Elyssa & Alessandro’s Tongan Adventure

Travel & Arrival

We left LA at 11:00 at night, and arrived in Fiji at 6am two days later (Fiji is one hour behind the beginning of the International Dateline; Tonga is at the beginning.) We then flew on to Tongatapu, the main island of Tonga. We arrived at Nuku’alofa, the capital, that same morning around noon, and slept about 18 hours…pretty much until the following morning!

At breakfast the next morning, we met a couple from Germany who were planning to travel around the Pacific for a year and a half on a sailboat. They were going to be filming documentaries for German television, and also completing his anthropology thesis by documenting folklore of the various islands in Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia. Turns out, they did not know how to sail, but they had bought a sailboat from an Austrian living in New Zealand, and he had sailed it over to Tonga. This guy, Fritz, was going to sail with them for a month so they could learn to sail, then he was planning to leave them and head back to New Zealand. Also during breakfast, we got to talking to another of the hotel guests who was in the breakfast area. We discovered he was the Mexican ambassador of New Zealand in Tonga on a consular mission. These are the kinds
of people one meets in Tonga.

That day was Sunday and there was NOTHING to do. In Tonga, Sunday really is the day of rest, and everything is closed. We were lucky to find that the International Dateline Hotel was open so we could get some lunch. But that was it. That evening we were able to eat out by going to a Chinese restaurant with the Germans and their Austrian sailor.

Vava'u

The next morning we left for Vava’u. Tonga is an archipelago made up of over a hundred islands, only a few of which are inhabited. There are four groups of islands, and the Vava’u group is where we went.

Out hotel, the Hilltop, was in fact, on a hill in the center of the main town on Vava’u, Neiafu. The hotel had a view overlooking the old harbor, which is where canoes used to come in (hundreds of years ago), and the new harbor, which is where sailors from all around the world come to moor today.

The view was gorgeous, and we felt right at home, because the three owners of this hotel came from Italy! They had all wanted to “escape” civilization, and I think they had found the perfect spot. So, needless to say, we had the best cuisine on the island right at our hotel restaurant, the Sunset. They even had a wood-burning oven, so we had pizza four out of eight nights!

Vava'u Culture

Tonga is a monarchy, and is the only nation in the South Pacific that has never been colonized. It’s a pretty homogeneous place, with a few Chinese and European immigrants, but otherwise overwhelmingly Polynesian. In the 1800’s, they were subject to proselytization by missionaries, and today there are several religions because of this: Methodist, Mormon, 7th Day Adventist and Roman Catholic. In the late 1800’s the king agreed to allow Sunday to be the official day of rest, and Tongans take this very seriously. Everything is closed, and the only activities Tongans engage in are going to church and cooking and eating omu. Omu is a way of cooking meat or fish wrapped in kava leaves, and placed in holes in the ground. The holes are heated by fire and kept hot with rocks. This creates a lot of smoke and it can be seen and smelled all over the place.

Pigs, roosters and dogs are everywhere. People “own” these animals, but they roam around loose everywhere. The pigs seem to just eat whatever they can find. Most are killed for food when they are young. The rest are kept to breed more pigs. The roosters don’t limit themselves to cock-a-doodle-doing at 5 or 6am. They can go at it at any and all times of the night or day.

Vava'u Sailing

Vava’u is world-renowned among sailors. Sunsail and The Moorings, two yacht-charter companies, have bases here. There were boats in the harbor from all over: Spain, Germany, USA, Australia, Austria, New Zealand, etc. We would often sit at one of the bars by the water, either the Mermaid Café or ‘Ana’s café, and watch the boats and talk to some of the people sailing on them when they came ashore. We met all sorts of interesting people with as many stories. Some had retired and had been sailing around the world; they were now stopped in Tonga for the season. Some had chartered their boat from New Zealand. Some were living there. It was a very relaxed, enjoyable atmosphere.

Vava'u Tourism, Restaurants

Tourism is quite undeveloped in Tonga. There are no souvenir shops, and it took nearly a week for us to find any postcards. There are some handicrafts shops, and we did buy a couple of carvings. There are also some “upscale” hotels, such as the Tongan Beach Resort and Mala Island Resort. However, none are on the level of what you might find in say Hawaii or Tahiti (of which I was glad). In any case, both were way outside of Neiafu, so we were glad we didn’t stay there. We enjoyed seeing the town and being immersed in the culture.

