The Little Mail Carriers’ adventure in the Pacific continues! After their first stops, they’re back on the move with their hosts Andry and Maret (aka andry1961 and Cerres), island-hopping through the ocean in search of postcards, post offices and friendly postal people. This time, they’ve landed in Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands — where time does funny things, rain showers are frequent, and the friendly post office is definitely worth a visit!
Our plane left Auckland for the next island on the morning of September 6th. After a three-and-a-half-hour flight, we arrived in Rarotonga, Cook Islands, on September 5th, at 2:30 in the afternoon. It felt like a magical journey back in time to the previous day, without us even realizing it!
The Cook Islands consist of 15 islands. We visited the main island, Rarotonga — an almost perfectly round island surrounded by beautiful azure waters and coral reefs. Snorkeling to observe turtles and colorful fish is as easy as stepping into the water; you don’t even need a boat. The indigenous people here are Polynesians, and the official languages are English and their own version of Māori. Amidst the enchanting natural beauty, there’s an interesting rule: no building on the island can be taller than a palm tree, although the palm trees here were impressively tall.
The Cook Islands were named by the Baltic-German Admiral Adam Johan von Krusenstern (born not far from the point where we started our trip in Estonia) in 1820 in his book Atlas de l’Ocean Pacifique, after British Captain James Cook, who visited the islands in 1770.
The history of the Cook Islands is closely intertwined with England and New Zealand, but since 1965, they have been in free association with New Zealand. Two weeks after our visit, the USA recognized Cook Islands sovereignty and established diplomatic relations. We did also our best in developing these new diplomatic relations and even sent a couple of postcards to the United States!
During our stay, there were heavy rain showers every day, which helped us stay engaged in our favorite activity: preparing postcards for mailing and visiting the post office! All post from here will be sent to Auckland and only then distributed worldwide.
The post office in the capital, Avarua, was a bustling place. Unlike the previous two smaller islands, there were many tourists here, and some of them had postcards in their hands. Most tourists were from New Zealand and Australia. The majority of Cook Islanders also hold New Zealand citizenship. Also local music here was different from the previous islands. In addition to the drums we could hear skillful ukulele players in the evenings in different places. But people with smiles were as welcoming as on the previous days.
In the post office, we made some new friends, and hopefully, some of them will become postcrossers in the future. The post office’s staff, Caroline and Ophelia, greeted us with smiles and helped us get our stamps and took our postcards. We did the cancellation of the postal stamps in the postcards ourselves (with the help of our fellow travelers, of course).
A big thank you to Andry and Maret for taking the Little Mail Carriers along on this wonderful journey, and to Caroline and Ophelia at the Avarua post office for helping all those postcards on their way! Their Pacific adventure isn’t over yet though! Next time, they’ll be heading somewhere even more remote, where mail has quite a journey… Stay tuned! ✈️
