Cook Islands Vacation

simon@corston-oliver.com

Mo and I went to the Cook Islands on vacation in October, 1998. The Cook Islands is an independent country, NE of New Zealand, between Tonga and Tahiti, with strong historical and contemporary connections to New Zealand. For a better sense of where it is, check this page.

What can we say? The Cook Islands is a beautiful South Pacific paradise. The population is overwhelmingly made up of the indigenous Polynesians, who are closely related to the Maori of New Zealand. As linguists, we were thrilled to find that Cook Islands Maori was alive and well and functioning as the dominant language--there were only a few occasions when we heard locals conversing with each other in English. (Of course, there are also some other languages spoken in the Cook Islands, like the Samoic outlier spoken on Puka Puka.) On the other hand, there was never an occasion when we weren't able to converse in English. Everyone seemed to speak totally fluent New Zealand English -- most people spoke a closer approximation to NZE than what I do these days, now that I have been living abroad for so many years. We somehow managed to resist the temptation to go beyond the game of "spot the cognates", and didn't once grab a notebook and try to do formal elicitation.

We spent our time snorkeling, playing Scrabble, going for walks, exploring, and zooming around on a little scooter, and managed to not get too sunburnt. We divided our time between the "bustle" of Rarotonga, the main island, and the quieter backwaters of Aitutaki, the second largest island.

The picture pages are organized thematically. I have tried to keep the preview pictures to well under 30K in size. For higher resolution pictures, click on a preview. I have designed these pages for viewing at 1024x768 or better, although I have tried to make sure that each preview is viewable at 800x600. If you move the pointer over the bottom right corner of a preview, it will tell you how large the full-size version is.

Preamble Buildings Dancing Coconut husking

Graves Market Rural Scenes

Simon and Mo Miscellaneous