Exploring Tongatapu with Lily and Jackson

Exploring Tongatapu with Lily and Jackson

We explored Tongatapu, 1st by bus which was an education. I spent some time sorting out which bus to catch and where and at what time. I met Sylvester who owned 6 little buses and did the Ha’asini rout. I called him Mr Stallone. He first took me passed the airport to collect the kids- $2 instead of $30 for a taxi, and with some excellent rap blaring from his stereo. So we caught the same bus to go to some caves.

Sylvester assured us that the caves and good snorkelling were at the end of this road. There were caves and snorkelling but not the ones we had in mind but to our utter surprise the only people on the beach greeted Jackson – friends from university. How does that happen? As they enthused about the whales they had seen that day, there they were just the other side of the reef. Fantastic!!

We could not resist this bill board. Everything I hear or read about this man leaves a sour taste but the local response is more muted. Seems a touchy subject to raise.


Then we hired a car – one of simplest transactions ever, no contract, no driver’s license check, no innumerable extras. Just $50 for the keys and we were off. And the car didn’t break down.
Visited these spectacular blowholes

And this coral arch,

And these fabulous caves at the bottom of which was this fresh water pool. Ah, the pleasure of a salt free swim.

Much effort went into finishing these coconut drinking cups.







All up Jackson and Lily had a pretty good time.

Blog July 14 - Salt


Salt has been dominating our lives so thought I’d write a piece on this as we have been hanging out at Tongatapu waiting for the right conditions to go back north again, and there’s not much to report.


Our lives are inundated with salt. It has now permeated almost every area of our existence. In Wellington I managed to restrict most of the salt to the outside of the boat but here it has seeped into every crevice. It started on the trip up, day one in fact, when we were in rough weather off the Wairarapa coast. We would fall into our bunks after a watch clothed in full wet weather gear. Getting changed was hard work when the boat is heeled over and falling off waves, and in my case any additional movement below probably meant throwing up.


Salt infiltrates through many means. We only get a fresh water shower once or twice a week as getting fresh water here is quite a challenge, so it comes in on our skin. Plus most days we swim. We wear the same light clothes for days and they become salt laden. Because of the water shortage we can’t do laundry very often and getting the salt out requires several rinses, something we can’t afford.


Then the water got so low we started doing the dishes in salt water. It gets them clean but has introduced salt into many of the cupboards.
Now you may wonder why salt is such a problem. Somewhere a long time ago I gathered a figure about salt being able to absorb 70 times its mass in water. (Someone please Google that for me and let me know if that is correct). These last few days the humidity has been up to 88%. With the air laden with so much water every salty surface is lapping up the fluid and the place has become very damp. Even the bed is damp now as the sheets soon became salt from our salty bodies.
Because our dishes are done in salt water everything you drink has a slight salty flavour. Fortunately we need the ingestion of salt to offset the salt loss from sweating.





Blog July 16, Neiafu, Vavau group


At last we are in the north again. We had a glorious trip up here, aside from having to motor half the trip because of lack of wind. It is 160 miles, an overnight sail from Tongatapu, to here. On the last two trips I was sick on the first day but this time I wasn’t. Having my sea legs makes the trip so much more pleasant.


We are on our way to new adventures. I feel excited and anxious about it. We are headed to two types of places, remote places and foreign ports. Our first stop will be Nuiatoputapu. 160 miles or an overnight sail from here. It only gets a ship four times a year; it won’t have internet and probably not cell phone. We need to take all our own provisions, and it has a very narrow coral reefed entrance. Why go there you may ask? Aside from it being a good stopping point half way to Samoa its very remoteness is part of the attraction.


From there we may go to Samoa. When we first arrived here adapting to being in this very different culture entirely used up the part of my brain that deals with these things and the thought of moving on to a new country quickly (as many yachts do) was daunting. Gradually I have gained a rudimentary understanding of how things work here and am ready for more new experiences. Or so I thought. Yesterday I talked to a man from another yacht about Samoa. He described an awful marina – swell, dirty, noisy, expensive -, the only place you can stay in Apia, main port of Samoa, endless red tape, super – trade winds, and then of course different currency and another language. But after a long description of all the problems he said it was a great place and really worthwhile visiting – see why I’m nervous and excited!


One of the reasons for going to Samoa is so to increase our chances of getting favourable winds for sailing to Niue. Niue is remote and foreign. It has one flight a week. It has no natural harbour so they have put moorings in for yachts. More on Niue later. One country at a time.
David has described our activities with the kids. After they left I was busting to go north but we decided to wait till David’s knee was a bit better. Then we got held up by a long weekend (couldn’t provision) and westerlies. Had a very domestic time, cleaning fixing and rearranging provisions – an almost perpetual task. It was colder down there too. We suffered in about 22 degrees (I don’t expect any sympathy from you down in NZ) and we had to use light blankets at night and wear another layer.


