Come with me to Rarotonga

Virtually, that is because although I’d love to take you all with me on my fantasy private jet, or yacht, I don’t possess one and it’s a looong taxi ride to the South Pacific from Chester, UK.

Rarotonga is a small volcanic island within the Cook Islands 21 degrees south of the equator with strong New Zealand links. With a population of 13,000 on an area of 67 square kilometres (a quarter of the area of Palm Springs) it was the ideal isolated warm island to locate the refugees from the infectious amnesia epidemic annhialating the planet in ARIA. Most of Book two ARIA: Returning Left Luggage and half of Book three (ARIA: Abandoned Luggage) is set on Rarotonga. I hope the real inhabitants don’t mind.

It’s an idyllic island with its extinct volcano now mostly green with vegatation and rich with banana plantations and other tropical plants. There’s bascially one main road that circumnavigates the island linking the small towns to the capital of Avarua. Of course ARIA is a fiction but as a former geography teacher I like to get as much of the setting right. At least for it to FEEL real to the readers – smells, sights, touch and so on. I was able to chat to a couple of residents of the island through the gaming site http://www.itsyourturn.com and not for the first time have I used friends there! They know who I mean don’t you Martin, Susan, Paul, Steven, Marianne, Dru, Kerry and many more.

Rarotonga was ideal for me as my intrepid refugees including Brits and the international crew of the Shuttle needed an isolated spot where the chances of the infectious amnesia virus reaching them was low. Of course I had to have boatloads of the infected try to reach them and the consequences of their attempted incursions make up much of the adventure aspects of ARIA: Returning Left Luggage. Using a real place like Rarotonga made it real for me, as I hope it does to readers. Do you prefer real places in your books?