Travel with Indigo

The Kingdom of Tonga is one of the world’s last constitutional monarchies, having declared its independence from the English in 1970. Its  population of 120,000 are mostly native Tongans spread over an archipelago of 171 islands, only 36 of which are inhabited, divided into three main groups. To the north is the Vava’u, in the center is the Ha’apai and to the south the Tongatapu group, where the capital of Nuku’alofa (meaning abode of love) is located, all of which should be called the unpronounceable islands. They are a wonderland of utterly unspoiled tropical beauty washed by iridescent sea. While other South Pacific islands have surrendered to the onslaught of modernity and the trampling tourists that come with it, Tonga has steadfastly resisted but with a depressing effect on its people.

Following a short and calm passage, we arrived in the yacht popular Tonga town of  Neiafu, the main town in the  Vava’u group. The islands here are uniformly high but evenly surfaced volcanic promontories sloping sharply down to the sea all clothed in thick lush jungle.  If you were dropped here without knowing where you were, you might guess these islands were in the Inside Passage of Alaska and western Canada because of their rocky underlayment barely visible through the forest, their general shape, and the strangely out of place red clay soils poking through here and there. Of course the coconut palms would sound a discordant note.  The jungle reaches down the steep slopes all the way to the sea leaving few places where an accessible beach can be found. The islands themselves are closely spaced and the sea deep to the shore making it ideal for larger vessels, like motor yachts and sailboats. Exploring by tender is fun since the waters are well protected from the wind and waves of the open sea and there are few reefs to impale an imprudently steered boat.

The town’s waterfront is lined with a few shabby bars and restaurants catering to the owners of the many private sailboats that frequent the area, mostly Kiwis, Aussies and Americans in 30 to 40 foot sloops. In the town itself, just up the hill from the waterfront, there are mostly decrepit wood frame buildings, last painted maybe thirty years ago, giving the place the look of a Wild West mining town.

One night when we went ashore to a bar, there were unemployed young men hanging around listening to the hectoring sermon of a street preacher rambling on in Tongan about how the crowd can find salvation. Leaving Tonga would be a start. The crowd was not threatening and a few even smiled timidly, but it was easy to see that life here lacked much promise.

The Tongans, unique among Pacific islanders, are insular, rejecting outside– meaning white– influence as contrary to the Tongan way.  They have chased off foreign investment and declined to trade much with other nations and made it very clear in their policies that they want no truck with non-Tongans, especially the white ones. In short, they have always fought a retrograde battle against encroaching civilization. The economic result is all plain to see.

While the natives are friendly here in the Vava’u islands, they are not so in the capital, Nuku’alofa (abode of love), now a wasteland after the anti-monarchy riots in November 2006.   We chose not to visit the place having been forewarned, but from descriptions of others and especially from Paul Theroux in his book, The Happy Isles of Oceania (1992) it is scruffy, dusty, down at the heels and now riot torn.  The people Theroux encountered he described as “bereft of enterprise”, “slow of speech”, “casual in manner”, “indifferent to a schedule”, “unable or unwilling to anticipate”, “inattentive”, “physically clumsy and had little manual dexterity”. He goes on.  “They dropped things, they forgot things, they broke promises. They drove slowly—who else in the world did that.”  He describes their snobbery, incivility, rampant xenophobia.

Their diet is best described as opportunistic. They eat horses, dogs, cats and fruit bats, among much else, and in former times ate each other. Cannibalism was a widespread practice throughout most of the Pacific islands and they went about it with considerable gusto. One famous chief bragged that in his lifetime he consumed more than 800 tasty humans, called long pig. The preferred means of cooking was to bury the hapless delicacy in an earthen oven.

There is a story about the former Queen Salote of Tonga, grandmother to the current king, attending in 1953 the coronation of England’s Queen Elizabeth.  She rode along in an open carriage, part of a parade of dignitaries. With her was a diminutive man, at least contrasted with her immensity, a member of her retinue. Someone in the audience asked out loud, referring to the small man, “Who is that?” to which Noel Coward is reported to have quipped, “Her lunch.”

Early Tongans, like many Pacific islanders, were exceedingly and gratuitously cruel. They used live young girls from their village as rollers to launch heavy war canoes and stuffed even friends and relatives into post holes to support the piers when building huts.

What I found most amusing about Tonga is the absurd juxtaposition of the word Kingdom in its official name along with the images that term usually invokes set off against the reality of the place. It is a comic farce, a theater of the absurd. The king’s ancestors adopted the title aping the Brits who once controlled these islands, and successive kings have been largely hereditary, but they are nothing more than satraps in a ghetto country. Junior chiefs, called noblemen, are the fattest among a very obese, uniquely incompetent ruling class.  There is an ersatz royal palace that would be humorous were it not so pathetic. The present king, George Tupou V, attended prep school in Switzerland, graduated from King’s College in Auckland, and went on to study at  Oxford and  the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in England, and is by all accounts a cultivated man, though one with absolute power to rule.  The outward consequences of his reign are not encouraging for the Tongan people.

Tongans are among the most religious and priggish people on earth.  Work of any kind is absolutely forbidden and strenuous recreation strongly discouraged on the Sabbath.  Men typically dress in a black skirt hemmed well below the knee with a woven grass mat wrapped and tied around their torso. Shirts are commonly long sleeve. It is considered an affront to visit a village wearing a hat or sunglasses or to show too much leg or shoulders –for man or woman.  Young girls swim wearing two layers of ankle to neck clothing, the second intended to cover the inevitable visual effects of wetting the first. Visitors are discouraged from wandering about in shorts, tank tops and the like lest they give offense. Outside of the capital and especially in the more forgiving Vava’u group the rules are far more relaxed. Young teens go about dressed as they are everywhere, in faux basketball star, logoed baggy shorts and tank tops, clunky sneakers and all the rest.

During our brief stay in Neiafu, we were struck by a storm whose winds reached fifty knots even in the well protected harbor. Our anchor held secure but trees in the town were toppled and docks blown away.  We had known of the approaching storm and had taken timely shelter thanks to the on-line satellite based weather service to which we subscribe. The service keeps track of our itinerary in real time, knowing where we are, where we are headed, and at what speed. They send us by email, fax or satellite phone regular forecasts of wind speed and direction, wave and swell height and direction, barometer readings, and the position and direction of any squall lines, storm cells and the like, along with advice to change course, remain in port, or seek shelter as appropriate. Since leaving Florida in March 2006 they have been astoundingly accurate and have saved us many times from dangerous conditions. That we were securely anchored in a very well protected harbor when this storm hit is yet another testament to their skillful service.

In the  high pressure center that followed behind the storm, the crew and I, minus Seann and Tomas, loaded the tender with our beach camp gear, including plenty of cold beer, sandwiches and snacks, snorkel gear, and iPod with speakers, and headed off to a beautiful secluded beach about five miles from Indigo. There we set up under the shade of a kava tree, thus avoiding the risk of being beaned by falling coconuts, and spent a delightful afternoon languishing in the soothing embrace of the balmy tropics.

Tomorrow, after the cumbersome process of clearing out of immigration, customs, and all the other meddlesome bureaucracies, we will depart for the two day travel to the town of Nadi (pronounced, for some reason, Nandi) on the main island of Fiji.