Atata (place of lost dinghy)


We revisited Atata, a short sail from Nukualofa, and anchored off the reef. The kids and I took a long dingy ride into the reef and I took them to a local village. It was very different to anything they had encountered before. For me the villages here are remarkably similar to the villages on Aituatki in the Cook Islands where I worked for 3 months on a film, 30 years ago. Remarkable in that apart from the ubiquitous cell phone tower, they looked much the same as 30 years ago.
We have visited half a dozen now. They don’t usually have power, maybe a small generator here and there and a few solar panels. One village had a communal Sky dish. No cars in the island villages. The houses are very simple, made out of concrete blocks and tin, with louvres. A lot of cooking is done outside on a fire. Dogs, pigs and chickens roam freely.


One of the sad things about these villages in beautiful; settings is the litter. It’s everywhere, people just throw their rubbish on the ground. Beaches and tracks are often festooned with corned beef tins, used batteries and broken glass. In the past all their rubbish would have been organic and not a problem.


As a corollary to my item on salt we have just got our water-maker going. This is making such a difference to our lives. This machine sucks seawater through a membrane and produces 5 litres an hour. We run it every time we run the engine, which we do at least an hour a day to chill our fridge and freezer, and charge our batteries. Also here in Neiafu we have access to local town water which is very unpalatable. I have five buckets of washing soaking in the cockpit waiting for the hose tomorrow where I can rinse to my heart’s content and just for a moment we will be almost salt-free.

Blog June 30
Kelefesia, Hapai Islands
We are sitting here off the most beautiful island we have visited so far. We are in transit from Vavau to Nukualofa to pick up Lily and Jackson.
We arrived dog tired after an overnight passage, a day of navigating coral reefs, and the slaughtering of fish. These coral reefs are scary things, you often can’t see them, lurking just below the surface, meanwhile being seduced by the coconut palm clad, white sand fringed islands just beyond them.
In any other country we could use our GPS to navigate around them but in Tonga the charts don’t match with the satellite derived GPS coordinates, so we have to work off paper charts only.
We nosed into a tiny anchorage liberally peppered with bombies, big coral formations flowing up toward the surface that can rip the bottom out of your boat or wrap your anchor almost irretrievably around them.
The island is largely uninhabited, just a shack that is occasionally visited. We wandered on the beach collecting coconuts, then snorkelled on the stunning coral reef.

I thought I’d summarise the different kind of days we have on this trip. They loosely fall into three categories, day at sea, day at anchor and day in town. At the moment these tend to fall in quick succession as we have been tied into visitor’s schedules. Later this month we’ll start spending a week at a time anchored in places.
# 1 Day at sea
Around here that means getting from one island group to another and usually involves an overnight trip. Starts with navigating out of whatever coral reefed rimmed place we are in. Sails up, take a bearing and off we go.
We do four hour watches but this does not necessarily translate into four hours sleep when you are off watch. The boat is moving around, the wind may be howling, waves crash on the side of boat, the person on watch is navigating and making food in the galley, downloading weather information or talking on the radio.
On deck the watch person is keeping a look out, checking the course, altering the sails, monitoring the weather, checking anchorages and tides for the next place, fishing, cleaning fish blood out of the cockpit, and has the occasional conversation or game of cards when we cross over.
#2 Day in town
This inevitably follows a day (or more) at sea. And of course the weather is usually still and blisteringly hot on town days. However town day also means fresh crunchy vegetables and watermelon that drips down your chin. It means cafes and internet, contact with home. We have to go to customs and check in and out of every island group, immigration to update visas, bank, phone top ups and of course the ever essential fuel and water. To our dismay there are very few places you can go alongside and get these, mostly we have to jerry can it under the blazing sun. Supermarkets are like our corner stores, and the prices vary wildly, so you need to go to several each time to find a good price. The fresh produce is abundant but different things are available each time we go in.
Then the inevitable repairs, sail, outboard, dinghy replacements! Then we stagger back to the boat for a cold beer and bed.
#3Day at anchor
This is the best one. We wake very early as we usually go to bed early here. Make coffee. This involves the daily grind. I misguidedly thought it would be better to bring beans up here than ground coffee but in actual fact with vac-packing ground would have been good. I borrowed a hand grinder to bring but it is hard work. Or we should have brought the electric one with us.
Next is a smoothie of some kind, usually watermelon and banana (we often have one at night with the addition of Bacardi), or slices of pawpaw or pineapple. Occasionally we have toast from David’s home-made bread with my homemade marmalade.
At Vavau we listen to the local daily net on VHF at 8.30am. This is very cool. All the boats around report in, it gives a good weather forecast, then a buy sell or swap, requests for information, and local events that are on like Waka arriving, or a street cleaning session.
Morning swim, one of the many great things about being in a yacht is that you can just fall over the side any time you get hot. The snorkelling has been fabulous. A few days ago we practised diving in and out of a cave with an underwater opening in preparation for a famous dive called Mariner’s Cave.
Then the daily boat activities. For me planning menus, use of provisions, shopping lists, you always have to think ahead as often we don’t get to a market for over a week, and things go off quickly as our refrigeration isn’t perfect. The food is great. Last night we had fish soup made with yellow fin tuna we caught, with kumara and rocket. Also constant cleaning and fixing.
Wherever we can we explore the islands and visit the villages. We collect coconuts for drinking and for making coconut cream. David is getting very good at husking them now.
We often have a cocktail at sunset or join other cruisers for a drink. Dinner then play cards or watch Outrageous Fortune and fall into bed.
Contrary to expectations we hardly ever spend any time just lying around.
July 3rd
We have been here just over a month now, but it feels much longer. After spending a day at Kelefesia we had a lovely day sail back down to Tongatapu. Around this time we both managed to put our backs out and David got a serious infection in his knee so we felt a little old and decrepit. It was glorious to arrive at Pangimotu again, to be somewhere familiar for a change.
We spent two hot days in town, provisioning etc before the kids arrived Tuesday night. Since they have been here unfortunately there has been a strong relatively cold Southerly (20 degrees) and we haven’t been able to go far. But there have been a couple of highlights.

