TASHY TRAVELS

Every Sunday, I am going to upload a post about the different countries I have visited and/or lived in since 2002.

I can assure you of some interesting stories.

POTTYED TONGA

My mother was very fond of proverbs. Time waits for no man, she would sometimes say. For those of you who may be interested in family history, my father did not often use quotations or proverbs. In fact, as you can probably deduce from the amount of times my mother was quoting things, he didn’t really get the chance to say much but when he did it was worth waiting for. Actually he used to say never end a sentence with a preposition so that last bit would not have pleased him. Continuing the educational format that we entered into some time ago, he also used to say the verb to be takes the same case after it as before. So, if ever I am somewhere, I always take the same suitcase as I had before I was where I am now. In other words if you see a guy with an old bag, I am he.

But back to time. It’s strange isn’t it. In the old days people never had clocks so how did they cope with life? Where would we be without clocks? I’ll meet you at three is so easy to say. In the case of some people I have known, should you ever try to meet them, there is no chance they would be there. They don’t seem to function to the same clock as the rest of us. Allowing for this, I always tell them the time 30 minutes later than it is, on the off-chance we may meet on time. But back to time and it is moving on as you read this. Do you realise that somewhere in the world, because of the way time is, someone is reading this at an earlier time than you are now but they haven’t read it yet? Think about it. Weird isn’t it.

Tongan time is very different though. Basically the hours and minutes of the day are used just like a preposition. They are merely a part of speech. They have no relevance to anything at all. We flew around Tonga quite a bit and we were always given a departure time when we booked our ticket. Never, and I mean never, did the plane leave at that time; sometimes, in rare cases, not on that day. But don’t get me wrong. Tongans are not always late for things. Oh no. We were booked to fly to Vav’ua from Ha’apai at 3.00pm. Lunchtime and my girlfriend went for a walk on the beach and met a nice friendly Tongan family who, typically, offered to share their lunch with her. After chatting for a while, they happened to mention they were flying to Vava’u too. “See you at 3”, she said, as she left. “No”, they said, “the flight leaves at 2”. “ Really”, she said. “Yes it was changed last night, didn’t anyone tell you”?

Of course they didn’t, why bother. It’s only time. Tongan airlines seem to be forever putting people up for an extra night in a hotel as they missed the flight because it went early. Time. A measure really, but of what. We have decided to divide the day into 24 hours and each hour into sixty minutes and each minute into sixty seconds. Why, why these figures? Why not have a ten-hour day? So much better cause you would only have to work for about 3 hours or so. Meals would only take 10 minutes or less if we had 10 minutes in each hour. Then it could be a minute or two. and all those people who say just a minute and disappear for a really long time, wouldn’t be lying.

The sometime heard comment, “is that it”, would now apply after 4 or 5 seconds, which could be a bit disconcerting but you know who you are, so work on it. Drag it out a bit. Elevenses would now be about fourses and we would all be like Margaret Thatcher and only need 3 hours sleep and probably carry a handbag everywhere too. The world record for the mile would be down to under a minute, the Eurovision song contest would last for less than an hour and a night with Engelbert Humperdink would only be 40 minutes. This is so good. Time could be changed for ever. Foreplay would be oneplay and thereby remove the problems as no one would complain or, if you did, then you have a major problem anyway.

OK, this is the plan and we will adopt it. There are ten hours in each day and ten minutes in each hour. Seconds have now become superfluous. Boxing would be less crowded as no one could have a second. This would also help people to diet as they couldn’t have seconds, now we are on a health kick too. What else would disappear? The minute waltz would be more of a marathon. Clocks would tick much slower but of course your pulse rate would go up quite a bit per minute. All these exercise machines would have to be recalibrated as a maximum heart rate of 160 a minute would basically mean you were Sebastian Coe or close to dead. No this is really good. Tonga you are leading the world here. This is the way to go. And educationally this would help kids learn quicker as they could tell the time when they can count to ten not twelve, therefore bringing forward their development quite a bit. Amazing. Time for a change, I think. After all we must move on. Time flies, which of course you can’t as they go too quickly. Mother never knew that. Talking of time, let's go back in it shall we? The year is 1789 or, the be more precise, dix sept cent quatre-vingt neuf, as it is a far more important date for them. It was the beginning of the time that the French finally got round to revolving and the peasants, feeling they had unfairly been relegated to the third division, or le tiers-etat as the French sieyes, sought instant promotion to Ligue 1, as they claimed they had tithed on points and didn't always want to be looked down on by Father Cleese and Lord Barker. At first only people in France knew about this dispute but soon the news, like the peasants, began to circulate.

