No, I haven’t started making places up for my blog. My friends recently told me that they got a great deal on a holiday there so I thought I’d check it out. As I used to live in New Zealand, the name did ring a few bells as it was once a Kiwi colony. Let’s discover this tiny Pacific island, the capital and most populous of the Cook Islands.

If you were to draw a line between Queensland, Australia and Bolivia in South America, the Cook Islands would be about halfway along that line. The Cook I...