Each morning at around 5:00 am, we heard the drums being beaten to call people to church. At 5:30, the church bells sounded. This in conjunction with the roosters, did not bode well for sleeping the first couple of nights. But then we got used to it and slept through it. It also didn’t hurt to use earplugs! We would wake up at about 7am, have cappuccino and toast for breakfast, then head down into town and over to the dive center. There was no beach to speak of in town, but the Tongan Beach Resort has a beach, and after diving, we would ask them to drop us off at that beach on the way back into port. That way, we relaxed in the sun until dinnertime.

There are no “Tongan” restaurants that I could see. Tongans don’t have the money to eat out, and for them, eating is something done at home. In fact, they often eat outside in their yards, because until very recently, that’s where they lived. Only in the last several years have Tongans been building houses and spending time in them, and even then it’s usually to sleep. In fact, many of the basic houses we saw didn’t have furniture in them, and we were told that Tongans sleep on mats. This is not necessarily from poverty, because Tongans don’t consider themselves poor, but rather from custom.

Many Tongans go abroad (to the US, New Zealand or Australia) to study or work, and sometimes they stay there, and wind up sending money back home to relatives. This is probably where the “outside” influence of house building and furniture is coming from.

Most of the restaurants are run by and serve foreigners. We had excellent food at our restaurant at the hotel. We also tried another restaurant by the Old Harbor, run by an expat Englishman and his wife. They had a gorgeous setting and excellent curry. There were also some waterfront cafes that served hamburgers, sandwiches, etc.

To eat Tongan food, you have to attend a Tongan feast. A Tongan feast consists of various meats and/or fish cooked in omu, baked taro root (this is a starch, like a potato), raw fish salad with lime (very delicious), chop suey (yes! chop suey) and lots of other native foods. There is also kava, a drink made from a plant root. The men sit around the kava bowl, swirling the kava around, playing music and getting slowly…hmmm, relaxed? I want to say stoned, but this plant is not considered a drug. Nor is it alcohol. But consumed in even small quantities, this drink renders the drinker very mellow.

Before the food comes out, Tongan children dance while the elders sing. This is the feast Tongans have for tourists, and is what we saw. When Tongans have feasts for themselves, it may be different. They have feasts after funerals, after church on Sundays, and on other special occasions.

Vava'u Diving, Diving in Tonga

We had not heard much about the diving in Tonga, as not as many people seem to go there as go to, say, Fiji for diving. But it turned out to be fantastic! We chose Dolphin Pacific Divers and were very happy with them.

Our guides were Aroha (a native New Zealander) and Giuseppe, from Bologna. Yes, that makes him the forth Italian we found on Vava’u. (There is a fifth, Dr. Alfredo Carafa, the main physician on Vava'u for the last 13 years.)

The diving was really spectacular. We usually had over 100-foot visibility. There were caverns, rock formations, grottos, swim-throughs, lots of colorful hard and soft corals, and fish. We got to see sharks on nearly every dive, which was a first for both of us. Most of the sharks we saw were white-tip reef sharks, and these are not dangerous or aggressive towards humans. In fact, they mostly swam away from us. Sharks are really neat to see under water, in their own habitat. You can see what perfect swimming machines they are; a true wonder of evolution.

On one dive, we also got to see a sea snake. They have black and white bands, and are highly poisonous. But again, they don’t attack. These creatures have to come out of the water to breathe and lay eggs, so they sometimes surface in what are called “bubble caves.” A bubble cave is when there is an underwater cavern that has a hollow part inside where there is air, above the water but under the rock. We dove into a few of those, and were able to take off our regulators inside the cave and speak to each other. It was in one of these that Giuseppe found a snake along a cavern wall.

On many of our dives we could hear the male humpbacks singing. Only the male humpbacks sing, while the females make clicking sounds, similar to the sounds dolphins make. Male humpbacks are known to have the longest and most complex sounds in the animal kingdom. We went on one night dive, and we could hear the whales singing so loudly that we could feel the vibrations in our chests. I felt at times that I would turn around and flash my light into the dark blue sea and find a whale staring at me. But we were told that whale’s songs can carry underwater for over 100 kilometers, so they could have been anywhere.

