Susan Buckland: No need for a penthouse here

COMMENT

If your temporary lodging had sweeping views of the ocean, would you mind if it were a shipping container? Ron and Eva Abercrombie don't mind.

When Ron has finished building their permanent home they will close the door on their container pad. But that may not be soon.

Ron has been building the house for five years, and a few more are likely to pass before he finishes the job. The view is dazzling and a man can't work all the time.

He sits down for a cuppa with Eva and they take in the scenery. There is peace all round except for the occasional plop of a ripe mango falling from a tree in the garden.

I came upon Ron and Eva in the Cook Islands. With a friend, I had chugged up a potholed track on a motor-scooter for a panoramic view of the brilliant blue lagoon surrounding the island.

When I thought I could take the bumps no longer, a building rose from the bush. And there, in the middle of the half-finished house, its owners were sitting on a couple of Warehouse plastic chairs.

Most of the walls were still to be built, but happily that meant unobstructed views of the shimmering lagoon and the ocean breaking on the reef.

They beckoned us to join them. From the 1950s, when New Zealander Ron and Aitutaki-born Eva began travelling from Auckland to the island, they planned to build a house near the top of Mt Pirake. In due course a container was hauled up the track and hooked to a generator, and they began.

Eva keeps it spotlessly clean. They are very comfortable, she says. If it gets too hot they sleep under the stars. Tropical balm for most of the year and always knockout views. In their modest way they have it made.

From their house I watched a boat taking day-trippers to the fringe of tiny uninhabited motu (coral islands). The day before I had been there, snorkelling along a coral cliff darting with little fish.

Ron and Eva have seen plenty of comings and goings on the lagoon. They used to watch the Teal (now Air New Zealand) flying boats land and take off, sending foaming shafts in their wake.

And almost everyone who was on the island in 1955 remembers how a flying boat had to leave its 40 passengers behind while it took off for Tahiti on 3 engines to repair the other engine.

Can you picture the pigskin luggage stacked on the sand and indignant passengers asking to be taken immediately to a hotel? In 1955 there were no hotels in Aitutaki. Instead, the passengers bunked in airforce sheds built for the American forces during World War II.

The islanders topped up the flying boat's dwindling food supplies with fresh fish, meat, and fruit and vegetables from their gardens, while the Teal steward handed out IOU slips and tried to remain in command while gorgeous young island women swayed past.

When the flying boat returned eight days later, the passengers didn't want to leave. They had been won over by the lagoon, the coral sand and swishing palms, and by the generous, community-spirited islanders.

Eyewitnesses to their departure say a marlin danced in the wake of the flying boat as it took off from the lagoon. It must have been a marvellous parting salute.

Ron says not much has changed on Aitutaki.

There are a few hotels, a couple of them swanky. And houses have got indoor plumbing which makes a nice change from when he and Eva first stayed on the island.

But even tourists don't bother looking at their watches after a day on Aitutaki. Long may the island move at its languid pace - the pace of the house on the hill.