Cook Islands 2016

First day, straight to the lagoon side.

Muri is the postcard - a shallow lagoon so clear it looks shopped, with small islands sitting out in the middle of it and the reef breaking beyond them. Lunch at a table on the sand looking at all of it, which set the tone for the three days.

Rarotonga is small enough that you can be anywhere on it in forty minutes. There is no reason to stay on one coast.

Over to the west side for the evening.

The island only has two coasts that matter and they do different jobs: Muri in the morning for the lagoon, Arorangi at night because that is the side the sun goes down on. Twenty minutes across and worth doing every day.

A day in the lagoon.

Took a kayak out to one of the motu, which is easier than it looks because the water is barely over your head the whole way and completely still inside the reef. Stopped over the coral heads on the way back with a mask on - nothing dramatic, just clear enough that you can see everything, including a blue starfish sitting on the sand doing nothing at all.

The road runs right along the water here. Even the drive is worth it.

Back across for the sunset, and stayed for the whole thing.

I have eleven photographs of this one evening and they are all more or less the same photograph, which tells you what the light was doing. The reef sits close enough in that the water inside it hardly moves, so the whole lagoon goes the colour of the sky.

Go about an hour before it drops. Reef shoes - the bottom here is coral rubble, not sand.

Diving on the last morning.

Out on the boat to the passage on the south side, where the lagoon drains out through a gap in the reef and the bottom drops away. Big coral heads with sand between them and blue going dark underneath. Two dives before lunch and I would have gone again.

You go when the boat says. The current through the passage decides the timetable, not you.

Lunch on a deck over the water, straight off the boat and still salty.

White tables, nothing between them and the lagoon, and the good sort of tired you get after a morning underwater.

Last afternoon back at Muri, doing nothing in particular.

Standing in water up to my knees that was clear enough to count the ripples in the sand, with the green peaks of the island behind and a motu of leaning palms in front. Three days is not long and it was long enough to be sorry about leaving.

Go back. Obviously go back.