You know that when you arrive at an airport at 2.40 in the morning and theres a cheery guy singing a welcome song that its going to be a friendly happy place!!

We had such a great time in the Cook Islands, we chose a great hostel which was on the west side of the island and it had a pool and hammocks on this amazing postcard perfect beach. We have never seen anywhere so stunning...there was white sand, turquiose water and palm trees swaying in the wind, the sea was like bath temperature and it was so hot! We felt relaxed as soon as we got there and we slipped into Island time quite nicely!!

We met some really great people staying at our hostel and we hung out with them quite a bit, most nights involved a few beers and some hammock swinging or should I say breaking, we even managed to get invited to someones wedding night. A canadian guy called Kevin was due to get married on the saturday but he spent the night before the wedding at our backpackers hostel and we all went out for dinner with him, the next day after he got married he invited us all over to his really posh apartment which had a waterfall, jaccuzi, marble floors and a little river flowing through it!! It was a really great night.

Rarotonga is so small you can drive round it in 45 minutes, me and Kam thought we would be healthy and hire some bikes and huffed and puffed our way round, it was lovely and peaceful cycling and the island is just so pretty we really enjoyed it! Another good thing about the island being so small is that when the planes come in you can go and stand at the end of the runway....something known as jetblasting! Most of the flights come in at night but on Wednesday and Sundays theres a flight that comes in in the afternoon. We went down there and it was really scary to see the plane coming straight at you, it was really noisy and my skirt blew up in the air as it flew over us!

We went to an amazing beach called Muri on the island and it was so lovely, there was a lagoon you could wade accross to another little island and the water was only waist deep. We saw some people getting married on the beach and it looked so romantic. We also did a bit of snorkling and alot of wallowing in the warm water!

We went to Island night one night and that was all the traditional dancing and instruments, I think Kam quite enjoyed watching the girls dancing as they had amazing hip movements! They tried to get people from the audience to join in but luckily we didnt get picked. We seemed to do something every night there that usually involved alcohol, we met some really funny dutch guys who invented a dragon pose (well they copied it from Starsky and Hutch) and then that became the Rarotongan thing to do after a few beers....do the dragon!

Its really hard to write about our time there now as we are sitting in the freezing cold! Hopefully our pictures will say it all (if we ever find somewhere to upload them) We really miss the Cooks and we wish we had stayed a little bit longer, there were the best 3 little cats at our hostel Marmalade, 50 cent and tabby....they were so cute and everyone fed them crisps and anything else they could find. Marmalade broke into our room one night and woke us up...we thought he was a huge rat!

Anyway I think anyone who is seriously stressed out with life should just go and spend some time in the Cooks and experience Island time, me and Kam just had the best time ever there and are gutted we didnt stay longer :-(