Our Family Travel Logs: The coral atoll Island of Aitu

We boarded a small plane to Aitu Island about 45mins from Aitutaki and landed on the crushed coral run way on the small unique island. Aitu is a raised volcanic island surrounded by 6m cliffs of fossilised coral, erosion over millennia created the fertile inner ring of land with a central high plateau where the 500 Aituians live. As the people live in the centre of the island it seemed to be so much more hot and humid that the other islands that we stayed at. The circumventing ring of ancient exposed coral is covered in jungle and is difficult to navigate - jaggard and unstable. We did a tour to a local cave in this difficult terrain to see the Kopeka birds only found in Aitu (small swallow like birds that use sonar like bats to find their way into the caves to nest).

Our host on the island was Roger he came to the island as a PhD student in the 70's to study atmospheric physics and ended up staying marrying a local. He and his wife built the Aitu Villas self sufficient accommodation for tourists which are very charming, Roger organises the village cultural entertainment for guests (which looks like a party for the locals as they thoroughly enjoyed the night of feasting, playing tennis and sharing their music and dance with us too - not just a job).

We had a bit of high drama when we arrived, after only being there in the hut 30 mins Alex was lighting a match to cook lunch when the match flew up and got stuck bizarrely between his eye lids!!! After much flushing with water we asked to see the local Dr for supplies. Luckily the hospital clinic was attended by the islands only Dr and his nurse wife and toddler, sometimes its not manned we heard. The Dr was lovely he was from the Tuvalu Islands also in the Pacific but because of rising sea levels its future is dire so its not so ironic that he has settled on Aitu an island that is rising!