Roratonga

Our next stop was another small volcanic island, Roratonga, the largest of the Cook Islands. This was also our first weather change after 2 weeks of 80+ and sunshine. Mostly cloudy with
occasional rain showers. This is the rainy season for the South Pacific, so not unexpected. Roratonga is too small to dock a large ship, so we anchored off-shore and used the ships tenders.
It was rather windy in the morning, and we were very concerned that the Captain would cancel tender service, but he decided to go ahead.

Went for a 4x4 tour of the island in the morning. We were able to drive to one summit, where Phil took advantage of good coverage and phoned home. A slightly higher and steeper road was too slippery for our guide, though. Left to our own we’d have tried it, but he had to be concerned with his passenger’s safety, so didn’t.



Instead we visited a pretty waterfall, where the expected interaction of Margie and water occurred. The blur in the middle of the second picture is her jumping off the rock.













Mid-day when we returned to the dock, the wind had picked up and tender service was
temporarily suspended, and we couldn’t get back aboard for lunch. So we wandered the town for
an hour until our afternoon tour of a rain forest hike.

And the rain forest lived up to it’s name. Rainy and muddy. And verdant and beautiful! Not
many pictures worth sharing, what with rain and difficult lighting, but we had fun. And mud
washes off. If you look real close to the right hand picture below, smack dab in the middle is a
tree with bare branches and brown pods. Those are fruit bats - flying foxes. And if you look
even closer you can see what looks like a brown bird just to the left of the tree - that’s one of
them. Wingspan of about one meter, but too far away to get good pictures.

And then back to the pier to reboard the ship. The wind had not abated, but now they really
needed to get all passengers aboard. So we had the best tender ride of our lives. Better than any
roller coaster! Some passengers were various shades of white and green, but others were
whooping and hollering. You can probably guess which category we were in. We took a video
of the ride, but at 57MB it’s WAAAAAAAY too big to upload at current access speeds, so it will
have to wait until we get home. Come visit and we’ll show you what a tender ride SHOULD be
like.