So, it was getting pretty warm. Time for a dip perhaps? Break out the snorkel? Sitting down for too long after walking, walking, walking every day was only possible for so long. The weirdest thing? Having the same scenery for more than about an hour starts to confuse the brain. You can’t tell what time it is, oddly. A confused sensation of timelessness arises from not having the last hour’s progress across the landscape to look back on. If space doesn’t change, then neither does the time. Strangely, time and space have become linked in my perception. And being lost in time - paused - we don’t really know what to do with ourselves!
Hmm… Fancy a walk?
The lagoon was warm, shallow and full of coral reefs and fish. I was expecting such, so before we left New Zealand I bought a little underwater camera to capture some of our aquatic antics.
The minuscule GoPro camera is fun to play with - there’s no focus or other settings, no view finder, I just set it to take pictures every few seconds (or video) and see what comes out. Best of all, it has a hilariously distorted fish eye lens!
This is it! What we’ve been waiting for for six months. WooHoo! Our own island. And it’s a-mazing! I know.. I’m sorry, i’ve just run out of adjectives here! But it really is as beautiful and tropical as it looks. I’m fully expecting there to be buried treasure on there and pirates to attack. Being marooned on your own private island is about as fantastic as life can get.
The Cook Island Mauri name for the Island is Tapuaetai, but the tourist friendly version is One Foot Island. I’ve heard a couple of different reasons for the name - The most likely one is it’s simply shaped a bit like a footprint. The more elaborate story is about father & son caught fishing in a no-fishing area of the lagoon many years ago. By following each others footsteps across the beach, the father was able to hide his son on the island and convince the approaching war party that he alone was guilty of the crime (punishment death!)
