One down, six to go.

Marina and I have decided to walk the island’s seven main mountain tracks by the end of the year – and we started last weekend with the one described as "easy" in the guide book : Raemaru.

"Easy" is a matter of opinion, of course, and by the time we’d scaled a 20-metre rock face relying on ropes and climbing equipment, we were wondering what the guidebook's “steep and strenuous” tracks would be like!

It was a gorgeous day – I had expected to be really hot tramping in tropical conditions, but we were in the shade almost the whole way, and there was a lovely, cool breeze high up. The scenery was fantastic - jagged volcanic peaks covered with dense, emerald bush. Somehow the photos don’t show how steep and rugged it is.

My tramping boots fell apart after about half an hour – literally, the soles came flopping off, first one foot, then the other. I think this is because they have lived under the bed since our arrival – and things tend to get mouldy and damp unless aired regularly. Fortunately the laces were long enough to tie right around the bottoms, holding the soles in place. I’m on the lookout for someone going to New Zealand who can take them back and post them to a good cobbler.

This is on the summit of the flat-topped Raemaru, looking over to some of the higher mountains that we hope to conquer in the future – and under my hand is the famous Rua Manga rock formation, or “the Needle” as it is commonly known. The cross-island trek, which goes from one side of the island to the other, passes close to the Needle.

Marina is a great friend – we met at a women’s meeting last year and hit it off straight away; she’s funny and intelligent and we are passionate about similar things. A qualified property valuer – and the only woman valuer on the island - she is currently fulltime mother to two-year-old Esther. We talked solidly the entire walk, which of course meant that it took us twice as long as the guidebook said it should. That's our excuse anyway.

On the way down we saw these kape, or giant taro plants – which were introduced to Rarotonga as a famine food by Polynesian settlers. The bush on the island is similar to New Zealand’s, and can be very dense, but thins out and becomes quite sparse the higher you go, in what is called the ‘cloud forest.’

It was a brilliant day, and we were quite pleased with ourselves, ‘easy’ walk though it apparently was. The next day we had a few sore muscles; after all, on a day-to-day basis one doesn’t walk uphill at all, as the coastal area is entirely flat. When we got back to my house we went for a swim. The water felt a bit cool - the tepid waters of the height of summer are no longer - so we sat in the shallows most of the time, with little silver fish swarming all around us. It was good to have 'knocked one off'... and to have started our quest instead of just talking about it, as we had done for many months.

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