Tonga: Doing A Lot Of Nothing and Getting Home

Whale swimming was probably the big huge major thing we did on the trip, the thing we talked a lot about and thought a lot about. We laughed a little, later, when we realized how actually active we’d been on our beach holiday, suiting up and getting on boats right after breakfast, when mainly we’d wanted to get the chance to relax and do nothing. To be fair, we did do a lot of nothing. It was pretty perfect in that way.

For example we took this picture of ourselves wearing every single bikini we had brought with us. I went for minimalism, bringing one black top and two black bottoms. Rachel brought four with her, which allowed her a pleasing variety. Angela brought eight bikinis with her, like I didn’t even know people were allowed to own eight bikinis at a time. And you know why we called the Bikini Meetings the Bikini Meetings? Because the first one we convened was expressly for the purpose of sorting through Angela’s twenty-one bikinis that she has here in New Zealand (the other twenty-nine are apparently back in Brazil).

Rachel, who is something of a circus monkey, also made it her mission to walk the whole length of this near-horizontal coconut tree. She gave it several goes over the course of the week.

I tried it too. It’s way scarier than it looks.

Angela eats a papaya we bought at the Nuku’alofa market.

And husks a coconut while she’s at it. It had been so long since I had fresh coconut that I forgot how creamy and pudding-y and amazing the meat is, once you’ve drunk the water.

We had a lot of coconuts.

Angela and Rachel report from the bonfire we had the one night that wasn’t pouring down rain that duty-free rum + pineapple juice + coconut water = delicious.

Angela actually walked all the way around the island on one of our days ‘off’, but Rach elected to read in the hammock instead.

I chose the frolic-along-the-shore-with-a-dog option.

Here Angela practices good dental hygiene, using rainwater to brush her teeth—the water for her shower had to be hand-pumped from the well.

Here is the Ha’apai Public Library on Lifuka, where we’d got dropped off after our last dive because we had a very early Chatham Air flight the next morning to get back to Tongatapu and eventually Auckland, and we were not completely sanguine about our ability to get to the Ha’apai airport in time if a 30-minute boat ride in uncertain weather was a factor. The library seems to have been closed, which was a pity because I would have loved to have seen what their selection was like.

I think these are the only street signs in Pangai.

Here we are at the Mariner’s Inn, where we walked in for dinner and saw two other people sitting there, both white Westerners, and wouldn’t you know it, they were both from Wellington, and Angela and Rachel actually knew one of them.

I’ve talked before about how small Wellington is, and how everyone knows everyone, and how everyone shows up in everyone else’s lives in the most unexpected ways—like, how I got a job a couple of years ago through the partner of my bellydance teacher, whose boss was the partner of a social work supervisor at an organiation who was looking to hire a locum, or over this past weekend when I realized that Alice’s old flatmate was at Rachel’s birthday party. One time we were all sitting on the beach on Uoleva, which was pretty well deserted, talking about people we know, and I instinctively did the Wellington Over-The-Shoulder move, where, as you lower your voice to gossip, you take a quick look around at whoever else is at Deluxe, or Sweet Mother’s Kitchen, or the waterfront, or the library, or wherever, because the chances that, even if the person you’re about to talk about isn’t physically there, his friend is, or his cuzzy, or his cuzzy’s friend, or some variation thereof. You want to be careful.

So in some ways I was not altogether surprised that OF COURSE someone we sort of knew from Wellington was sitting in the one bar in a town with a population of fifteen hundred in the middle of the South Pacific. We all sat around chatting and discovered that Jay was going to be on all our same flights the next day and made plans to travel all together and hang out during the fourteen hours between getting into Nuku’alofa and leaving for Auckland. Little did he know he was going to become our trip husband, or that he would begin to refer to us as his sister wives after spending time with us for about two hours.

Here he is at a bar we hung out in back in Nuku’alofa, after going to the market for more beautiful tapa cloth. Jay, it goes without saying, was an excellent trip husband and very, very nice to us. He sorted out our cultural performance thing and actually acted as a bank for us because he had all these extra pa’anga he didn’t want and we didn’t want to get any more out. He created a beer fund (for everyone else) and a bottled water fund (for me) just because he felt like it. He took some very good pictures and was full of fun stories. When we were stuck in various airports for hours and hours and hours he was very helpful with things like luggage and getting hot drinks and demanding food vouchers from Air New Zealand and giving us a ride home from the airport. In short, the three of us were united in thinking that all husbands everywhere should be more like him.

