Awake too early on Saturday July 29, 2017 and it is now only 5.51am. Oh well…such is life in slumber land.

We are headed for strong winds and icy blasts which is hard to take after Fafa Island, Tonga’s almost heavenly colours and mostly heavenly weather, bar an uncomfortable sticky, humid night.

Where to begin? Sue and I returned from Tonga only three days ago and I think I still have a bit of reverse culture shock. When Mike drove me back from Sue’s after a Turkish lunch at her’s I felt very vulnerable as traffic pushed, edged and overtook at speed on the Monash freeway. In Tonga’s main island of Tongatapu there is only one main road with the traffic travelling at about 50km an hour. Traffic is an overstatement as vehicles were sometimes sporadic. In fact we passed a police speed monitoring area and the driver taking us back from Nuku’alofa’s wharf after five days on Fafa Island said that if he was over the limit he would bribe the police with a five dollar note. He said that really they were just hungry and needed the money to go and buy lunch. What simplicity! Here I was heavied at my last breath test for not breathing out for long enough during two attempts.

Some of the school children went to school barefoot, no-one wore helmets when riding a bike, there was no need to use seatbelts, the dead could be buried in a family’s garden, chickens and their chicks fossicked around on the floor of the Friends Café, dogs – mainly bitches, roamed around the streets or slept under cars, their teats sagging from so much breeding. Pigs and piglets trotted around whilst the odd cow strayed on the road, sometimes eating banana palm leaves instead of grass.

Would the bus come past our Scenic Hotel? The jury was out with reception staff saying probably but it was best to be outside and waiting an hour in advance. We met Vai, a local woman who had returned from Auckland to work at the Scenic. She was waiting for a bus she laughingly said may not come. It did arrive, pootling along flat, country roads with reggae and pop songs pumping from the radio. The bus was old and dirty but crammed with locals who sometimes sat in the aisles. It was only $2 Tongan to get into town whereas to cover the 19 kms in a taxi cost $40.

Our first impression of Tonga was one of people with a sense of humour amongst basic facilities. In Nuku’alofa we couldn’t disembark from the plane’s rear door as the stairs didn’t fit. One of the locals aboard told us this always happens as she almost wet herself laughing. The airport itself looked like a large corrugated iron shed. Once inside it was interesting to read that Tonga consists of 127 islands. So we were only ever going to get a flavour of this patch in a remote part of the Pacific.

Our hotel, the Royal Scenic, sat on impressive acreage and looked a mixture of styles from art deco to Grecian pillars to who knows what. But it was modern, clean, with an avenue entrance and decorative marble floor tiles. A dish which tempted us early on our visit turned out an unwelcome surprise. We thought we’d ordered tofu chips but it turned out to be soggy, flabbily tofu rolled in dried oregano. We found the vegetable salad equally startling and soon realised that we weren’t at the Royal Scenic for culinary joy.

However the hotel had a fifty metre deep blue pool across the vast grassy area. It beckoned but was frigging freezing on entry. I managed to do 30 laps on two occasions , Sue also clocking up a considerable number.

We read a lot during our time at the Scenic as well as walking along the country lanes or the quiet main road. We went to a nearby church the day after we arrived in Tonga and were enveloped by the heavenly singing. Little children roamed at the back of the modest wooden church with painted windows and a painted biblical scene featuring Christ. The liturgy was in Tongan though we and other visitors were welcomed in English by the pastor.

Apparently about 94 percent of Tongans are Christian and the main island is studded with innumerable churches. When we’d finished attending the service where the women wore decorative waist belts woven with pandanus palm fibres and the men wore tapa skirt like versions, we wandered up the road and could hear more heavenly singing borne on the wind from elsewhere on the island.

Our day tour of Tongatapu with Tui, our guide, was a mixture of vague ‘facts and his folklore’. He took us to the impressively huge tsunami rock – a limestone boulder towering over the landscape. Apparently it was carried 100 metres by a tsunami about 1,000 years ago. It had been colonised with trees and plants creating a dominant presence on what is a flat, limestone island.

I thought Tonga was mostly volcanic but many of the islands are flat and made of limestone.

