Untraveller

Next morning was our session with the Cook Island so it was an early rise. The hotel put on a buffet breakfast, which was lovely, and we collected our hire car for the drive to the Met Service. It was located by the airport runway so the drive was only a few minutes. And it was at this point that I got to see the wonder of Rarotonga. A small circular island rising from the sea up to a high peak right in the centre.

Cook Islands

Such was my lack of knowledge of the region, many of the countries we were to visit on these missions where ones I never heard of before. I was aware of a few: like Fiji, Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guiana… and the Cook Islands. The flight to Cook Islands was rough. There was no direct flight from Melbourne so we had to fly to Auckland first. I can’t remember exactly when we left Melbourne but I do remember the flight to Rarotonga being delayed, and us departing Auckland after midnight.

Nothing exciting happened the following two days apart from work. We ate at the restaurant on the Monday night, under my request, and here we ran into another French inspiration, which was peanuts in the salad dressing. As someone who’s allergic to peanuts, I can say that the rest of the evening was altogether not pleasant (fortunately my allergy does not require me to administer an epipen; it just causes a few hours of discomfort).

Sunday was our day to explore the island a bit. We dedicated most of the day travelling around the coast of Efate island. And I’ll be honest, I’m struggling to remember much of it. I do recall us travelling through a little bit of a forest, near the southern end where the road peels away from the coast. I recall us visiting Emua, and also of some interesting hills we had to drive through near the north west.

Vanuatu

I didn’t know much about Vanuatu before I arrived (well, you can pretty much say that about most of the islands I visited) but it’s meant to be quite a popular tourist destination. Not as popular as say Fiji or the Cook Islands, but talking to a few relatives a couple of years after I made these trips, it turns out that they actually visited the islands themselves while on a cruise.

Our flight out was early afternoon so during the morning of our last day, we hoped to go site seeing one last time. The weather was not cooperative though. In fact, it was pretty awful. It rained, and rained, and rained some more. It rained so hard that when we did head out to look around, our visibility so bad that we barely saw the road in front of us.

One of the days we stayed there — I can’t remember which — we decided to go to the Nadi city centre to look around. The city centre was several kilometres down Queens Road and was probably the size of a large country town, with a central commercial district and a number of houses nearby. It was dusk when we set out (this was May and it got dark after we finished our work for the day) so we didn’t have much to see.

Next day was work. Fiji is a bit of a regional hub so they had quite a large met service. The actions there were more or less the same as most other places so I won’t say too much about that. We hired a car to commute to the met office, located on the other side of the airport. We got a tour of the station on the second day. The usual assortment of instruments were there, although one interesting instrument they had was something that detected ionised radiation present in atomic explosions.

Fiji

Of all the places we’ve visited, Fiji was the one I’ve actually been to before (not including our transfers). We went there as a family in 2000, shortly after the coup. First time I saw someone with an automatic weapons was when I was leaving Nadi airport (the second was Papua New Guinea). It was probably just as well I got an opportunity to see it back then as we didn’t get a chance to see much in Fiji this time, unfortunately.

We left early Wednesday morning. Getting to the airport was not a problem but the airport was closed off for departing passengers for a while. I’m sure it was just routine or similar, but I won’t lie to you, I did want to get home. After making our way through an equally small departure building, we boarded the plane for Nadi. We landed there at around midday, and were required to stay for about five or six hours for our connecting flight back to Melbourne.