Glow in the dark graves

Helen: Still loving Rarotonga. Been hiking twice, snorkelling, diving (where we were accompanied by Tommy the Trigger fish - he followed us around with his mouth open in the hope of being fed...) and even managed to hire Lasers (small one person dinghies - for me it was just like being back at school - I started to remember all the tricks we used to do - C wasn't very impressed when I started seeing how close to him I could tack, or when I practised the art of stealing someone else's wind...Oh well - dinghy sailing must be the only thing in the world I can do better than he can :) )

Rarotonga seems to be the Menorca or Costa del Sol of the Southern Hemisphere (except nicer) as there are lots of Aus and NZ tourists here and lots of bars and clubs. Even got C dancing last night. Only problem is that we have to keep reminding ourselves that, although everyone else is on holiday, we're not! This is our life - and we can't afford to go out every night!! But it has been fun so far. We had a BBQ at our hostel the other night and ended up drunkenly watching the Olympics at 1am. We have a pretty international crowd (Canadians, a German, a Swede and us Brits) so there was lots of friendly competition. I love the Olympics. When else do you get to watch women's weightlifting, or road cycle racing, or archery or table tennis or countless other obscure sports and be proudly patriotic about them?

Right, going to have to go soon as I'm being bitten to death by mossies. But that's about the only bad thing about this island. Other wise we're in love with the place - sunshine, motorbikes, tatoos, sailing - doesn't get much better than this! And, to top it all, it even gets cold here. Sounds odd, but after so long in the tropics it's nice to get a bit of variety in the climate. We've both worn our long trousers (pants - learning lots of Canadian English at the moment) and long sleeved tops and wooly hats, and we've used our sleeping bags. Knew there was a reason we've lugged them 10,000 miles around the world...Actually, it's a good thing the climate is changing - all our more summery clothes are beginning to look decidedly tramp like - I spent all day yesterday sewing patches on C's t-shirts and shorts. He now has a big flowery hand print on his bottom...

One final thing to tell you about before I go - all the houses here have family burial plots in their front gardens. I kid you not. They usually have at least 2 graves, but sometimes half a dozen. They're all above ground, rather than in the ground, as to put earth on a woman's body is considered very bad form. So people get buried in concrete tombs instead. It's very odd to see these graves outside people's houses for me as that's not at all what people do at home...but it does mean that they are nearly all very well tended, which is good - they nearly all have fresh flowers on - some even have 'glow in the dark' flowers that you can see at night...

OK, time to go
Lots of love
H & Cxx