Rarotonga is circled by two roads: a coast road you can drive in under an hour, and, a few hundred metres inland, a stone one laid roughly a thousand years ago. Islanders still use the old one, the Ara Metua, every day. The island beneath both is what remains of a volcano that fell silent more than a million years ago. Erosion has chewed its cone into jagged ridges and left a single splinter standing clear of them: Te Rua Manga, which everyone calls The Needle, a bare fin of volcanic breccia on a ridge 413 metres above the sea. The Needle anchors the Cross-Island Track, the only path that cuts through the interior, climbing out of Avatiu Valley on the north coast, past the spire's foot, then dropping through rainforest to Wigmore's Waterfall on the south side. Around the whole island a fringing reef holds a shallow lagoon, widest and clearest at Muri, where four small motu sit offshore.
The last stretch to The Needle is a climb on tree roots and a fixed rope, and the ridge at the top gives the widest view on the island: forested folds falling away to a white line of surf and a ring of pale water. At sea level the lagoon is a different world, barely knee-deep in places, warm, and clear enough that you can see the sand under a paddleboard the whole way across. But the reef here is narrow, and just beyond it the seabed plunges towards water four kilometres deep. That drop is why the whales come so close: between July and October, humpbacks that have swum up from the Antarctic to breed and calve pass within sight of the beach. Since 2017 the entire ocean territory of the Cook Islands, 1.9 million square kilometres, has been protected as Marae Moana.