This gave the sweetest, softest water I have ever tasted – literally melt in the mouth. I asked Tui if they ever had water shortages and he said no, there were many underground springs. This was evident as we descended into a limestone cave and apart from the stalactites and stalagmites we arrived at the entrance to a deep, fresh, underground swimming pool.

Tui also took us to the blowholes – 5kms of coastline with erupting sea as it hit the rocks, was sucked under and belched or blasted its foamy waves high into the air. I bought a black pearl necklace from a young vendor, the table cloth and jewellery looking incongruous above the spray.

Tui drove us to see an ancient burial site dating back to 900 AD. The bodies were buried in rising terraces with each terrace faced with local stone slabs. It was for the nobility. Strange to see that the locals had small gardens next to these ancient monuments and also the contemporary graves. But that is Tonga –no fanfare or elaboration – unless of course it is to do with the king. And then there are huge signs a plenty wishing their king a happy birthday, a blessed life, a long life.

His birthday is on July 4 with celebrations including dancing and singing lasting for a month. One driver said the king was close to the people and mingled with them. The prime minister of New Zealand attended the birthday this year, staying at the Scenic Hotel, as did we. It is run by a New Zealand company and looks to be the best standard of accomodation on the island.

In fact a Tongan waitress, Alison, who had just started working at the Fafa island resort, wants us to return next year for the king’s birthday. She said she would put our names forward in the hope of an invitation. Who knows, Sue and I are enticed by the idea of returning to Tonga to visit some of its other islands including Vava’u which apparently has a lovely botanic garden. One of the drivers told us it costs about $150 on a ferry ride to the various islands and that this price includes a private cabin with meals. It is an appealing thought though we were perturbed to see that the life jackets on the 30 minute boat ride to Fafa were in cupboards behind a rusty padlock blocked by suitcases and other gear. Not exactly great OH and S.

The Tongan driver who fetched us from the Nuku’alofa wharf after Fafa Island was also a train the trainer, having studied and worked in Australia. He told us that on some of the islands the only transport is horse and cart taking the family into their plantations. That would be interesting to see! Apparently Captain Cook brought cattle and horses to Tonga on one of his three visits, the first of which was in 1770.

Tui took us to huge limestone pillars dating back to 1200 AD. The inscriptions pointed in the direction of the shortest day, the longest day and two equal length days. He said that these avenues had been maintained since that date. It was hard to work out how the top lintel had been raised and sat above the two pillars. At that site there was also a massive stone seat which was supposedly for the chief who was more than 7ft tall. According to Tui, many of the Tongans were this height during that era.

During our tour, Tui took us to the King’s palace, an elegant white wooden house with red roof, in colonial style, dating to 1870. He also pointed out the huge modern parliamentary building. When Sue and I did our own bus trip into town we had a closer look at these buildings and also the magistrate court and the old parliamentary building. We visited the market and saw attractive jewellery, string and shell skirts, tapa cloths, carved wooden items, ornaments carved in bone. The fresh food market mostly sold taro, cassava, cabbages, pawpaw, coconuts, cucumbers and a few home grown tomatoes and sad looking lettuces. We bought some delicious apples imported from New Zealand and somewhat sour oranges from Australia. We also bought a few tomatoes and peanuts in their shells. We had no cooking facilities so were restricted.

 From the supermarket which sold Woolworths home brand items expensively priced, 

we bought cassava chips, dry biscuits, milk arrowroot biscuits and UHT chocolate milk. These came in handy on Fafa Island where the resort prices were very dear and the food pretty uninspiring and  sometimes scant.

For example a pawpaw and chicken Thai salad which hardly had any chicken and was small cost about $26 TOP or about $Au22. The only real value at the one and only restaurant/facility on Fafa was the coconuts which cost $TOP4 each. They sometimes ran short as obviously they weren’t picked on Fafa but came on the boat from Tongatapu.

In terms of contemporary Western food, we were pointed in the direction of Friends café in Nuku’alofa. It sold coffee, iced chocolates, omelettes, rice paper rolls etc. Norah Jones jazz played as little chickens or a cat roamed near our feet on the outside deck. The toilets were in an unhygienic state but the café vibe was good and popular with visitors.

