The Cook Islands are a group of 15 islands in the South Pacific Ocean with a population of 13,200 people. The islands have their own language and government and are divided into two groups - the Southern Cook Islands and the Cook Islands. Traditional houses called Kikau still exist in a few locations, such as in New Jerusalem on Aitutaki. Cook Islands dancing is always accompanied by music and singing, and the singers and drummers from the small islands are renowned in Polynesia. Local cuisine includes foods like sea cucumbers, fish, and young taro leaves prepared and cooked in underground ovens called umus.

1. Intro The Cook Islands is a net of 15 Islands in the heart of the south pacific, spread over an area the size of India with a population of 13,200 people. These Polynesians have there own language and government. The Cook Islands are in the South Pacific Ocean, north-east of New Zealand, between French Polynesia and American Samoa. There are fifteen major islands, spread over 2.2 million square kilometres of ocean divided into two district groups: the Southern Cook islands and the Cook Islands

2. The traditional houses are called Kikau. There are only a few traditional houses left in the Cook Islands. The few houses that are left in the cook islands are in New Jerusalem, Aitutaki. The Traditional Houses

3. Traditional Dancing Cook Islands Dancing is always accompanied by music, there are singers is well. The singers and drummers from the small Islands are the best in polynesia and there known around the world for there perfectionist http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ3Bsnasr-E&feature=related

4. Rori (sea cucumbers) are eaten raw or cooked with butter, garlic and spices. Fish is eaten raw and cooked too. Raw fish is called ika. They also eat young taro leaves. They wash them with cocoanut cream, salt and chopped onion. That dish is called Rukau. Cocoanuts are always used in the cook Islands All the food is cooked in an umu (an oven dug in the earth and filled with fire-wood bassalt rocks.) The food is wrapped In banana leaves and then put in sacks and the put into the pit, which is covered with soil and has to cook for about three hours.

5. The cook Islands are named from a Russian navel chart published in St Petersburg in 1823 -29 after Caption James Cook, who visited the islands in 1773 and 1777. The Cook Islands became a British protectorate in 1888

6. Health care in the cook islands is provided by the government and they have a hospital in nearly all of the towns but they are all very poorly equipped and the people have to go to Raratonga or New Zealand for very bad illness.

7. From June to September the day’s are usually warm and sunny so they wear grass skirts made out of flaks.