T-O-N-G-A

I’m going to the Kingdom of Tonga tomorrow evening after work with my friends Rachel and Angela. I have hauled out my old green pack and filled it with jandals and togs and sunnies and a lavalava. Our snorkel with humpback whales is all booked (which we hope the whales have been informed of). I have my old headlamp all ready to go in my purse to illuminate our electricity-free beach fale. It is safe to say that I cannot wait to get on that plane.

It has not been a very prosperous year for traveling, for me. I mean I went down south for New Year’s, which technically is still included in this year even though it seems like ages ago, and then of course there was the now-infamous Easter kayak trip. And since then…nothing. Everything started getting kind of gross for a while right after the trip and it’s only recently that I’ve picked my head up and looked around and thought about having fun and doing awesome stuff instead of crying all the damn time.

So I guess it was a while ago—May, maybe? Beginning of June? Beginning of July?—when my buddy Rachel was over at my old house and said that she and Angela were going to Tonga in October and…would I like to join them?

There were a lot of reasons to say no: money and job insecurity and not really knowing anything about Tonga and only having gotten to know Rachel and Angela quite recently and…and…”YES,” I said, not even checking my calendar, not even caring about anything. “YES I WOULD.”

So I got to do some enjoyable trip research in the middle of an awful winter. I was thrilled to learn that both the girls dive and when we learned that we could do a humpback whale snorkel (assuming the whales are in the mood to snorkel with us) we were sold. We started emailing back and forth (subject line; “T-O-N-G-A!’) during our workdays regarding what kind of fales did we want to stay at and were there any cultural things we could do and how many snacks should we bring? We started having Bikini Meetings that got their start based entirely on the fact that Angela has twenty-one bikinis here in New Zealand–the rest of her collection, she reports, is back in Brazil. I created a trip spreadsheet. Rachel got us like seven gabillion pa’anga in cash to take with us since there’s no ATM where we’re staying. We emailed to make sure that our Sunday night umu would be kosher and made a special trip to Pak N Save specifically to buy a whole gigantic resuseable shopping bag of snacks. I’ve been basically talking about nothing else for the past week.

It’s still a little funny to me that, having grown up on the beach at home and totally rolled my eyes all through my wasted youth at white sand beaches and warm ocean water, I now pay heaps of money to get the chance to be on one for a mere six days. I’m curious to know what it will be like to travel with the girls as I generally travel alone and am quite set in my ways. I still have some qualms about being a Western tourist in a non –Western country. I am wondering if I’ll remember how to dive for real and be able to descend properly, unlike when I was in the Coromandel over Christmas.

But mostly I am just glad to get away for a while, and to do something new and fun and cool. I have been hibernating for what seems like forever and it’s almost definitely positively, almost totally certainly spring now. A lot has changed; I want a lot more to change. Next week I’m going to lay on the beach and read books and talk to my friends and wear lots of sunscreen and look at nudibranchs and sea stars underwater and maybe swim with whales and let go for a while, loosen up a little, turn my face to the sun after a long hard winter. There will be plenty of time to think while I’m over there—I just hope I get some time to not think, too.