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.

TONGA 1

After Fiji, we went on to Tonga. Our sponsorship deal with Air Pacific now took over and we would have free flights to all our destinations in the Pacific, then back to Fiji and, finally, on to New Zealand. It was a very generous offer and we were very pleased with it. In return, we had to accept that we could only fly at, if you like, non-rush hour times. We arrived at Nadi airport and set off through the checkout. I went through with no problem but, for the second time in two flights, my girlfriend did have a problem. The check-out staff told us that their information was that anyone on a Polish passport needed a visa to enter Tonga. Having learned from our previous problems over the years, we had contacted the Tongan representative in New Zealand before we left and he had told us that a new law had just been passed, treating Poles like other EU citizens, which by now they were. Eventually, I had to open my laptop and show them the email and finally they agreed to let us through. It was also a problem at the other end, in Tonga, as they had not been notified of the law change either. But, we got there.

We arrived, though, at the end of a fairly turbulent time in Tonga, or at least in the capital Nuku’alofa. In November 2006, less than a year before our arrival, riots had broken out in the city. Tonga is a monarchy, it has a King, or for many years, a formidable Queen, and some people wanted reforms and a more democratic (there’s that word again) government. The rioters were upset that Parliament was about to stand down for the year and reforms had not been passed. They started by throwing stones and breaking windows but then they began to set fire to buildings. Part of the problem may have been that some enterprises were actually owned by the royal family and it was these that, at first, were targeted. By early evening, the riots were out of control but so were the fires. More than half of the central business district was destroyed. The picture shows levelled ground where once the buildings stood.

The King had only succeeded to the throne in September 2006, aged 58. When we travelled around Nuku’alofa, we saw the remains of the vast dais that had been built for the old King’s funeral ceremony. One of the problems, so I heard, was that the old King had spent a lot of his time in Auckland over in New Zealand. This had not endeared him to his people and, of course, the profits made by companies owned by the royal family didn’t help. As we were to discover later, Tonga, as a nation, has a habit of its national airline going bust. One of those in the past was also royal owned.

Talking of burials, as you do when King’s die, the picture on the left is from a Tongan cemetery. It was not an unusual sight. Several of the ones we visited were as colourful, and as well looked after, as this in the heart of Nuku’alofa. If I remember correctly, and this is not in my notes, purple was the colour associated with death. Quite often we saw a house where purple sheets had been draped on the walls outside and this, we were told, was because of a recent death.

A few little notes about the new King (note - King George Tupou VI died in 2012 and was succeeded by his younger brother). On his accession, he took the name of George Tupou VI. In view of his real name, Siaosi Taufa'ahau Manumataongo Tuku'aho Tupou V, this was probably a good move. The picture shows his palace, which was undergoing some refurbishment when we were there. I have a feeling that during this time, October 2007, there was a meeting of all Pacific Countries, or at least their leaders, and the opening ceremony was held in these grounds. We met with the King’s Personal Secretary and he told us a little about the way things were done in Tonga. I had heard some rumours about the new King but decided not to ask for confirmation. In any case a day or two later, one of these was confirmed when the King drove past us in his London taxi. Of his rumoured toy soldiers, I saw nothing.

We had arranged our first stay on an island just off the coast from Nuku’alofa, called Pangiamotu. It was an incredibly small island with only about 10 huts for accommodation. It seemed strange that they were able to make it financially viable but, as our stay covered a weekend, we soon discovered how. There was a bar and decking area and on Saturday and Sunday there arrived a sudden influx of visitors from the mainland. By the way, I am putting up this picture of our accommodation in case a couple of young ladies from Australia recognise it. One night, or possibly early morning, we had retired to our little hut after a night chatting in the bar. About 1.00 am we were awoken to the sound of female giggles. Next, the door opened. Two figures walked in. As I said the resort was small and we knew everyone staying there, so we recognised these two young Australians. There was no lighting and they sort of stumbled in. We decided to keep quiet to see what might happen. This allowed us to hear the memorable comment a few seconds later when one of the girls said ‘this isn’t where our table was when we left’. It only took them a few minutes more to grasp the fact that the reason for that was, that it wasn’t their hut. They turned and left but I just had to say, ‘Shut the door after you’. The next day they said nothing and neither did we. I’m not sure they actually knew which hut they had been in.