No longer would these peasants be seen as smelly, dirty, common people though it actually took almost 4 more years till anyone significant had a bath and, in view of the mortifying outcome, perhaps that was not a bad thing. In any case as most of these peasants were only eating bread they could just brush the crumbs off their clothes so obviating the need for clothes washing too. “Brush off the brioche” was a common, and possibly smelly, phrase of the time, shortly followed by “let's have a nibble on the bourbons”.

However, totally unaware of the revolting French people and miles away from all this, old Bill Bligh was sitting in the captain's cabin on his ship writing his log, after all it was a log cabin. He had been sailing around the Pacific for the last eighteen months or more. He'd left the UK in December 1787 and sailed for Tahiti. His intention was to take the Cape Horn route but it was blocked through bad weather, not enough salt, no gritters, the usual excuses and so, taking advice from the AA, he took a diversion through the Indian Ocean. He knew he needed to get a move on as, having been born in 1754, if he didn't he could soon find himself in the roaring forties. It took ten months till he got to Tahiti and for all this time he had 45 men all cooped up on the ship. He made them exercise on the coop deck but still it wasn’t fun.

Realising he needed to also exercise his power, he flogged a few, demoted a couple and generally did all the things a captain should do. One time he came up on deck to address the crew and foolishly held up a hand to silence the others. Sadly, he made a bad move when he demoted the sailing master John Fryer, and replaced him with Fletcher Christian, thereby going into the frying pan out of the fryer. Mother, perhaps?

March came and went, he had tried to organise a speed festival but the wind let him down. He took some settlers and things got better. April followed March but she had no idea what to do so we'll ignore her until she got to 27. Yes, April 27 1789 was the date that changed history because it had never happened before.

Bill Bligh had finished in Tahiti. They had waved a fond goodbye to the dusky maidens and a slightly less fond one to the dawny grannies. Finally he, and his crew, were on their way home. “Lets go”, Bill shouted to his new sailing master who unfortunately indulged in a spoonerism having meant to say “weigh anchor”. This affront in earshot of the men forced Bill to take Fletcher in hand. “You jerk”, he thundered, and this time Fletcher did as he was told.

Once again Bill took advice, this time from the RAC. They said that there might again be possible, adverse, traffic conditions, and so Bill decided to take the scenic route and found himself just off the Ha’apai group of islands in Tonga. See, this is relevant.

At the time they were called the Friendly Islands, having been given that name by old Jim Cook when he had popped in a few years back. Old Jim went around naming lots of places and some of them didn’t require much imagination. He often used the names of top people in the Admiralty who sponsored his journeys, as with the Sandwich Islands, now Hawaii and originally named after the 4th Earl of Sandwich, who himself invented the sandwich, or one of his ancestors or descendants did. He was really John Montagu but, could I have a cheese and tomato montagu, or I've been montagued between those two people the whole journey, sounded so bad, sandwich it was.

New Zealand was the scene of some of Jim’s most inspired namings. Discovering nothing in the way of supplies in one place, he called it Poverty Bay; after the servant of his Maori guide was kidnapped, an area was named Kidnappers Bay; Mercury Bay was where they anchored to watch the planet Mercury and best of all, Doubtless Bay was so named, so I have heard, as when they rounded a rocky outcrop, Cook said “Doubtless this will be another bay”. Lucky he was so well spoken as “Not another f**king bay” doesn’t really look good on an atlas.

