands are taken seriously, although these days the worst offenders don’t have their name put on the community notice board as they once did.

While driving along the coast my guide points out the raui signs. Raui is a ban on taking marine life between the markers, a request really since it is not enforceable except by social disapproval. "If an elder catches you, your name will be mud," she says.

For her part, my guide has already decided that her offspring, should she have any, will be brought up and educated in Rarotonga. As someone who has studied both at home and in Australia, she’s certain the discipline is better and character building, peer pressure non-existent, the academic standards higher and the teachers more dedicated in Rarotonga. And besides, it’s a hell of a lot more beautiful.

In fact it’s extravagantly beautiful. As the only high volcanic island in the Cooks, Rarotonga is blessed with steep mountains, rich volcanic soil and dense forests in the interior while the coast’s fertile base supports farming and an array of vivid fragrant flora which make the loveliest eis (lei is the Hawaiian term). Clean shallow lagoons and beaches with sand as fine and white as milled flour rim Rarotonga in an almost continuous line. And circling this volcanic island like a ring of safety is a coral reef, so close that you can hear the foaming waves crashing noisily in frustration upon the narrow barrier as you fall asleep each night.

Rarotonga is not only the largest island in the Cook Islands, it’s also the biggest population centre and as the only island with an international airport it is the entry point for all travellers to this collection of 15 islands.

So much so in fact that few people talk of going to the Cook Islands. They go to Rarotonga. Usually they go to bake on the beach in the time-honoured fashion of pale, work-exhausted tourists, but they can also snorkel, canoe, hike into the interior, 4WD, horse ride, visit the Cultural Centre and eat at any one of the island’s 20-plus restaurants. Which is where I met one of my relatives. A boy from the Rarotonga Resort Hotel noticed my name on the register and informed one Pieter Johannes van Dongen who rang and invited me to visit his restaurant, the Kikau Hut. And so it was that I came to be having a drink with the only relative I have ever met outside Holland or New Zealand at the island’s newest eating place.

After a few cursory inquiries it turns out that we are from the same branch of the van Dongen family (which I have to say it not an uncommon name in Holland), the branch with connections to the fauvist artist Kees van Dongen. His connections as great-nephew of Kees and friend of his daughter Dolly are rather better than mine as something or other number cousin.

So, as it turned out, are his connections elsewhere. His was a fantastic tale of business in New Zealand, a house in Austria, an art gallery in Hawaii, a Rembrandt in a safe in New York, Picassos, Dalis and of course van Dongens, among others. I was shown photos of some of his assets, including the biggest wooden bowl in the world, friends Tony Curtis and Anthony Quinn and a few of his son’s wedding in Rarotonga in which he flew 85 guests from Europe for the event.

And now owner and chef at the Kikau Hut. It scarcely seemed believable. Non-profit-making, high wages, cheap good food and the staff referred to as darling and princess and himself as Papa van Dongen. Nearing 60, Uncle Pieter, if I may call him that, says he has to do something with his time and he loves to help people. He also loves Rarotonga and he wouldn’t be the first.

I am reminded, as I talk with the paternal Pieter, of the ancient lure of the South Pacific, located somewhere in the imagination, home of dreams and oft-times failed ambitions. Like the Italians who planned to set up an ice-cream manufacturing industry. But nothing could be more evocative as an emblem of dreams in disarray than the unfinished shell of the Sheraton resort. Millions were spent on its construction and millions were lost by the time the developers pulled out - though the how and why of it is still unknown. The word now is that the idle resort has but two more years before the rot really sets in.

I put it down to the dancing. If you ask me, the reason the South Pacific has been able to pull the punters, who were on the whole male, is because of the way the women move their hips. As one early missionary observed "Respecting the morality of their dances, the less said the better; but the upaupa dance, introduced from Tahiti, is obscene indeed."

He’s not wrong. The sashaying hips are suggestive in the extreme and extraordinarily hard to copy, as you will find if you fall victim to participation time at a hotel’s island night. The dances themselves are similar to those seen anywhere in the South Pacific, but their execution is something else since Cook Islanders are reputed to be the best dancers in Polynesia. And they practice, practice, practice. From childhood on until perhaps they are good enough to enter the annual dance competition held every April.

Apart from catching a dance or two there’s one other must-do on Rarotonga. You’re going there anyway. The incoming flight arrives an hour before your plane pulls you out of paradise. Go to the sea wall by the runway. There’ll already be a crowd, peering into the distance. Then you’ll see it. The twin lights of the aircraft, first as pinpricks, then as big as the sky as the plane roars over you, the release of the undercarriage looking like the claws of a great bird about to pick you up and carry you away.

You’ll be awestruck, but mostly breathlessly grateful that the world is now so small the privilege of visiting Rarotonga is but hours away.

Articles

• More from Yvonne Van Dongen