Malo e leilei! I’ve returned from Tonga in one piece! Hooray! For all of you who enjoy the short version, it was tons of fun. For those of you interested in more depth, read on:
It started out with a bit of a rough start when our flight to Tonga was delayed on Friday night, from 10pm to 12am. After bumming around the food court and eating ice cream, we made it to the gate. Then they changed the gate. Then we got to the new gate and got on the plane. Then we sat on the plane for over an hour. Apparently our original plane never left Australia due to mechanical problems, and our new plane was experiencing its own share of problems as well. Eventually, after 1am, we took off. After getting through customs and all that jazz in Tonga, we arrived at our accommodation…at 7am. Dang.
We slept until noon in our fale (We even had our own bathroom! Although the wall was incomplete between the two rooms, so you needed to be very comfortable with your fale-mates. It did, however, facilitate conversations between the person in the shower and the other two in the bedroom.) After getting up and exploring the beach (the sand was full of shells and bits of coral!), we decided to do a bit of grocery shopping since the weather was not ideal for sunning ourselves. We were given directions about how to walk to the nearest convenience store. When we arrived, we started to walk past because it couldn’t possibly be so tiny. It was a small narrow room filled with tinned meat and packaged food with bars covering the wide window so you could only look at the food but not get close enough to reach it. We managed to negotiate for some ramen noodles and potato chips. Walking through the village, it was so different from anything else I’ve experienced. Tonga is certainly not a rich nation, and a lot of the houses are very run-down. Pigs, dogs and kids (in various states of cleanliness) are running around in the street. It’s definitely still a developing nation. But they had ramen, so what else could we need?? They even had different varieties…one day we bought some that was imported from Indonesia and another time from Canada. Yum!
The following day, Sunday, was abysmal. It stormed all day and everything shuts down on Sundays anyway as Tongans are a very religious people. We ended up hanging out in our fale, reading and playing cards. I only won one game of Go Fish, but I did manage to read three books over the five days. Not too shabby. Although our fale might seem confining, we have a lot of interesting memories there…
Tonga is a tropical island (in case you didn’t know…one of my friends thought it was in Africa. Alex forgot that I was going anywhere at all, and then thought Tonga was part of New Zealand. Goodness gracious.) As one might expect, there are an interesting array of bugs, spiders, and lizards. That doesn’t bother me. It bothers me when they are inside my living space at night when I can’t watch their every move. I was showering when screaming broke out in the next room…there was a sizeable lizard on the ceiling. Nicole was pretty freaked out, but we all continued on with our tasks. Then Nicole happens to glance behind her bed. There is a HUGE SPIDER. HUGE. In the excitement and screaming about said huge spider, and its untimely demise by tennis shoe, we lost track of the lizard. Great. The search begins to find it. Although having no luck finding “Liz” and she/he is hereby known, Laura did find a GIGANTIC bug. GIGANTIC. (I need to admit that I was actually doing none of the bug or lizard searching. No…I was hiding under my blanket on my bed. There is photographic evidence.) It took several tries to crush the exoskeleton with the tennis shoe. I should also mention that this bug was on a ledge above all of our heads, so we were unable to dispose of the body. And. Then the smell hit. Apparently it was some kind of stinkbug. So now we’re trying not to breathe deeply, remove the bug’s body, and still keep an eye out for Liz. None of these tasks were accomplished, and we spent the night with the bathroom light on in hopes that it would draw all bugs, spiders and lizards in there and away from us while we were sleeping. Liz never reappeared…dun dun dun!
The following evening, we were plagued with only some moths that kept dive-bombing the nightlight (and Nicole). Thankful for a more restful night, we all dropped off to sleep. Only to all be simultaneously awakened in the middle of the night with cats fighting right outside of our open window. To those of you who have heard this before, it is a hair-raising sound at the least. To me, it is worse than nails on a chalkboard. It continued for quite some time. It took me more than three hours to fall back asleep as the sun was coming up. Needless to say, most of my sleeping took place on the fantastic beach!
The beach was wonderful and everyone at Heilala Holiday Lodge was really friendly and helpful. They let us borrow snorkeling gear, lent us some Tongan money to get our ramen, and gave us a ride to and from town on Monday. We had wanted to check out the capital city, Nuku’Alofa, for souvenirs and perhaps some food so we could make our own meals in the communal kitchen. We started out by standing at the end of the road to Heilala waiting for the bus for half an hour before two nice Tongan ladies informed us it was a public holiday, so no bus. We never did figure out what the holiday was for exactly…maybe everyone just felt like taking the day off! Unfortunately, this meant that there wasn’t too much to see in town since almost everything was closed. We headed back and spent the rest of the day and the entirety of the next on the beach sunning ourselves. I am very proud to report that I did not get sunburned at all! Not one little bit! Nicole and Laura can make fun of my all day about the amount of sunscreen I slather on my skin, but it paid off. Hooray!
The last day of our trip, we took a tour around Tongatapu, the island on which we were staying (the Kingdom of Tonga is a collection of over a hundred islands). Our tour guides were really fun and we really did see the entirety of the island in seven hours...they didn’t lie! We saw cemeteries, plants galore, crazy looking fuzzy-headed bats, the landing sites of Abel Tasman and the Christian missionaries, Nuku’Alofa and countless other things. The best part of the tour was how unorganized and “non-touristy” it was. We would just be driving along the road when one of the guides would spot a group of women weaving tapa cloth or making mats. We would just pull over and take a look, not a problem at all. The funniest part was probably when we were passing by a church when the guides casually point out that there are people drinking kava next door before the service. Kava is the local alcohol in Tonga, and is ground from the root of the cassava plant, otherwise known as the kava tree. After mentioning it, the one guide decides “Let’s go drink kava with them! Yeah!” So away we went. Three American girls, a British and an Italian along with their two Tongan guides crash the kava party. They were happy to share! It looks kind of like muddy water, and tastes kind of like it too. I guess it’s an acquired taste. It has a very strange effect…after just a little bit, maybe two mouthfuls, my tongue and hands went kind of numb and tingly. It was pretty creepy. I can only imagine what would happen if you were to partake in the whole bowl, which the five men there were planning on doing. And then going to church afterwards! And both of the pastors were there!! Things are different in Tonga, but fun. Although I won’t miss the sleepless nights of lizard hunting, the people were extremely friendly and it’s just a beautiful island in the middle of nowhere. Maybe I’ll make it back someday!
And now onto the next adventure. After about twenty hours in Wellington, it’s off to Dunedin early tomorrow morning for a five-day jaunt around the southernmost parts of the south island. More updates after that!