You may feel here that Tongans, or Friendlies as they were obviously called then, have a particular love for the apostrophe; Ha'apai remember? It crops up all over the place. In English, Bill Bligh's native tongue, they use the apostrophe for two things. Thinking about it, unless you have had a transplant everyone's tongue is native, But I digress. The first use of the apostrophe is to denote possession, Fred’s hat, and the second to denote a missing letter, I haven’t told you. There are exceptions of course. The English always take exception. It’s its own worst enemy is an example of an exception as the it’s, when meaning it is, is apsotrophed but its, meaning possession by it, is not. Following, good cos I’ve finished with it. You didn't know this would be such an educational story did you?

Tongans use the apostrophe for fun. Nuku’alofa, Vava’u, Ha’apai may well be possessed by someone but the apostrophe is not there for that reason. In fact the apostrophe is actually the 16th letter of the Tongan alphabet. Only sixteen you say. Tongans, or Friendlies, are laid back people. Why bother with 26 when 15 and an apostrophe will do. Economy of effort and saving on ink. Anyway, this apostrophe is a signal to take a breath in a word, to rest the vocal chords for a mini-second. The Tongans use the letters differently too. Ng is written as g but pronounced ng. Now even I may be lost here because that means Tonga is not really Tonga at all but Togo in Africa. Oh God, do they know this. They are not Polynesian at all; or possibly even friendly.

In Tongan they use s instead of t sometimes or maybe they use t instead of s tomesimet who knows. Each syllable has only one vowel and there is never a combination of consonants. A long bowel, presumably the large intestine, or vowel sorry, is shown with a macron. Each syllable must have only one consonant. That means, buster, that each syllable can only be two letters, if these rules are adhered too, and I now see that each syllable must end with a vowel so that limits it a bit too. There is also a bit about stress, but taking about it made me, so I have ignored it here.

Finally, in this diatribe, the apostrophe is a consonant and has to be followed or preceded, unless it is at the beginning of a word dumbo, by a vowel. Unlike the apostrophe in many other Polynesian language texts, the Tongan apostrophe is always written. To get really technical, this apostrophe is known as a glottal stop. And it has glottal be put in when it should be there, otherwise you would never stop would you. That makes some sense I suppose.

Anyway, we have wandered off at a tongent, so back to Bill Bligh. He had been a protégé of Cook’s and sailed with him on some of his journeys. We can assume therefore he knew about the intricacies of naming islands. But, at this time, he had other things to think about. His men were not happy. They had spent five months on Tahiti and enjoyed, and I use the word, spread in its widest sense, the hospitality of the natives, especially the women. Bill had let the guys live on the island as the constant thumping and moaning on ship had seriously disturbed his sleep. Some of these men had also formed attachments with the women, longer and less physical than the one you are thinking about. But to put it politely, Bill had had enough of seamen running through the decks all night. Now was the time to withdraw.

So, he set sail but soon found himself with an unhappy crew, who had no way of satisfying their now awoken urges, and his men were trying to trim the sails using only one hand as the other one was tired. What should he do? Could he sail single-handed, he asked? Very soon, he would have an answer to that. Just as he was thinking this, his first officer, Fletcher Christian, his parents were the token religious couple in The Archers and pure country folk, popped his head round the cabin doors. “Got any chocolate boss”, said Fletch. “Just the one bar left”, answered Bill.

Fletch thought it should be for him; he had done a lot of work using his loaf to organise the 1,000 or so bread fruit plants that they had put on board and he felt he was entitled to a slice of the benefits, a thick slice. But Bill wanted to keep it for himself. He liked a nice piece of chocolate when he had his tot of rum each night and foolishly he told Fletcher this. Fletch went berserk. “Surely you don’t drink and drive while driving this ship”, he raved. Fletch, you see, had been hauled over the coals some time ago when he sailed in a collier and he knew the risk of drinking and driving on a boat. “Give me the chocolate and don’t drink”, he stormed. “No”, said Bill “its my chocolate”. “Mine”, said Fletch. “No mine”, said Bill. Fletch turned on a sixpence. “Come here you stupid coin”, he yelled. “I'll give you a good tanning”, he ranted, and left.

Bill sat back; he was worried. He'd never seen his sailing master so angry. Shortly after midnight Fletch stormed back in with some of the crew and dragged Bill up on deck. He had been in bed and was only wearing his ringed nightshirt which barely covered his fear. At this sight many of the men were cock-a-hoop. They had no idea Bill had been part of a circumnavigation with Cook but now they knew.

