Cook Islands Sun · map studies · all fifteen Cook Islands in style 04 →
One island, thirteen aesthetics. Style 01 is the house style — the look readers know from last year's Rarotonga map, rebuilt for Mauke. Six more are drawn from the same survey data; six more again are made with an image model, in the register tourism magazines actually print in. Click any of them to see it full size.
The seven drawn sheets come from the same two sources: the 2022 topobathymetric LiDAR survey flown for Infrastructure Cook Islands (1 m grid, −48 m to +28 m) and the Survey Department's 2017 cadastral sheet. Nothing is traced by eye. All seven are vector A3 landscape, 420 × 297 mm, print-ready. The six generated ones are conditioned on the same survey geometry, so they carry the real coastline too.
Six more, made with an image model rather than drawn from the data — the register a tourism magazine actually prints in. Each is conditioned on two reference plates built from the survey — the real surveyed coastline, and a deliberately crude three-tone plate of sea, coastal plain and inland plateau. That keeps the island the right shape while holding the detail down to roughly what the Rarotonga sheet carries.
Every one is generated completely unlabelled — no names, no roads, no pins. What you see below is each base plate with the real survey label layer composited on top: the same roads, place names and district names the seven vector sheets use. That is the actual test — a base plate is only worth anything if the names read on it. Open any one to get the clean base as well.
The painting is generated; the geometry never is. Both files ship: the bare PNG, and a self-contained SVG with the labels live as editable vector over the painted base.
9 of the 26 places marked are approximate. They are the well-known Mauke landmarks that have no published coordinate anywhere — the cave pools, the two beaches, Kea's grave. They are placed from written descriptions only and every style marks them differently (a small ◇, a hollow marker, or an italic note) so they can be checked. Someone on Mauke should confirm or move these before the sheet is printed.
| Place | How it was placed |
|---|---|
| Vai Tango | freshwater cave pool, short walk from Areora |
| Vai Tunamea | cave pool |
| Vai Ou | cave pool |
| Vai Moraro | crawl-in cave pool |
| Vai Nauri | cave pool |
| Motuanga Cave | 'cave of 100 rooms' |
| Kea's Grave | east coast, near Arapaea |
| Teoneroa Beach | north coast |
| Oneroa Beach | west coast |
| Areora · Ngatiarua | densest cluster of LiDAR building footprints inside each surveyed district — worth a local check too |
Everything else — the airport, the harbour, the landings, the Divided Church, the hospital, Kimiangatau, Oiretumu — comes from OpenStreetMap, much of it imported from LINZ hydrographic charts, and can be trusted.
All the places live in one file, tools/pois.ts. Add a business, move a pin, fix a name there and re-run bun tools/build.ts — every one of the seven sheets redraws with the change. Nothing needs redrawing by hand.
The 2017 survey sheet carries 253 named landowners against mapped parcels. That layer exists in the source data and is not drawn on any of these sheets. Publishing names against land in a community this size is a different act from publishing geometry, and it isn't ours to make.
The tīvaevae sheet is a designer's homage, not a tīvaevae. If the Sun runs it, the version worth printing is one drawn with a Mauke tīvaevae maker and credited to her by name.