One of the most interesting aspects of your travels to the Cook Islands will be your encounters with the culture and traditions of our people.

Whether it's dancing, drumming, song or traditional carving, weaving and quilt making, culture is alive and kicking in our beautiful lands.

Discovering the culture and history of these islands will make your holiday an even more memorable adventure.

The allure of the South Pacific is still as powerful today as it was hundreds of years ago when adventurers and explorers dared to discover the mysteries of the open seas.

What they came to find was a bountiful, beautiful paradise brimming with new and surprising ways of life.  It was nothing like their home towns in Europe or America, it was like no place they'd ever seen on earth.

Isolated for hundreds of years, the South Pacific began receiving navigators from far away between 1400 and 1800 AD. 

As news spread, more and more visitors arrived to experience what they imagined to be the exotic romance of the last frontier, the solitude of islands dotted in an immense sea and the rituals and customs of a culture so different from their own. Whether explorers or scientists, missionaries or scholars, the islands of the Pacific drew them in.

Today people continue to visit from all over the globe.  Often they are greeted in the customary way with a garland of flowers, perhaps gardenia - the national flower known to us as Tiare Maori. 

These visitors are mesmerised by the stunning beauty of our tiny islands, wowed by the friendliness of our people and relaxed by a way of life still in harmony with the environment we live in.

It is important to us as Cook Islanders to keep the rituals and customs of our past alive, so that they will endure in to the future for many to cherish and enjoy.