Tonga - the Kingdom of!

We have been in Tonga for a week now, having motored up the channel to Neiafu, Vava’u last Wednesday morning. We had left Nuie the previous Sunday morning in rolly seas of about 3 metres and the wind directly behind us. We were making 6kts under the genoa which resulted in 124nm over 24 hrs – good stuff!! Monday saw the wind ease and the swell lessen although it was still rolly, so not comfortable travelling. The winds lightened off to the point that our batteries were getting too low, so at 2230hrs on Monday we started the engine to boost the batteries thereby ensuring our chartplotter, our best friend when on passage, would still have enough juice to operate. Tuesday disappeared into Wednesday as we crossed the International Date Line somewhere out there on the blue, with little fanfare on our part. Neiafu has been a great place to stop and catch our breath. We have been on a mooring in the large, calm harbour right in front of the Aquarium café/internet spot. Once again we have spent a good deal of time just catching up with friends from other yachts, doing internet stuff and eating plenty of non-traditional foods such as pizza. In fact it took us quite a few days before we did anything remotely cultural (unless you count the lady boys on our first night in town) we were having such a nice time doing ‘nothing’. I think we have reached the point one does in an extended trip away where one can ‘smell’ the closeness of home and just wants to get there, rather than exploring the nooks and crannies where one is. So I should explain about the lady boys……boys who look like girls, but are NQR (not quite right) eg. They wear a mini skirt but have really hairy legs or have breasts, but wear boys shorts or have their hair done up in a lovely bun, but sound like a man when they speak. Lady boys were all over French Polynesia, we didn’t see them in the Cook Islands at all, but here they are again in Tonga. I can’t quite work it out – some say historically it has something to do with ensuring that there is someone (ie. a girl) to stay at home and look after the parents. Regardless, they are an interesting part of the local culture and here in Neiafu, the lady boys put on a show at Tonga Bob’s, the local seedy bar, every Wednesday night. It was one of those shows where it was bad enough to be funny; we were treated to one dancer at a time coming on stage, lip-synching out of time to Cyndi Lauper or someone similar, gyrating on a pole and making suggestive motions to men in the audience. The deal was if you liked what a dancer was doing you would put cash in her cleavage. Some of them left the stage looking like an overflowing ATM! The other big thing to do in Neiafu is to go whale watching. We ummed and ahhed about the ethics, er no, it was actually more about the price of doing this, before we agreed we were unlikely to ever have the opportunity again to swim with whales – certainly not in Australia. Wow, what a great day. We motored out into the ocean on the whale watching boat with 10 other tourists. After spotting two whales in the distance we motored over towards them and Date, one of the whale boat operators, got into the water to keep an eye on them, and then signalled for 4 of us to get in the water to swim over. The way it worked was that we would keep pace on the surface looking down through our masks into the depths to a mere shadow of a mammal for 15-20 minutes. We would then see the whales start to materialise as they surfaced and came INCREDIBLY close to us. Should I swim forward or away? Gotta keep taking photos. My goodness how big are these creatures? Yoiks!! Were random, clashing thoughts in my mind at this point. We had about 3 swims with the whales all up and each time it was great. We also thought that the boat operators were really good, keeping the boat a good distance away from the whales and ensuring only 4 of us at a time were in the water hovering over them. Tomorrow we sail off for Fiji or maybe New Caledonia, depending on how the weather is as we travel along. Perhaps we will return to Tonga one day to explore some of her anchorages. For sure there is more to her than beer and pizza (and lady boys) in Neiafu.

Niue

We left Palmerston at around midday Saturday to sail west the 390nm to Niue. We set the reacher in about 12 knots of wind from the north east, but then ended up motor sailing through the night as the wind dropped. A breeze came in from the SSE at around 9am on Sunday and increased to around 15 knots so we pulled in the reacher and unfurled the smaller genoa. The winds increased throughout the day and night to 20-25 knots, gusting to 30. We were averaging 6kts with a reefed genoa. The seas were boisterous and uncomfortable. Monday brought more of the same so the cockpit was a wet place to be. The most comfortable place for each of us to take our turn on watch was from the bunk, with the timer set for every 20 minutes lest we fell asleep in the relative comfort of the bunk. We managed a cracking 135 miles over a 24 hour period. Tuesday still brought us good winds, but by now they were mainly from the east and the sky was alternately cloudy and sunny. We motored the last hour into Niue to make way against strong headwinds. We picked up a mooring ball at 4pm alongside 13 other yachts. Somewhere along the way we had lost a dorade cowl, but other than that all on Brio was intact.