”OK Bill give us the keys, I’m driving this thing and you can take the runabout home on your own unless anyone wants to go with Bill” Fletch shouted. Fletch asked for a show of hands and flung 18 of them into the little runabout, which they truly regretted was a cabriolet version as they then had to sail for almost 7000 kms through the heat of tropical waters, taking 47 days before they found a service station in Timor, where they ordered a Royal Naval taxi and went home. Bill, needless to say, navigated single-handedly and had both hands ready to greet the natives of Timor. Later Bill was made governor of New South Wales in Australia and people didn’t like him much there either.

Meanwhile Fletch and the others took the big boat back to Tahiti, picked up a few of the islanders there and set sail for a quiet little retreat where they could relax a bit and just enjoy life. They found it on Pitcairn island. It didn’t go quite as planned and they argued a lot and often, in his quiet moments, Fletch would sit there with his Tahitian wife and wonder if it had all been worthwhile. Eventually, in 1793, war broke out among the islanders and Fletch was killed leaving behind him his wife and son, Thursday October Christian. I would guess that in their quieter times together, Bill Blyth had passed on some of the knowledge he had gained from old Jim Cook about naming things. We will never know but there is a story that just before he died, he gave the bar of chocolate, which he had taken from Bill Blyth’s cabin, to his son and said, “This is why we are here lad, we took that ship because Bill wouldn’t give me his bar of chocolate. It will go down in history as a mutiny for a bounty”.

I can't decide, if you made it all the way through that, whether I should give you an apology. No, I agree. Would be polite though but possibly a bit quaint. Tonga is a quaint little place isn’t it? That is a rhetorical question and continuing the educational format of these blogs that means I don’t expect an answer, in this case for two reasons. One I can’t hear you and two, maybe you have never been to Tonga and so are unqualified to answer.

Let’s get back to quaint little Tonga. As I walked, I found these signs all over the place. In most of the western world we have billboards. This is the place we put our posters. Every so often, a man, and I believe his name is Bill Poster, will come along, splash glue over the existing advert on the board, take out a number of rolled sheets of paper or something like it, you can tell I know nothing about this can’t you, and then gradually stick each piece up and then you have a brand new advert. Of course the fun is to think what might come up when he is only half way through his job. An interesting game played with photoshop if you want, “cut the ad”.

Not in quaint little Tonga. When they make a sign, it’s actually painted on the board. No flimsy bits of paper and glue here. No staring at the guy watching to see how funny half the sign might be and inventing a new game. In Tonga you get it all in one go, so to speak. The sign arrives complete. There it is on the road side until replaced. The question is do they then come along and paint over it or do they take it away, put in a new one that was painted back at the factory.

Back to the signs. They love them. Walk for Health, great idea. A whole family, all incidentally in identical shoes, click to enlarge, walking alongside the beach. They don’t seem to have a mouth between them or on them and the length of their stride would indicate several days to walk a kilometre but never mind, the thought was there. Of course, the question might be what else can you do alongside the beach. No bus; Tonga is notoriously short on trains; and no road for the car so walk you must. And just think how long it took to make this sign. Hand painted by the look of it. Just had a quick check to make sure Jake wasn’t in there but no, eight legs, four people, the accepted ratio. Note the pretty little birds flying in twos or threes across the beautiful blue ocean.

Then another one. In case you can’t read it, the English version says, “Swimming at night-time, drinking alcohol and eating are prohibited in this area”. Presumably, as it is an and not an or, you can do two of the three or even one of them but not all three. Lovely idea, swimming at day time, drinking alcohol and eating, which my mother, there she is again, would have opposed anyway. She always told me to wait an hour after eating before I could have a bath. I kept having snacks for weeks when I didn’t want to wash. If you take a close look you will see the area is gated but not fenced so maybe it only applies to vehicles anyway. By the way at the side of the gatekeepers hut, there was a family who were acting as security on a Sunday in Tonga when no one is around anyway

Both the earlier signs were in Tongatapu, the main island in the south, but they love their signs up north too. This one was outside the Tongan Visitors Bureau and while helping you to know distances, it is not much use for geography. Is Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea really the same way as Geneva in Switzerland? Can you really go due north to Vancouver, due west to Rome and almost the same way to Sydney and Brussels? The answer to all these questions is, of course, no. And politically it would seem that this part of Tonga is looking for funding from Taiwan not China. Oh well such fun. It’s a sign, nothing accurate, just a sign. This is the visitors bureau and I bet you would like to know how to get home.

