Tonga - Part 2

 After all of the back and forth about when the ferry would arrive in Ha’apai and take off for Vava’u, it ended up coming on Wednesday night, the original prediction.  We boarded around 10pm and got comfortable in between rows of chairs for the 8 hour ferry ride north to the island group of Vava’u, where Sean and a few other peace corps volunteers live.  Chaos greeted us in the morning as we de-boarded in Neiafu, the main city on Vava’u, but Sean navigated through it and found the truck belonging to the school where he works, and we climbed in the long bed of it along with some sort of band and all of their instruments and other equipment, which took too long according to I think all of us since the bathrooms on the boat were gross and we all had to pee.  We got a ride up the hill and dropped off the band (and helped unload all of their items), then continued on to Sean’s school and his adorable house:

It has two rooms, each about 10 square feet, and a little shelter out back where there’s a shower and toilet (picture above).  We had to keep the curtains in the bedroom closed because otherwise you could look out and see directly to the toilet, which is about 3 feet from the window and doesn’t have a door to complete its enclosure.  We drank rain water from the tank next door, which collects from what runs off of the roof, and were actually mostly happy with the cold showers since it was so hot during the day.  The locals apparently disagreed with our assessment of the weather, as we frequently saw them huddling in sweatshirts and jackets while we were sweating in shorts and t-shirts – they were fully convinced it was winter.  For us it took wondering out loud whether Sean’s tree in the front of his house was dead since it had no leaves on it, but he informed us he had worried the same thing last year and asked his neighbors, who reminded him that July is the heart of winter and therefore it made sense that his tree had lost its leaves in the chilly 85 degree weather.

The first weekend on Vava’u we were invited to a party on another island, on which an American couple lives and are building a house and restaurant.  We had the option of taking a 20 min ride on a little boat for $20 or sailing with “Captain Radical” on his catamaran for a leisurely 5 hour trip over beautiful blue water through so many lush green islands for free… guess which one we chose:

The 2.5 acre destination island has a pretty amazing set up, with hammocks scattered here and there, a fale where they sleep on one side, the skeleton of a tree house with a spiral staircase on another, a kitchen structure at another, and a restaurant roof on another (everything is still in progress).  The American couple that leases the island (bottom picture below) are building the restaurant and house parts to have planted concrete roofs so that from afar you can’t tell that there is anything but nature on the island.  The party included a pot luck dinner, a DJ and lots of dancing, sleeping in tents, then making a big breakfast for everyone who stayed long enough the next day and drinking the contents of whatever coconuts we could find opened by the guys playing with machetes, all with intermittent games such as corn hole, darts, water games, and a battle hip tournament (a last-man-standing game played by standing in a big circle and hitting a rubber ball-type thing hanging from a tree with only your hips, eliminating people as they get hit with the ball unintentionally), of which I somehow became the international champion.

The remaining 3 or so weeks of our stay in Tonga were less eventful as we really got down to the nature of our trip and reeeeelaxed… but there were still some highlights.  We played trivia at Tonga Bob’s, a local pub, each Thursday and were determined to win.  Sometimes we would have too many people show up for our team, since there were a bunch of Americans, a few Australians, and eventually some British people we were friends with, and then a couple of us would have to join another team.  We never came very close to our goal of ultimate victory (we suspect cheating was involved by at least one other table), except for Sean, who on last Thursday we were there joined a team of other expats and his team won.  I’m sure we still haven’t heard the end of that.  Another weekly occurrence at Tonga Bob’s is a Fakaleti show, which we attended once.  Fakaletis are Tongan men who dress as girls, so it was similar to many shows in San Francisco.  It is fun to take male friends there and watch the pretty men make eyes at them.  Apparently in Tongan families if there are too many boys and not enough girls to do the traditional female work, the youngest son will be dressed and treated like a girl, including being taught to perform cooking and cleaning and other tasks generally done by women.  Sometimes these boys change after they move out of their parents’ house and end up like traditional men with wives and fulfilling the male roles, but sometimes they continue to dress like women and maintain feminine qualities, both of which are perfectly acceptable.  We also went sailing again, this time with an old guy who later earned the nickname “Hammer Roy,” after we heard a story of him smashing a loud boat generator with a hammer.  We decided not to sail with Roy anymore, but it was a good day out in the sun on the water.  Other than that, we hung out at Sean’s, checked out a few of the local beaches and camped at one for a couple nights, hung out at the peace corps office, hiked up Mt. Talau (great views), and various other activities around Neiafu. 

At the end of the trip Tres and I returned to Nuku Alofa for our flight back to New Zealand.  We went a day early in case flight schedules were changed as they tend to do in Tonga (there are so few planes that Sean asked us which one we took, we said a little blue one, and he said “oh, the one you have to duck down in to get to your seats?” – yep, that was the one.  Luckily it wasn’t the one built during WW2 that is still in regular use today).  We encountered a typical end-of-trip conundrum in which you want to use as much of your currency you already have to not have to exchange it back, but you don’t want to have too little and have to pay to take more out (exchange and ATM fees are ridiculous).  We had about 90 Tongan dollars between the two of us, which we decided would cover the night at the guesthouse, rides to and from the airport, and meals for the last day.  We stopped at the store on the way to the guesthouse to get a few small items for dinner and breakfast and figured we could eat lunch in town the next day (Tongan BBQ meals are only $5).  When we went to pay for the night at the guesthouse, we realized we hadn’t factored into our budget the 15% sales tax they add on to your bill, so we ended up with only about $3.50 and 1/3 of a loaf of bread left for lunch/dinner the next day.  That meant our options were buying a cheap can of sauce and eating the noodles in the community food bin at the guesthouse (a typical thing at hostels and places like this), or buying eggs (60 cents each) and having eggs and toast.  However, as we were walking around in town, we came across a little Tongan flag exactly as Tres’ grandmother had requested, so we had to get it.  We were left with $2.50, ruling out the sauce for pasta.  I realized I wanted a souvenir as well and hadn’t bought any so far, so I decided on the cheapest one I could think of, a Tongan coin.  This reduced our potential egg purchases to 3.  We were about to go for it, but at the last second we saw samosas on the counter at the fale kaloa (little store) for $1 each so we got 2 of them instead.  We shared a half of one of them while we were playing scrabble waiting for the bus to take us back to the guesthouse, and rationed the remaining one and a half throughout the rest of the day.  Of course when we got back to New Zealand Tres realized he had another dollar in the pocket of a pair of pants – we could have had the pasta sauce!  That caused quite a laugh as we remembered how “faka ofa” we had been, if you know what I mean...