Talking of Sunday, which I was earlier, as the day-trippers arrived, we took the ferry the other way to the mainland. At first we thought this a bad decision as the streets were almost completely deserted. It was dead. Tongans are very religious people and on Sunday all shops, except I think those selling bread, are closed. Bearing in mind the devastation caused by the riots, it was very eerie. Roughly from this moment on, our time in Tonga was organised by a guy called Tomasi who ran a company called Teta Tours. He was, in some way, connected to Air Tonga, and had his offices in the remaining building you can see in the empty Tonga streets in an earlier photograph.. He agreed that he would arrange for us to be flown to the other two islands groups, Ha’apai and Vava’u, he would organise some tours for us and, in return, we would give him a complete set of all photos we took during our time in Tonga.

That night, we waited at Tomasi’s office and a car arrived and took us off to a buffet and traditional dance evening. Sadly, for you lot, I have forgotten where. I think it was something like the Tongan National Museum but maybe that doesn’t exist. As well as much dancing, and eating, they also performed a traditional kava ceremony and it was there that we first learned that, in Tonga, women were only allowed to serve the drink not to consume it. We would come across this again later when we visited Vava’u. Unlike Fijian dancing, which I found quite physical, Tongan dancing seemed, to a complete non-dancer like me, far more gentle, flowing and great emphasis was placed on the hand movements.

Next for us was a tour of Tonga. We started off by visiting the very spot, so our guide said, where Captain Cook had landed on April 30, 1777. I have to admit that possibly because Tomasi had asked for help with his website, my notes were pretty extensive at this time. Then we moved on to the Ha’amonga Trilithon. It was believed to have been built in about 1200AD and there was a legend about it but this I did not note down. What fascinated me was that it bore a close resemblance to Stonehenge and other monuments in the western world.

Our guide pointed out that there was a notch in the centre of the cross stone. This pointed directly to the position of the sun at some significant time, which, again, I failed to note. This kind of thing has always fascinated me. The similarity between two or more old monuments, buildings, built in a time when communication around the world was virtually nil. I will tell you soon about the Maori and the Vikings and now I was looking at a stone-age structure similar to others thousands of miles away. Even Mont St Michel in France and St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall amuse me. Check them out if you want; I have been to both.

The tour continued with a visit to the famous blow holes. The sea wasn’t that rough on the day we were there but it was still very dramatic. The water from the ocean is forced up through natural breaks in the rock and a towering fountain sprays all around. I think this stretch of coastline is over 3 miles long and I do remember that we could see these fountains of spray, not only in front of us but also way into the distance. You are, or we were, allowed to go right down on to the rocks and my western mind again thought ‘Health and Safety’ and then, almost immediately, ‘what the hell’. You don’t get these chances too often in life, unless of course you live in Tonga.

After that, we drove along for a while, unsure where we were heading, until we stopped in what appeared to be a residential area. There was a lot of screeching to be heard, but it wasn’t until we climbed out and, seemed to walk into someone’s front garden that we saw them. Hundreds of them, Up in the trees were the fruit bats. They hang from the branches of the trees, some looking inanimate, others quite agitated and appearing to defend their own space from intruders. We learned that they are considered sacred although apparently, rather like swans on the River Thames, can only be eaten by the royal family.

I am not, nor have I ever claimed to be, a professional photographer. Over the last 28 years, since my first trip around the UK coastline, I have taken thousands of photos. My travel regime of arrive, look, inquire, move on, means that I never have time to set up a photograph. I seldom take pictures of animals either. That is not to say I don’t take as much trouble as I can over a photo. I believe I do have an eye for seeing something beautiful in our landscape but, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder (mother circa often), it may only be me that likes it. But, when I get something like this, I do feel good.

Once we had got rid of the bats, we headed off to a reconstructed ancient village. There were several houses there and it looked very Tongan. It also acted very Tongan because all the buildings were locked and we couldn’t get in. We walked round the outside, we rattled a few padlocks and we looked for someone who might know something. All to no avail and our guide gave up and suggested we went elsewhere although he didn’t suggest where. In fact that was the end of our tour and we set off home.

On the way, we saw a less well-maintained modern set of homes in a real Tongan village. This was the first time we had seen anything outside the capital. For me, it was one of those occasions when your initial reaction is how dirty, poor, broken. But then you see children playing and laughing, washing on a line and you re-adjust your views. It is their way of life and I should not judge it by my standards, what I am used to and have lived. The other day someone asked me why, as I was essentially writing this stuff for kids and grandchildren, did I feel I had to update it weekly? Why didn’t I take a week off? The answer, to me, was simple. I had set out to update it weekly and so that is what I needed to do. We all set goals, I hope, and we should all keep going until we achieve them. If I failed to update, I would feel I had failed in the target I set myself. To see an athlete set a record way beyond anything ever done before and be disappointed that she probably hadn’t achieved what she wanted, brought this home to me a year or so ago. If I didn’t update one day it wouldn’t matter, except, to me, it would.

