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Island thyme orcas island11/27/2023 Say no no no to Aitutaki Sunday flights.” The island is almost 100% Christian. The gentle pastels of one of the sunsets.Fruit is everywhere: here is coconut, soursop (cherimoya), and papaya (“paw paw”).The water is about waist-deep for about a half-mile out to the reef.A house just steps from the water, owned by locals, and shockingly affordable.An amazing sight in the middle of the vast deep-blue ocean.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. 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. There is only one flight each Sunday, with about 25 tourists onboard. The people of the island speak English and are kind, generous, and friendly. 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. You just never know where your dreams will take you. Keep your sights way above your current horizon. 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? I think the strangest thing is that I never planned for any of this to happen. (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. 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 got stunning posters of Bora Bora and Moorea from the magazine and they beautified my walls as I dreamed of one day visiting them. I worked on Catalina Island one summer in college, and later worked for Islands Magazine after graduating. I responded to a high school survey about the future, saying I’d be living on an island in 20 years. I wanted to be deserted on a tropical island, like in the movie The Blue Lagoon. (Not anymore.) You see, I always had a fascination with islands. ‘Aitutakibound’ was my bank password for the next 15 years or so. I wrote down the word Aitutaki and never forgot it. 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. 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.
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