Atiu, Bless You

‘There’s only one rule on the beach,’ says Mr Tom. ‘Don’t sit under a coconut tree.’ I bear it in mind later that afternoon when I walk barefoot down to the beach from the back of Mr Tom’s Cottage, carrying a glass of pinot noir and a feeling of goodwill after my first day on Aitutaki, one of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. I walk away from the coconut palms that seem to run like a fringe round the entire length of the island, and to the edge of the banana shaped beach that crescents out on either side.

The sand dazzles me. The sea is turquoise and the sky deep blue. I take a sip of the wine, which like most local produce is imported from New Zealand, and look for a spot in the shade where I can drink in the moment and avoid plummeting coconuts. Along the beach a dark little heron is crouched in the shallows fishing. A young couple, just arrived on the afternoon plane from the main island, Rarotonga, are already strolling hand-in-hand along the sand. It’s tempting to say that it’s like a picture postcard, except the truth is that a picture postcard is a hopeless attempt to convey moments like this.

At Ralphie’s that night, the main restaurant/bar/hang-out on Aitutaki, I start with Eke Taakari, curried octopus in coconut cream. ‘It’s so tender,’ I tell the waitress when she asks how I’m enjoying it. ‘I know,’ she says with a smile, ‘he just finished cooking it and I just finished sampling it.’ Should I follow it with fresh tuna, wahoo, or parrot fish and chips? No, I’m in a curry mood so it’s curried goat with rice and banana, and a few glasses of the house red. I eat in Ralphie’s four times in my three days on Aitutaki, and every time the PA seems to be playing ‘I Wanna have Sex on the Beach’.

Next morning I think about death; not through too much wine, curry or, alas, sex on the beach, but because I have my breakfast at the Café Tupuna sitting at a table next to the grave of John D. Harrington, Lt. Col. in the US Air Force, World War II, Jan 12 1911-Mar 19 1976. In the Cook Islands they bury the family’s loved ones prominently in the front garden or next to the house. John Harrington served on the island during the war, and came back and married a local girl, who now runs the café. What at first seems macabre soon becomes moving, keeping thoughts of the person with you all the time instead of in some seldom-visited cemetery.

I fall into conversation with an elderly American guy who has sold up and moved to Aitutaki, and who gives me his theory on travel. ‘Tourists go and expect everywhere to be like home. Travellers go and make anywhere their home. Aitutaki is for travellers. You’re here for three days? Not enough.’

So I try to make the most of it and set off to walk round the island, a feat which could be achieved in a few hours on the rough road that encircles it, if you didn’t keep getting distracted by beaches, wildlife and the sheer damn beauty of the place. There are white frangipani trees, red hibiscus, breadfruit trees, banana palms and mango trees as huge as English oaks, bearing hundreds of fruit, the road beneath squashy with the fallen bounty. A group of six tiny brown piglets dashes across in front of me, moving in rapid unison like a school of fish.

The road is now a dirt track, and by the side of it are hundreds of holes, like burrows. I’m just wondering whether they’re rats or rabbits, when a huge crab the size of a cat scuttles away and levers itself neatly down one of them. Just when I’d thought the island was perfectly safe for wandering round – there are no dogs on Aitutaki, no snakes, and even the few mosquitoes are non-malarial – I discover there are crabs big enough to drag you down a hole and eat you as a side salad. I continue the walk nervously, and jump out of my skin when there’s a sudden ‘whoosh’ a few feet behind me, followed by the thud of a coconut hitting the deck. Knowing that coconut crabs climb trees, I wonder if they’re trying to tenderise me first.

If Aitutaki was a peaceful idyll, it was Manhattan compared to Atiu. Atiu is an even smaller island in the Cooks, pronounced in a way that makes you want to say ‘Bless you’ every time you hear it. The Cooks are cheap and easy to get about by inter-island plane, once you’ve got used to the fact that the pilot will be reading the local paper as soon as the plane is safely cruising, or eating his sandwiches.

It’s a cliché to describe a place as being friendly because everyone smiles and says hello to you. As I sat in the sun outside the guesthouse on Atiu – and I say ‘the’ because it is the only guesthouse – reading my paperback and having a cup of coffee, people I’d never met before were walking by and saying ‘Hello, Mike’. Then I realised that I was the only tourist on the island, and half the kids had been round asking me: ‘What is your name?’ By now everyone on Atiu knew the tourist was called Mike.

The previous day there had been two of us, as I shared the guesthouse with a backpacker called Simon, who impressed me by telling me that his brother was in the Abba tribute band, Bjorn Again. Cool. Though I was disappointed that he didn’t offer to sing Fernando when we went to the tumunu. Mind you, he must have been nervous, as it’s not every day you meet the Deputy Prime Minister: Norman George, Deputy PM of the Cook Islands and the Atiu MP. And a popular bloke he was, having legalised illegal drinking. The tumunu are also known as bush beer schools, where a bunch of men congregate after a hard day’s work and knock back home brew in a boozy and rowdy yet strangely formal ceremony. Till recently these tumunu were strictly against the law, then Norman George introduced a bill in Parliament late one night which legalised this Atiu tradition, and the few tired fellow MPs who were present didn’t realise what they’d voted for till they read the scandalised newspaper headlines the next day.

This was Sam’s tumunu, and the motley gathering of men sitting round on tree stumps was fondly known as Sam’s Boys. It seemed appropriate that Norman George was a dead ringer for Norm from Cheers, though any similarity between Sam Kautai and Sam Malone would have to have been made after a few dozen coconuts full of bush beer. The barman, Teata Bob, sat in the middle and filled the coconut shell (not much bigger than a large eggcup, in fact) with beer from a white plastic barrel. He handed the shell to each man in turn, who drained it in one go and handed it back. In-between times the men chewed the fat, cracked jokes and got slowly merry. The beer was a mix of malt, hops and sugar, and tasted quite pleasant, like a sweet scrumpy. One bit of conversation drifted across from the far side of the circle, and the line I heard will stay with me forever: ‘He was circumcised but they cut off the wrong bit’.

After a while, Teata Bob tapped the side of the barrel with the coconut shell, and drew the men to order. He murmured a prayer in Cook Islands Maori, which another man took up and translated into English. It welcomed us to the tumunu, from our countries far away, and told us how welcome we were on Atiu, and how we should go away and tell our friends what a lovely place it was. Then each man in turn was required to say a few words about himself by way of introduction, before a guitar, a ukulele and a tea-chest bass were brought out. The bass fascinated me, the single string running up from one corner to the bar of a wooden cross attached to the opposite corner. The player tilted the bar up and down to get a range of bass notes.

If the bass was a surprise, the first number certainly was: that famous South Pacific melody, Old McDonald’s Farm. After that came an approximation of I’m Sitting On Top of the World, followed by some Maori songs in the kind of harmony that can only be achieved if both singers and listeners are slightly sozzled. Likewise the sentiments that were sincerely expressed in the final song, whose gist was: Come back to Atiu, come back to Atiu island. Don’t worry, I thought. I will, I will.