Dear Editor, Browsing online through NZ Herald today there’s an Air New Zealand advertisement offering one-way airfares from Auckland to Honolulu at $589. The distance between Auckland and Honolulu is three times that between Auckland and Rarotonga.

So albeit Auckland to Rarotonga is one third of the distance to that between Auckland and Honolulu the one-way airfares between Auckland to Rarotonga is approximately double that between Auckland to Honolulu. 

Why do we continually face the most steepest airfares charged by Air NZ? Where’s the fairness?

Air NZ and its biggest shareholder, the NZ Government, should be ashamed of the monopolistic airfares that are been charged between the Cook Islands and NZ.

Yours

Enough is enough 

(Name and address supplied)

Price of nu

I refer to cartoonist Kata and his recent depiction of one of the Mama’s, apparently at Punanga Nui, and a price tag on a nu of $6.

And words suggesting that price somehow made the Mama a member of the Mafia?

Kata, please accept this writer’s challenge. Take your shirt off, get your bush knife, climb a tumumu, knock down a bunch of nu, husk them, take them to the market, and sell them for $5 each. 

Unless and until you can physically do that yourself, maybe you should buy some $6 nu and drink those instead of your usual refreshment.

(Name and address supplied)

‘My island home’

Love how Ben Mitchell calls it home and I totally understand him (‘It’s like coming back home’: Shortland Street star shares his connection with Cook Islands, November 19). Being a Kiwi born and raised Kuki, I didn’t go back to the motherland until December 2016 and I was 34 years of age. My mum hadn’t been back since she came to Aotearoa to have me when she was around six months pregnant with me.

I turned 35 in Rarotonga in January 2017 which was pretty special and I visited many places with my mum which I grew up hearing about so in many ways, I felt like I was returning home because it seemed so familiar to me already. Many places were embedded in my memories already. I swam in the river and lagoon my mum and her siblings swam in as kids, I walked to places they walked to, gathered seafood where they did and even cleaned it the way they did ready to take back to Aotearoa, things like matu rori and the likes. I’d never peeled taro in my life freshly picked from the taro patch and even though I was there for a month, the only reason I was willing to leave was because of my husband who was waiting back in Aotearoa for us. My daughter and I cried the night we returned. We were missing it already.

I’ve been back one other time since, without my mum and the connection was still there, as strong as the beating of my heart and unmatched by the beating of the drums we dance too.

That first trip was the most memorable and grounding one for me, to feel so deeply rooted and connected to a place I’d only heard about all of my life up until that point. It was so very special to me and even more meaningful because it was shared from my mum to her only daughter and from me to my only daughter who was 11 at the time and still remembers how we haven’t seen a night sky anywhere else yet like we’ve seen in Raro and how the sky is so clear – it’s like you can reach up and just pluck a star from the sky.

I’ll be back again! I can’t wait to share that special place with my husband and it’ll be bittersweet because my mum is no longer with us as she passed in October of 2021. But I’m so grateful for the memories I have especially of that first trip and that I got to share that trip with her and my girl!

Vellencia Tangi

(Facebook)