But enough skiing in Tonga, for the moment and some of you may have lost me here so let’s move on to pigs. They are everywhere in Tonga. Every single village we went to had pigs running around. On this tour, when we drove along the coast, there were pigs in the sea, foraging around. One of the advantages of these animals is as a rubbish collector. It would appear that pigs eat almost anything and they obviously help to keep the villages clean. The picture shows one of them, ankle-deep, or maybe trotter-deep, in mud next to that village, pictured above and which took me off to the slopes of Lenzerheide. Another good point about pigs is that they taste good.

We returned to Nuku’alofa and the next day, Tomasi flew us off to the other island groups, which you can read about in the next few days. When we came back, we stayed for a while on Atata Island and more of that later too. Tomasi, meanwhile, had another idea. He wanted us to visit ‘Eua, a little island, and I mean little, just off the tip of Tongatapu. He arranged our flight, our accommodation and told his friend, who owned the accommodation, to look after us. The flight was six minutes. No sooner are you up than you’re down. You reach 1,000 feet and it is all over. Believe it or not, the Tongan, who sat next to me, fell asleep.

The runway was short, possibly a trifle too short. We touched down on the grass landing strip, and just as we were about to enter the bushes at the end of the runway, the pilot slowed enough for us to turn round and go back to the main terminus. That’s it in the picture; the hut on the right. Not much in the way of customs or immigration control and nothing in the way of comfort. We were met by our new host and driven off to his small resort, which consisted of about 10 huts overlooking the sea.

The next day our host had arranged for us to be taken on a 4X4 tour of the island. We set off and drove through coffee plantations owned by the King, allotments where the Taro plants were taller than our guide, a forest of banyan trees with their amazing roots and walked through bush and trees, which looked down on the beaches below, which is where I took the previous photo. It was a fantastic journey, just four of us and our guide, and I am sure we went to places we could never have accessed on our own. The other couple, by the way, included the Italian who will appear in a later blog and who didn’t like flying at low-level.

I remember that one time we went through some bush which took us out to a ledge overlooking the beach. Our guide showed us a cave and said that they had found some skeleton bones there a year ago. ‘We just left them’, he said, and, once again, I realised the difference between my world and theirs. There was no investigation to date the bones, no alerting the police to see if there were any missing persons, nothing. The bones were there and that was where they would stay. We finished our journey with half an hour on the beach and this was my typical, or archetypical, desert island. The trees running down to the shore, the white sand and the little lagoon with waves breaking over the reef a hundred yards or so off shore. The trouble was that the reef surface was under the waters of the lagoon and any attempt to walk into the water could result in sliced feet. Looking at the photo now, I am assuming that the white sticks are just that and not bones because if they had been then our friendly guide would have just left them.

The next day we went outside the reef on a whale watching trip organised by our guides. We went with another couple, they were a young couple not half a young couple, and, sadly, the guy didn’t like the sea or at least being in a boat upon it. We spent five hours out at sea, and never saw a single whale. The guy got sea-sick and then we got caught in a sudden squall. The rain almost knifed down and the two guys produced two waterproof jackets, which they gave to the two ladies. The guy had his own. Somewhere, I had heard Tongans respect their elders and I hope I gained their total respect for riding out the storm in just a t-shirt and shorts. They were most apologetic about not finding any whales and said we could go out, for free, the next day. Our friends declined but we set off again. The weather was far better and we went further away from our resort this time. Great plan because, with the wonders of modern technology, the owner phoned the guys after an hour or so and asked where we were. When told, he said, ‘shame, there are a couple of whales right outside the resort, we’re all watching them’. We still didn’t see one, except that afternoon I think I spotted one about 20 miles out to sea. Can you see it? A sudden thought has just occurred to me. I don’t remember seeing any life-jackets on this boat. Health and Safety again, only this time Health and Safety and downright stupidity. Have I told you I can’t swim?

The following morning, which was to be our last on ‘Eua, we took a walk from the resort to the nearby village. All we could hear was the constant banging of wood on metal and we followed the sound until we found the house from which it was coming. What we found was a women starting out on the process of making tapa cloth. Tapa is often made from the bark of the paper mulberry tree. The tree is cut down and the bark stripped off. This, by the way, is the meals-in-a-minute version. Once the outer bark is split off, the inner bark is cut into strips about 4 or 5 inches wide and soaked in water.