More about Tongatapu when we get back up to Vavau at the end of the week
Cheers
Janet & David

Vava'u to Nukualofa to pick up J and L

Hunga Lagoon and entrance, outer Vava’u – very narrow, very shallow, very scary.

All the people of Hunga Village in funeral attire walking to their cemetary.
The road was built with aid from India and, while, in my view it’s an over-the-top contruction complete with footpaths and low walls on both sides, it is a boon to the village who now don’t have to contend with a perpetually slippery mud track.
We had been invited to watch the rugby on their communal satelite tv and then to attend one of their 5 churches (village population is 300) on the following day. But a death in the village took precedence. We could hear singing all through the night and in the morning most of the village gathered for the burial.

Three of these extraordinary vessels sailed into Neiafu to a rousing welcome with much song and dance. They had sailed from NZ via Tahiti and Samoa using Polynesian navigation methods. Quite a special site. These are smaller replicas of the traditional vayaging waka which were larger, could carry more people, sail faster and better to windward than any of the European ships of the era.

Kelefesia in the Ha’apai Group. Quite the most perfect South Seas island we’ve visited. Very remote, breathtakingly beautiful, spectacular coral and tropical fish with under water visibilty to die for.

Just enough room in the lagoon for 2 or 3 boats.

Coconut and water melon

daiquiri – yum!!

Three traditional outrigger canoes and other evidence of periodic occupation on the north of this tiny island. There was a wary dog that looked fed so the people can’t have been too far away.

No trouble for Lily. The locals were impressed.

A modestly loaded boat with plenty of free board. You should see the others - Pangaimotu, near Nukualofa.

In Nukualofa we attended this feast of the Free Wesleyan Church conference. There were just 3 or 4 other palangi there among the 1000 or so at this enormous gathering. We were strongly encouraged to attend by all the locals we knew who said it would be an honour to have palangi at their table. We had no idea what to expect nor how to conduct ourselves but took the risk. We were culturally out of our depth and Lily and Jackson were completely at sea. After much speech making the tables filled so quickly we could find no space for the four of us. I eventually identified the ushers, one of whom simply had a space for us vacated which left us seriously uncomfortable. Having taken the decision to attend I figured the only thing to do was to get it wrong ‘til we got it right and put up with the discomfort.

So we took the seats offered. The tables, perhaps 30 of them, were groaning with the weight of food of every Tongan variety. There were no plates or cutlery and awful cheap soft drinks. After grace it was all on. Our table had perhaps 6 whole roast piglets which, to the kids horror, were dismembered by hand with gusto and passed around. Janet and I were game to sample most dishes but Lily and Jackson had more trouble. Someone had the presence of mind to offer them an apple each – food they could recognise and that’s all Lily managed to swallow. Jackson was a little more adventurous but both needed a meal when we got back to Navire. I think their verdict was “that was weird but worth it.”
At the close of the meal ten or more of these exquisite tapa (gnatoo in Tongan) cloths were presented.