Matapa Chasm

Niue illustrated to us yet again just how different the island groups across the Pacific are from each other. Stuck out on its lonesome between the Cooks and the Tongans, Niue rises straight up out of the sea like a rectangular, flat-topped chunk of cake. From a distance the vegetation all looks similar, but up close we could see some palms poking up amongst casuarinas and other trees. All the tourist brochures and guides for Niue talk about its wonderful ‘seatracks’ and how each one is different from the others. Well it’s not just propaganda we can assure you! The seatracks are, as you would imagine, paths that lead one from the road down to the sea.

Glorious Lipu Pools

They are all around the island and we had a great day in a car with Michael and Barbara from the yacht ‘Astarte’ visiting as many of them as we could. One of the highlights was the seatrack to Togo Chasm which led us through some lush forest, past a field of coral pinnacles and down a very steep ladder into the chasm where we wandered among coconut palms growing out of quite fine white sand.

Togo Chasm

As we drove around the island we were fascinated to see as we had on other islands, just how many graves were either next to houses or seemingly out in the middle of nowhere. Niue has less than 1500 people living there now. There was apparently a huge exodus of people from the island following cyclone Hattie in 2004. Evidence of Hattie’s destruction is everywhere in the form of abandoned, derelict and half destroyed houses.

Remains of cyclone

We also learned that you can’t get insurance on the island so it is easy to imagine people simply walking away from ruined homes and businesses as starting again would be financially impossible. We concluded our car tour of the island at the Matapa Bar, a delightful chance discovery. All day we had been hoping to find an ice-cream shop and/or a place to have a beer. It actually just became a bit of a standing joke as we knew that almost all places for food and beverage were in the main town of Alofi. Suddenly we saw a sign for Matapa Bar pointing down a dirt road. We didn’t really expect to find anything or anything open at least and we didn’t until Ivan leaned out the car window and asked a man who was painting a shipping container (there are a lot of shipping containers in yards!) if the bar was nearby. The man grinned, stepped off his ladder and said “You’re here. This is it”. We looked around and all we could see was a house and a shipping container, but happy to go with local knowledge when there was likely to be a cold, refreshing beer at the end of it, we parked the car. The man walked over to another shipping container and started dragging out a plastic table and chairs. We positioned them on the patch of dry grass out the front of his house and he asked us what beer would we like – Steinlager or Lion Red. He disappeared into the house and came back out with the ice-cold beers. Turns out Pele was one of the 20 (!) local MP’s on the island. We chatted to him while we slaked our thirst, not actually learning much about local political issues when we asked him, but certainly hearing all about the many countries he had visited in the world and the many prime ministers and presidents he had dined with!

Matapa Bar

We hired bicycles the next two days which allowed us to visit some more stunning seatracks, including ones where we could snorkel in pools that had layers of fresh and sea water. On Saturday morning we cycled the 10km to Tuapa village where they were having their annual festival. The order of events in the village festivals is you get there early in the day to buy some bbq food from one of the food stalls before they run out and you then listen to some speeches (mostly in Niuean so a bit meaningless to us) and then you watch some dancing put on by the people of that particular village.

apparently Jesus loves them

One of the aims of each village fair is to generate funds for the village so there is a donation basket in front of the dancing and all throughout the performances people throw coins and notes into the basket and hop up on to the stage to poke notes into the cleavage or costumes of the dancers. Sometimes the notes would drop out and someone from the audience would have to scurry over to retrieve it before the wind took it away. It was all a bit of fun. The weather was due to change with a westerly front on the way. It was time to leave. We departed Niue early the next morning, having had a great few days, enjoying the hospitality of the local people, including those at the wonderful Niue Yacht Club and saying goodbye to the whales as we headed for Tonga.