Swimming with Humpback Whales

There are several whale-watching operators in Vava’u, and Dolphin Pacific Divers is one of them. On one of our dive trips, we spotted a mom and baby humpback near the site. We put off diving for a bit so we could spend some time with the whales. According to strict whale-watching guidelines, only four people at a time can go in with them, so four of us put on snorkel, mask and fins and slipped into the water.

I could immediately see the bodies of both the mom and baby humpback, about 30 feet away. The mother was over 100 feet long, and the baby was probably about 20 or 30 feet in length. It was exactly the same shape and color as its mother, just a smaller version. It was the first time I have ever seen a whale in its entirety, and I was completely breath-taken. When you go whale-watching and see the backs and dorsal fins of whales above the surface, it’s one thing, but when you see the entire body under water, and you realize how enormous and more importantly, how gentle they are, you get a new perspective on these graceful creatures. They moved very slowly, so much so that we were able to spend several minutes snorkelling near them and watching. Eventually they swam away. When they came back on the other side of the boat, the next group of four went in and spent some more time with them. Not long after, the whales swam away and we proceeded on our dive trip.

This encounter only fed our desire to see more of the whales, so we booked a whale-watching trip one day instead of going diving. The captain of the boat warned us that there was no guarantee that we would find whales, let alone find whales that seemed “at ease” enough to allow us to go in the water with them. However, given that this was the season that whales were passing through Tonga, and that we had already seen some whales, even just on our way to dive sites, we were hopeful.

The key was to find females, because the males breach and clearly you can’t be in the water while they are doing that.

It was not long before we found two whales, a mom and her calf. There was already another whale-watching boat there so we had to wait our turn. Again, no more than four people are allowed in the water at any one time. There are also rules about how near the boats can be to the whales. I was concerned about disturbing the animals with our presence, especially since there were already other people there. But our captain said that if the whales wanted to be left alone, with one flick of the tail they would be far gone to another spot or even out to open ocean. I wanted to believe this because as much as I was dying to get in the water with the whales, I didn’t want to in any way impose on their tranquility.

After the other boat left, we got a little closer and soon slid down into the water from the boat. We swam slowly over towards the whales until we were about twenty feet away. The mom was at the surface and the calf was nearby. Soon, the mom descended to about 30 feet below the surface and stayed there. The calf needed air more frequently, so it surfaced more often, but always swam back down to its mother. When the calf swam back to its mother, she would open her fins and allow the calf to swim under her and inside the fins. Then she closed them around her calf, as if in a hug. I was overwhelmed with how beautiful they both were.

The current at the surface kept pushing us closer to the whales. However, the mother maintained absolute neutral buoyancy at 30 feet below. We kept gently swimming back away, not out of fear, but in order not to alarm the mom. It amazed me that the mother could be so trusting of us with her calf not ten feet away at the surface. But we had been told that whales can feel humans’ heartbeats, and “know” whether we mean danger or not. So she let her calf play around her and surface near us without moving herself. She only surfaced for air every so often, then sunk back down below. But we could see her floating there and watch as her calf played around her. We saw the gentleness of the mother towards her calf as she nudged it, or protected it with her fins. At one point, she turned very slowly towards us, with her calf by her side, and they both swam in our direction. She kept herself between the calf and us as she neared us. I thought she was going to swim into us. She wasn’t moving quickly, in an aggressive manner, so I wasn’t afraid, just concerned she didn’t see us. Maybe ten feet before she reached us, she turned slowly, keeping the calf on the other side, and swam past us all, and I could see her giant eye looking at us. Then I understood what beautiful, intelligent animals we were observing.

They returned to where they had swum from, about twenty feet away and continued their playing and breathing there. We must have spent about an hour and a half with them, floating above the mother, watching the calf surface and play, before we decided to get back in the boat. It was one of the most special things I have ever experienced and I will never forget the sight or the emotion I felt.

Contact your South Pacific Specialist at South Seas Adventures for more information. We can custom-design your holiday in Tonga.

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