'Eua

  'Eua Island, Tongatapu, Tonga
Friday, October 17, 2008

It seems I managed to pick up a cold in Vava'u, either that or an allergy, my eyes and nose have been streaming and I am apparently embarrassing Andy with the frequency and violence of my sneezing.

We are back in Nuku'alofa having spent 3 days on 'Eua, so a chance to update while we wait the 12 hours for our flight back to Auckland.

We took the world's shortest schedule flight (7 minutes) across to 'Eua (pronounced Aye-Ah-Wah). The plane accomodated 8 passengers and the pilot, who gave the safety briefing from outside, stood on the runway,
as he didn't have space to turn around in his seat. Once or twice he reached for something in the footwell and in leaning down the plane veered off course! We were met at the airport, despite the fact that they seemed to think we were arriving on the ferry !?! A short pot-holed journey to the guesthouse by 4WD. The roads had spider's webs spanning above them, the
spiders (10cm legspan) clearly visible from the car sat in the middle of the webs. And we arrived at our accomodation, the Hideaway resort. Sharing our accommodation were brother Izekial and sister Emily, two geriatric Mormon missionaries who had come to peddle their faith to the "savages". Seems a bit like taking coals to Newcastle to me. I felt obliged to interrupt my reading of The God Delusion for fear of being identified in need of conversion.
Also two Californian geologists who were collecting rock samples from the oldest part of the island (30 million years older than the rest of the south pacific apparently).
We talked religion and American politics with them over a few Ikales. As we finished dinner around 19:30 Andy asked "what is there to do here in the evenings?", the response "You've already done it", summed 'Eua up quite well. Retired to bedroom to listen to the waves breaking on the reef and a rest after our early start.

A late start with a plan to go walking. Asked if we were too late for breakfast, we were told "This is the island, there is no such thing as 'too late'".
The cook then drove us to the foot of the island's hill in the 4WD showing astonishing offroad skills.
Our hike took us firstly to an eight hundred year old banyan tree , the roots of which we climbed down into. I left Andy in a cave with bats flying around his head so I could photgraph him from above. He survived! From there we proceeded up, up, up the world's muddiest road to the top of the hill  (highest point in South Pacific Islands) to 2 amazing lookouts overlooking 300m drops to the sea and the canopy of the Tongan rain forest. Sadly the Tongan Royal Family have decided it's better to cut down the native vegetation and replace it with managed pine forest making some of the hike seem like Macc Forest, but with parrots!
We aren't sure how the kiwi's will react to our super muddy boots on our return to Auckland, but...

Each time there was a rotation of guests at the guesthouse, we were firm in our belief that the new arrivals would be a playboy photoshoot team on location. Needless to say we were repeatedly disappointed.
Back at the guesthouse the geologists had left to be replaced by a loudmouthed half tongan family; father of whom, Jim, sounded like a Kiwi muppet. And the mormons had been replaced by Jehova's Witnesses.

A quiet evening, we saw some far off whales from the guesthouse's platform.

Next day we took a guided walk on the north of the island with Paea, a young shy Tongan. The walk was amazing, taking in pine forest, rainforest, 200m tall cliffs
, down through seven or eight caves complete with stalactites
, etc; rock climbing down until we reached the beach.
Paea climbed a coconut palm, retrieved 3 fresh coconuts and opened them up so we could drink the juice fresh from the nut.
We had an hour dodging the sun on the beach and then woke Paea up. It seemed like he had somewhere better to be, as he practically sprinted back up the cliff. We trailed behind sweating and gasping for breath.

At the guesthouse it was the birthday of one of the newly arrived guests. We helped celebrate with cake and whisky (a bad idea as we had been assuaging our hike induced thirst vigourously with beers).
Birthday Boy Fou had come over to 'Eua from Tongatapu to celebrate, but was disappointed by the number of girls available.

I never finished reading Metamorphosis, however I can assure you that Gregor Samsa is alive and well with a huge family of gargantuan cockroaches living un 'Eua. Andy and I both had a resident 4 inch mammoth in our bathrooms, i found a 2 inch tiddler in my wash bag and another eating a pack of strepsils in my medicines bag.

Thick head in the morning (presumably due to the whisky). An 11 o'clock  surfacing by Andy put pay to plans for a final hike on the south side of the island (no complaints from me as my knees were aching from the previous two days activities). The staff at the guesthouse were busy all day preparing for a traditional buffet dinner.

We heard that the plane to Tongatapu had broken down and our return may be in jeopardy. Muppet voiced Jim and his loud mouthed family could not return home but had to move out as some new guests arrived on the Ferry. Vonda and Ross, kiwi's, were visiting Vonda's uncle's grave, as the only casualty of WWII on Tonga. the grave is on the highest point of the island. (There's a famous, by Tongan standards, story surrounding his death, which I won't go into, try here.. )

Fou was keen to kidnap the two peace corps girls in the nearby village in order to get them to be our Tou'a at the night's Kava session. This became known as Mission Impossible and so proved to be.

A band arrived to play traditional music (think discordant Hawaiian) with 2 guitars and a ukelele. The food was laid out, including an 'umu (underground oven) cooked suckling pig (which was apparently named Mark)
. We gorged ourselves before joining the band on the floor and sharing the Kava.
This was the first chance we had to try Kava, on our last night in Tonga, expectations were high. Of all the things we had read about Kava, all that I can agree with is, it tastes like dirty dishwater. Despite a couple of hours drinking we experienced no noticeable effects, except perhaps a slight increased tolerance for Tongan music.
We switched to drinking whisky and soon I called in a night.


A good night's sleep for me was not copied by my travel companion who decided it was prudent to pull an all-nighter with the guesthouse-owner's wife! Apparently he goes down in history as the first palange to do so, ever. There was even talk of a medal.


Despite the rumours, it seemed they fixed the plane and we find ourselves killing time in Nuku'alofa again.

Photos will come when we reach the 1st world (or NZ).