By Terry Ward, CNN
(CNN) — I ask Andy Cory how he came to live on the remote South Pacific island of Niue tending hives abuzz with one of the world’s most isolated populations of honeybees.
A 100-square-mile dot on the map located roughly between the Cook Islands and Fiji and home to less than 2,000 people, Niue is way out there.
But the towering New Zealander in the paint-splattered bee suit, who answered an ad for a beekeeper in the late ’90s and is now known as the “Honeyman of Niue,” has questions for me and my travel companion, too.
“You’re the Instagram husband, right?” he asks Jake, the handsome man by my side with the physique of a lifelong surfer and the humility of someone who’s definitely not an Instagram husband.
“I know what that’s like. I’m one, too,” Cory jokes in a thick Kiwi drawl, glacier-blue eyes sparkling with a cheeky grin. “You just have to look wind-swept and stay interesting, right?”
Jake and I laugh.
No, no, we’re not together, we tell Cory.
Jake’s wife, Sandy, is one of my best friends. Jake also happens to be my ex-boyfriend’s best friend, I add.
Sandy is at home in New Zealand with their poodle and my husband is in Florida with our kids, I tell the Honeyman, who takes this news in stride.
Jake and I have known each other for 25 years. We’ve traveled together — as a foursome, with Sandy and my ex, Chris — on many occasions, but it’s my first time vacationing alone with Jake.
“Well, that’s very contemporary of you all,” Cory says.
A platonic vacation in a South Pacific paradise
Jake and I found ourselves alone together on this atoll that rises steeply from the South Pacific Ocean then flattens across the top, like a birthday cake, because we had a few things in common — both with each other and the planeload of passengers on our flight.
The only commercial flights to Niue, a self-governing nation in free-association with New Zealand, arrive from Auckland, 1,340 miles to the southwest, on Air New Zealand.
Our flight was giddy with tourists, mostly New Zealanders, who’d come for the chance to snorkel with humpback whales that migrate within yards of the island’s cliff-lined flanks every year between July and September on their journey north from Antarctica.
That’s when Niue’s glimmer of a tourist season, which coincides with winter in the Southern Hemisphere, springs into high gear. The sight of spouting and fluking humpbacks from the oceanfront deck at the island’s lone hotel, Scenic Matavai Resort, is so common that a “whale bell” gets jangled nearly nonstop to alert guests to look up from their cocktails and poolside lounge chairs.
For as long as we could both remember, Jake and I, both ocean lovers (he’s a lifelong surfer and I’m a lifelong scuba diver), had longed to swim with whales.
And during the incredible — and utterly platonic — week I spent traveling with a married man as a married woman in the company of more humpbacks than we could count, I found myself wishing such a travel arrangement could be more commonplace in our contemporary times.
A 50th