Time travelling - Sat 4th / Fri 3rd Jan

It wouldn't be a Thomas holiday without a smidge of drama on the first day :) We sailed through finding the prepaid carpark in Auckland, and battling the Jetstar bag drop machine which quite clearly did not wish to send our bags to Rarotonga (spoiler, it did all arrive ok). The queues at customs were quite lengthy but we reached our gate with time to spare. After purchasing a quick snack it was time to board the bus to cross the tarmac to our waiting plane. Jetstar prepaid food was slightly average, but we remained optimistic.

On arrival in Rarotonga, we were enveloped by the heat and humidity as we stepped off the plane, even after dark. After purchasing at duty free, we were quite late out of the airport with only a few tourists and security staff left. Our hire car (van, think large van, embarrassingly large but practical van), which was meant to be waiting in the carpark for us, was not. With a large pile of cases, we sent runners to each end of the carpark, searching for the promised van with our name in the windscreen - no sign. When I called the office, I reached their after hours message, telling me the number of the breakdown after hours service. The lovely gent who answered this number told me where the cars normally wait for pickup, but did not know any of the details of our booking as he was the breakdown guy. Cue, two extremely kind locals to save us. One very lovely lady checked out all the likely vans for us, checked our booking and then offered to ride her scooter down the road to the hire place base as there was a van we could see sitting outside there. She came back (already exceeding our increasingly pessimistic expectations) to say the van was locked and had no label. She spoke to the company on the phone who advised her that our booking had been cancelled in November! I showed her some emails from the last four days where I had been sorting out the payment for my supposed 'cancelled' booking. She gave me the phone to talk to the company, who continued to protest that our booking had been cancelled, then she eventually took it back and said they needed to come down and give us the van that was sitting there and sort out the details tomorrow, as these 8 people were sitting in the carpark and the airport was closed and noone else was around and there was definitely no taxi that could take us to our accommodation (slightly factually inaccurate as our other 'hero' was the local taxi driver who waited with us until our van came as he didn't want us to be sitting there on our own with no way to get anywhere!) They said they would come in 10 minutes, and our lovely lady scooted off into the darkness. A few minutes later there was activity at the rental shop, Peter went over and came back with a very large van. They were pretty reluctant to hand it over, and we still have to go back in the morning to sort out the details. I suspect there will be an even higher reluctance on our part to give the key back, especially since our booking was apparently not cancelled enough to prevent the full payment being made today.

But the struggle only served to make the possession of a van all the sweeter, and we eventually, and with some backtracking and just the one incident of doorknocking on a random place at 10pm, managed to find our accommodation. Which is absolutely stunning. Two bedrooms downstairs and three upstairs, and a pool which Kat and Amelie took at least five minutes to get into. Compulsory cannonballs from everyone in the house, and the stresses of the day melted away and we fell into Rarotonga holiday mode. We are looking forward to seeing the island by daylight in the morning.

Our home for the week came equipped with an array of tropical fruit which we bravely tried and enjoyed - papaya, white (!) passionfruit - huge and full of sweet pulp, watermelon and tropical bananas. It's now nearly 1am on Saturday morning, and, once we have said goodnight to all our mini lizard friends, we will fall into bed, ready for the markets, and some awkward conversations with the car hire place, tomorrow morning.