Temperate Island to Tropical Island

About 23 years ago, I was sitting in an Anthropology class at UCSB called Romantic Love on the Island of Mangaia when the professor inserted a quick comment in her lecture. She said something like, “By the way, I’ve been everywhere in the South Pacific and if you want to go to the most beautiful island, go to Aitutaki.” She then proceeded with her lecture on the sexual mores of teenage boys and girls on the isolated island of Mangaia in the Southern Cooks Islands, where she had lived and observed the native people.

I wrote down the word Aitutaki and never forgot it. ‘Aitutakibound’ was my bank password for the next 15 years or so. (Not anymore.) You see, I always had a fascination with islands. I wanted to be deserted on a tropical island, like in the movie The Blue Lagoon. I responded to a high school survey about the future, saying I’d be living on an island in 20 years. I worked on Catalina Island one summer in college, and later worked for Islands Magazine after graduating. I got stunning posters of Bora Bora and Moorea from the magazine and they beautified my walls as I dreamed of one day visiting them.

Oddly enough, my family and I moved here to Orcas Island almost 20 years to the day of my saying that I’d be living on an island in 20 years. (I was originally imagining a tropical island, but who’s complaining.) And shockingly, my husband booked a spontaneous trip for us to Aitutaki, where we just spent three jaw-dropping, relaxing, sweaty, beautiful weeks.

I think the strangest thing is that I never planned for any of this to happen. I simply vocalized my dreams. How is it that I married someone who would eventually want to live on an island too? And how is it that my husband happened to be looking at travel deals when we weren’t planning to go anywhere, and upon finding fantastic deals, he booked the trip?

The moral of the story: Dream. Vocalize your dreams. Keep your sights way above your current horizon. You just never know where your dreams will take you.

Here is a pictorial journey of a rural, beautiful, 7-square-mile island surrounded by umpteen miles of calm, shallow, crystal-clear lagoon water guarded from the deep-water waves by a protective barrier reef all around.

The people of the island speak English and are kind, generous, and friendly. There is only one flight each Sunday, with about 25 tourists onboard. The local people own their land and pass it down to their children; no one sells it to outsiders, so there are only a couple resorts, who lease the land for a set amount of time from the local people. In other words, we bobbed in the bathwater-warm ocean watching the stunning sunset each night, and sometimes we were the only people in sight up and down the whole beach.

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We returned to find we had missed the biggest snow event since moving to Orcas Island. It had been an extraordinarily mild winter up until we left – daffodils were even popping out of the ground in spring-like air – but temperatures dropped dramatically when we were gone. Freezing air from the northeast blew in as wind speeds reached 90 miles per hour, and a woman said that as she drove past Moran State Park, she could hear the powerful, ominous sound of huge trees slamming to the ground. School was shut down for 5 days and businesses closed. Most people couldn’t leave their driveways. I love that everywhere else can handle snow, but everything stops here.

We went from living out our days in swimsuits, cracking coconuts, and avoiding the extreme intensity of midday sun to layering with wool and down, and huddling around a fire.

Ahhh….what a dream it was. Thank you, husband.

Here are some videos if you’d like a closer look…