After this, and this was the noise we could hear so clearly, the bark is beaten on a wooden block using a ribbed implement and I’m not going there. It is, however, for those of you who wish to know, only ribbed on one side. It is this side that is used to beat the tree bark first and, at a later stage, when the bark is much thinner, the smooth side is used. When the strips are thin enough, and before you ask I have no idea, they are beaten together into a large piece of material. Normally the strips will stick together but if needed they use a form of glue from natural sources.

These strips can be pretty big. They are laid out to dry in various places as you can see. The edges are trimmed with a knife or, so we were told, in olden or traditional times, with a sharp shell. It was a fascinating process and made me think, as so many traditional crafts or even food does, who realised they could do this. I know my old friend Napota from Fiji knew what leaf or berry would cure what illness but who worked out this whole process for making cloth.

Tapa can be painted or dyed and, when done, it is really beautiful. Even in its natural state it has a great significance for these people. Most of the dyed tapa we saw in Tonga had been coloured brown but I don’t know if this was in any way significant. We were told that as long as you had some tapa in your home, you were not considered to be poor. The tapa is often given as a gift to a chief on important occasions. In olden days, it was worn as clothing and you will see, in later blogs, if I remember, some examples of this. It is also used as decoration and can be found, like a picture, hanging on the walls of people’s homes.

Carrying on this hand-made, or even home-made craft theme, on our return to Tongatapu we found the annual, traditional, canoe building competition. As far as I could see it was mainly for young people and they had a week to complete their task. They started with something like the picture on the left and ended with something similar to that below. The boats were left overnight in the open area and, as far as I know, no mechanics broke the curfew and tried to fit the coanda oars. Sadly, we couldn’t stay long enough to see the races which took place at the weekend.

You may spot the guy is this photo is not really using a traditional tool, but I don’t know what the rules are, so let’s not complain. I love watching these traditional crafts wherever I am. I have now seen a Maori tattooist, glass blowing in Venice, dry stone-walling in the Lake District, even tried that, cheese making somewhere in Yorkshire, tried the cheese too and wine making of the Listel type in or near Aigues-Morte in France, definitely tried that, even bought a bottle or two. I suppose, if I stop to think, there may be more.

In the time after visiting ‘Eua and before leaving Tonga for Samoa, we spent time on Atata Island, a little further off the coast than our first stop of Pangiamotu. This differed in other ways too, as the island had a resort at one end but also their own village, at the other. The island was shaped a bit like a ………., no, mother said beauty was in the eye of the beholder so you take a look and you decide what it looks like. The village, like Wayalailai in Fiji, relied on getting supplies by ferry, although there was a guy who arrived each morning and sold his fresh catch of fish to the resort and maybe the villagers. There were no cars on the island and this is the main street.

There was a school and we spent some time there. We went into one class and managed to get the kids singing our song, while in a lower class, we saw young boys learning Tongan dancing. On a slightly more worrying note, the teacher in the older class obviously wanted a cigarette and we saw the teacher in the primary class give one to a pupil who carried it through. Good job it wasn’t my eldest son as he would have lost it somewhere on the way, several times. The fact that his father has never smoked a cigarette in his life, hasn’t stopped him. The kids in the older class were actually drawing patterns that could be used on pieces of tapa, which links so well with my earlier piece.

The village had the compulsory pigs running around, it used an old scuba diving oxygen tank as the church bell and one of the houses, see picture, was partly solar-powered. Many of the villagers worked in the resort and it was a far bigger operation than the one we stayed at when we arrived in Tonga. We were there for about ten days and it was from there that we left for Samoa. But that is not where we are going because, as yet, I have not taken you to Vava’u, the northern most group, nor Ha’apia, the middle one. And that is where we will go next.

By the way, the resort on Atata Island offered some water based activities. While we were there, a man and his young son came over from New Zealand. The boy tried knee boarding, easier than water skiing, while the father tried underwater skiing, and failed. If you are interested, I tried sail-boarding. This time I was given a life-jacket and so I did not have to sail the Pacific Ocean until I hit somewhere. You see, my sail-boarding is a little like my skiing. I can go anywhere in a straight line but need to dismount to turn the board around. With skiing, I found I just fell over and my instructor said he had no fears about me getting any injuries because he had never seen anyone fall so expertly. I have talents, you know.

I’ll leave you with an ‘Euan sunset.

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