travel

A Regular Pim Department

Reporting News Of South

Seas Tourism And Travel

From The Inside

keep your

eye on the Cooks

rpHE atolls and islands of the Gool A Group are small and isolated, j far flung aggregate of only 93 squan miles of land rising out of 850,0(M square miles of ocean. There are U islands, lying almost exactly in th( centre of the South Pacific—astridt the 160th meridian and 1,660 mile: nor’east of New Zealand. Tahiti i: some 650 miles to the east of the main island of Rarotonga, and Samo< is 750 miles in the other direction To the south the ocean stretches awaj to the Roaring Forties and tc Antarctica.

Cook Islanders are New Zealand citizens, but since Atigust, 1965, they have been internally self-governing with a New Zealand High Commis sioner representing the Queen. A Premier and a Cabinet handle the business of the day.

You travel by ship

The traveller gets to the Cooks by ship—either in the 2,750-ton Moanc Roa, which makes monthly calls tc Rarotonga from New Zealand, or ir the Matson liners Mariposa and Monterey, which call alternatively every three weeks on the south-bound voyages from the US. There are occasional cruise ships, such as the Bergensfjord, which makes a dramatic picture on p. 41 as it anchors off Rarotonga against a remarkable moutainous backdrop.

No regular air service these days calls at the Rarotonga airstrip (below), for it is too short for the commercial aircraft available to use it. But there are plans to extend that strip so that more travellers may see the Cooks, and the Cook’s official policy now is to encourage them. So keep your eye on the Cooks.

Extended airstrip or not, the visitor will still need to travel by sea to reach the fascinating outer islands such as Mauke (right top), and Mitiaro (right, below). In the outer islands you land through the surf and take your chances with the rest. But what’s a little tropical rain? The photos are by Van Eijk and Meers. ■

When work began recently on the foundations of the new Travelodge Hotel, next to the Grand Pacific, at Suva, a problem was to locate wartime tank traps, of steel rails embedded in concrete, which were thrown into the area for fill after the war. They were pinpointed in this aerial photograph, taken by the Fiji PRO in 1946; then carefully counted and removed without further trouble (right).

Hotel Takes

Shape

Work is going ahead steadily on Fiji's late luxury hotel, the Fijian Hotel, on the beach Yanuca, about two hours from Nadi internation airport. This is the unusual dining room, bui on a rocky promontory, overlooking the reef ar beach. The photograph was taken from the r ception area. All photographs on this page ai by Rob Wright.