Why the Cook Islands remain unchanged despite increased tourism

Opinion

In this new series, My Happy Place, Traveller’s writers reflect on the holiday destinations in Australia and around the world that they cherish the most.

January 8, 2026 — 4:55am

Since Jetstar started flying there direct from Sydney three times a week for the first time a couple of years back, many more of you have been visiting my happy place. But you won’t change it; Rarotonga has barely changed at all since I was born there 50-odd years ago.

Rarotonga, Cook Islands. Despite increasing tourist numbers, the island has barely changed in 50 years.Cook Islands Tourism

I was raised in a timber A-frame in Aorangi (on Rarotonga’s west coast) so close to the lagoon every decent storm we’d have to save our pet duck from the seawater flowing up the sand and into her enclosure. I learnt to swim in that lagoon – like the rest of the island kids – dog paddling from the beach out to the coral heads and back again as mum watched from the shore.

When they were satisfied I would stay afloat, my parents wouldn’t see me for entire weekends. All kids were of the free-range variety back then: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the Polynesian version. But what did our parents have to worry about? Traffic – what there was of it – moved at walking pace, and everyone, everywhere, looked out for us. Cook Islanders have long had a tradition of raising others’ kids (the Maori call it Whangai, where a child is raised by another family in an informal adoption arrangement). We were all kin back then. We still are.

I moved to Australia before I hit double digits, but Rarotonga’s always been my happy place. Dad stayed on and lived there for 55 years. He’s passed now, but my family still has a home there. It’s not the original one – that burnt down in the ’80s – but it’s the closest thing to a family home I’ve got. It backs onto the entrance of Muri Lagoon where Polynesian voyagers launched their vaka (canoes) 650 years ago, to go and discover Aotearoa.

From the top deck, my family watched the moon rise across the passage. On the other side of our house, I can never stop looking at the big, green, triangular mountains of the hinterland. People rave about the lagoons up here, but it’s the mountains you all end up staring at.

Arriving in Raro is always a time warp: the years disappear, I might as well be seven again.

When I was a kid, I was scared of them. Kids at school told me about huge marae (a communal or sacred place) deep in the hinterland where human skulls were stacked up high on tree branches. But now there’s something about those mountains that placates me, no matter what’s going on in my head.

In Rarotonga, all I need do is walk a few hundred metres inland from the lagoon and it’s another world from this one we’re all living in. Locals tend to their arrowroot and taro plantations and there’s more goats, pigs and horses than cars on the old inland road (Ara Metua).

The author as a baby on Rarotonga with his parents.

Rarotonga’s capital, Avarua, never did get a traffic light, or a high-rise building. No building should be taller than the tallest coconut tree – it’s the law. Entire extended families still sit drinking tea on top of the graves of their parents and grandparents in their front yards: how’s that for a unique sort of Cook Islands family get-together? There’s Netflix and fast internet now (where we once had the only video player on Rarotonga) but families still gather outside by the lagoon most evenings while they burn off all the green waste they raked up, and mowed, in their quest to be the tidiest house on the block.

The sunset bars and restaurants of my old neighbourhood, Aorangi, seem even more rustic now than when mum and dad took us there as kids. Just before he died, I’d take dad down to his favourite one (Shipwreck Hut Bar & Restaurant) for a beer with old friends talking about times long gone, as the sun set into the lagoon. He mostly had his back to it all – old expats aren’t the sentimental type – but I know it touched him all the same.

The author watching the sunset with his niece.

Though mum visits Rarotonga more than I do these days, the past couple of years she’s started crying every time a local plays a ukulele and sings. They’ve got those dreamy sort of voices which never miss a note, that I missed out on as a Papa’a (westerner). But then I can’t talk; lately I’ve been getting teary just smelling tiare Maori (a gardenia that smells like heaven) on the breeze the moment I walk down the steps of the plane that brought me home.