But even more fun was this sign we saw outside a nightclub in Nuku’alofa. OK, now all seems normal with the dress code and I am quite happy that no one should be hassled and even happier that no mosquito is allowed. That’s brilliant because there is nothing worse than having a groovy dance and getting stung by swarms, flights, gaggles, squadrons or whatever it is, of mosquitoes, although there are some people who seem to be doing the scratching as they dance anyway. But this thing with banning animals from certain places could catch on, couldn’t it? I mean:-

no cheetahs at the card table
no lions at the telephone exchange
no mice at the computer store
no sole at the shoe shops
no voles at the voling alley (this is getting silly now)
no gnus on TV at six o’clock each night (and sillier)
no jaguars at Le Mans (and clever)
no cats, moggies or pussies at the strip club, no beavers either (and risqué)
no place in this world where I belong (thanks to Phil Ochs here)
no eagles on the golf course, or little birdies or albatrosses or ancient mariners either. Always reminds me of a NO.11 batsmen, you know he stoppeth one of three. (and literary)
no salmon having an enchanted evening (getting subtle now)
and no unicorn anywhere

By the way, or btw in the modern language, a mosquito is someone who asks you to buy them a drink, asks for a sip of yours or, even worse, steals a sip of yours when you are not looking.

Later in our Tongan odyssey, we flew Tongatapu to ‘Eua, note the apostrophe is not preceded by a vowel here as it is the first letter. This is a short trip, in fact the shortest in the world commercially I believe. Six minutes. We all got on a little 15 seater plane, I think, it may have been 17, and strapped ourselves in. Then the cabin crew, one guy, who sat next to the pilot at the front, stood up and turned to us to give us the safety briefing. I had already checked out the pilot and he could not have done this. He was a man of Tongan proportions and he barely fitted in the cockpit and was the main reason when we took off that the tail left the ground first. In fact if he had ever needed to eject, you can use this word in aeronautical terms quite freely, or bang out as I think they call it, then he would have certainly taken the whole cockpit with him. His knees were hard up against the control thing and his stomach pressed into it too, in fact his whole body did. When he pulled it back to take off, joystick took on a whole new meaning for him. Anyhow more of him later.

The crew, one man, gave us a quick safety check and mentioned that the life jackets were under the seat. For the first time in her life, my girlfriend felt under the seat and…….nothing. So, being polite, she mentioned this to the guy. “Really”, he said, “it was there this morning. maybe someone took it”. Maybe young man, but while you were flying or on land. Is there some poor passenger out in the ocean trying to inflate himself. He didn’t seem to care. This leaving while flying is a possibility in Tonga because as we taxied down the runway and built up speed to take off there was a loud bang. We all looked around but in fact it was just the pilot shutting the door, air conditioning not existing on this plane, just before we became airborne.

I also said ‘Eua was a small island and the runway is proportionate to the island. You need to touch down at the very far end and then if all the passengers press their right foot hard down and brace themselves, it just stops before the bushes at the other end. Of course you have to be careful. If we had stopped too quickly and the pilot had been thrown forward in his seat, then all theories of motion would have happened in one. With his weight we could have been 300 metres further into the bushes and e=mc2 where e= ‘eua and mc=missed connection would have been proved. But it was fun. I think. We actually met a guy on the island who said he had come by boat, takes two hours not six minutes, because he didn’t like the idea of flying at 1000 feet. I told him how stupid. I mean if things go wrong and you start to plummet do you really want to sit through a 33,000 foot descent awaiting the crash when you can get it over in a 1000. Strange guy and far too thin to be a pilot anyway. Obviously couldn’t stand the bustle at the airport in Tongatapu.

Just for your information, this is the Tongan alphabet which, as you can see, is as easy as A E F
a, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, p, s, t, u, v, ‘

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