The Cook Islands

Welcome to the Cook Islands and the middle of no-where! In fact the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Here's a confusing tale of time for you all. We flew on Saturday 30th at 2pm from New Zealand and landed in Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands, on Friday 29th at 10.40pm. When we woke the next day, it was Saturday the 30th all over again, which made that particular Saturday, the longest Saturday of my life, literally. When we left New Zealand, we were 13 hours ahead of you guys and now we're 10 hours behind you, so while you were all celebrating midnight and 2007, we were sunbathing by our pool at 2pm New Years Eve! How weird is that? Answers on a postcard, even though I know how and why, I'm still confused :)
Rarotonga is 32k in diameter and takes 2 hours to ride around the whole island on a bike, apparently. The island is surrounded on all sides by a reef which looks amazing and will get some pics up soon. There are about 15 islands that people live on in the group, but probably loads of other smaller ones too, Rarotonga has a population of about 18,000, but you see very few people walking around, one of the other islands I saw in the LP, has a population of 2 :)
Since we got here 2-3 days ago, the most we have done is get our lazy bums out onto the sun loungers by the pool, the only exception was last night, New Years, when we managed to drag ourselves to the beach for some late night drinks. It was a very pleasant affair, me and Samantha, some cheap fizz and the odd hound, Sam has indeed now started making friends with dogs again. It was pretty cool sitting on a beach in the South Pacific, something that dreams are made of really and here we were living that dream, kinda weird :)
Happy New Year to you all and we'll see you in 2 weeks!!!