Our time in Nuku’alofa that last day was a bit of a blur, spent attempting to go to a museum and losing my iPod and walking around in the rain a lot and stopping at roadside veggie stands for fresh tomatoes and at a bakery for fresh coconut bread before we made it into town and could get coffees and trinkets.

We spent the evening at a cultural performance and dinner, which was served in banana stalks and located in some beautiful limestone caves right on the beach.

Here we have seaweed salad, roast suckling pig, purple sweet potato, cassava, some sort of barbecue chicken, and raw fish in coconut cream. (I didn’t have the grilled octopus). Not pictured: the fresh watermelon or caramel doughboys we had for dessert.

We’d been going to bed when the sun went down for the last week so it felt really hard to stay up past seven, let alone to make it to 1:30 for our red-eye to Auckland. Fortunately the dancing was quite cool to watch.

I’ve seen a lot of firespinning at ye olde Burning Man (and other sort of hippie alternative arts performances of course) but it was a really different feel to see in this context and recognize its place in Tongan culture.

I liked the womens’ dances as well but I got a little squicked when they would cover their arms and shoulders in oil and then dudes (and a few ladies too) would come up from the audience and stick money on them. I wondered what it would be like to do that for work every day.

Soon it was time to go to the airport and wait for a couple of hours for our flight, which is where things started to get funny only because we were already so tired and also incidentally pretty filthy from walking around all day in the mud and the rain and sitting on sand to watch the dances, etc. Nothing untoward happened on the flight to Auckland, however—we just made Jay get us hot chocolates in the waiting room and watched movies on the plane. Got through customs, fine; walked from the international to the domestic terminal in our inadequate tropical holiday clothes, fine; waited around another couple of hours in Auckland, fine. Everything was fine–although we were getting a little tired of the Air New Zealand Rugby World Cup-themed safety video–until were almost home, e.g. we were on the plane from Auckland to Wellington, which is like an hour’s flight, and we could actually see Mount Taranaki from the plane window when…the plane just turned around. In midair. The pilot was all, “Uh, yeah. There’s been a slight technical malfuntion—nothing to worry about, folks!—but we’re going to need to go back to Auckland right now.”

And then, you can imagine, trying to get re-routed home and getting our luggage and rushing around and getting put through Christchurch somehow—which is on an entirely different island, you know—and having to wait and wait and wait and being so tired and not being able to sleep on the planes and being so filthy and slap happy and just wanting to get home.

We all got pretty excited about our donut choices at the Auckland airport, made with twenty minutes between getting our new tickets and having to get on the plane to Christchurch.

Rach managed somehow, I don’t even know how she did it, to sleep while out flight from Christchurch to Wellington got delayed three or four times and various babies screamed at various volumes in our immediate vicinity. I think by this point Jay and Angela had just given up and were drinking beers at 2:00 in the afternoon.

I gave the whole getting-home experience an un-enthusiastic thumbs-down. Did I mention I’d worked myself into a nicely clogged-up head cold somewhere between the cultural performance and the Nuku’alofa airport, and that taking off and landing four extra times was the worst? I can’t even express how grateful I was, after all that, to finally get home and into my own bed with its clean sheets. It was hard to even remember that we’d been on this super fun trip, after all that.

It’s been over a week now since we got back, and some of the details have faded a bit, as they do if you elect to do your accumulated laundry the day after you return from your holiday instead of immediately updating your blog. We’ve all been talking about it all week, though, cementing the stories I haven’t been able to fit into these posts (the disco party fale, visiting the pig farm, locking Angela into the fale by mistake the first night there, peeing off the side of the dive boat, re-enacting our days via shadow-puppetry with our headlights, listening to the singing from the various churches on the way back from dinner on Pangai) and wearing our turtle and whale necklaces every day. It’s funny to think that I was really not sure about the wisdom of going on this trip, at first, that I had to be talked into it a little, when it turns out to have been exactly what I needed, exactly what I wanted.