The New Zealand embassy sat over the road and next to it a bar which looked dark and dinghy and near it a café opened by the Prime Minister. We looked up and saw the top of it had been burnt to a shell.

The boat ride to Fafa held the promise of azure waters and did not disappoint. I sat next to two slim young Scottish nurses who had been nursing at Tonga’s large public hospital. I thought they were Irish but one of them said people often thought that and that they didn’t have very strong Scottish accents. They were from St Andrews where golf was first played. One said she had been to the Bahamas and it was similar to Fafa though she thought more humid.

Some saw a whale on the trip over but it must have been travelling fast as we didn’t have such luck. We were delighted to see the blue heaven milk shake colours of the reef as we neared Fafa’s shore. We were taken ashore by another boat and left to explore our beach facing fale made almost entirely of natural materials and looking like something from Robinson Crusoe or the Swiss Family Robinson. We could see the lagoon from our front door and porch and on one occasion Sue lay inside reading a book and glanced up to see me zipping back and forth in flippers.

The shower was ensconced in a hibiscus, lime green vegetation and palms garden, open to the elements including visiting honey eater type birds and flitting insects. The toilet looked towards this little enclosed garden with its miniature deck. The best loo view ever.

We had a family of what we call Purple Swamp Hens living next to us. They came on the small front deck and ran off with any tidbits we threw, upstaging the poor little striped rails who fled from the swampies bustling bodies.One morning Sue caught a swampie trying to raid our biscuits after it had flown through an open window. They had an amazing array of vocalisations and I think that if I became stranded on Fafa I would begin to learn all their calls and perhaps talk to them. Sue photographed a mother swampie feeding her chicks in the centre of the island on some woven panels to be used for repairing fales or building new ones.

The island also held the shining parrot within the branches of its inner forest, home also to fruit bats and many fallen coconuts – like a coconut graveyard. David, the French manager, said there were only fifteen left in the world and that ten lived on Fafa. I was lucky enough to be about three feet from one outside our fale. It was eating a local fruit and at my eye level I could see its emerald wings fringed with azure feathers, its darkish plum coloured head, its lighter plum chest and its dark pupils surrounded by yellow rings. What a pity I didn’t have my camera with me.

Sue and I also saw two azure kingfishers as we sat and ate lunch overlooking the lagoon. Their heads were azure as well as their wings with a white collar around their throats.

We snorkelled over some pretty pink branch coral, some canary yellow spotted coral and some tan coloured brain coral. There may have been better coral further out but we were happy enough with our sightings. Sue says she saw an octopus on the sea floor and I think I saw the heads of several turtles during a walk amongst rock pools. David told us there are plenty of turtles, which for Tongans symbolise long life. He said the downside was that the turtles were eating the oysters from the oyster beds. On the upside he said that the coral was re-generating, the area having been made a marine park in 2013. However, he said, the sea level rises were obvious. He said the island had a biologist, Tom, who could answer many questions, but we didn’t get to meet him.

We walked around the island many times, always seeing new cloud formations, different shells, crabs, driftwood or other finds. It is a paradise for photography. We captured many textural, colourful or intriguingly shaped images both on the macro and micro scale.

Some lucky breakfasters, overlooking the lagoon, saw a pod of humpback wales swim by. We didn’t have that pleasure but enjoyed the tropical gardens, swimming, reading, relaxing in the hammock, chatting or snoozing.

It was hard to farewell Fafa after five  nights. Yes there were downsides – the odd annoying mosquitoes which seemed to prefer Sue, the spongy beds, the somewhat damp, salty feeling sheets following a night of rain which made things hard to dry and the outdoor toilet and shower decking slippery and potentially dangerous. The fales looked romantic and were a testimony to building with local materials but clearly they were subject to rot. Also they were not sound proof, so much toilet flushing could be heard in other rooms.  We could hear our fale neighbours very easily so any domestic ‘issues’ would have been carried within earshot.

But the night sky over the lagoon was magic. The stars, the galaxies, the thought that the Polynesians have used these stars for navigation for centuries, the view of them above the fale, above the coconut palms –definitely magic.

At one point, as in the movie “Castaways”, I was talking to a coconut. I think if I was stranded on Fafa I would first learn swamp hen talk and then write my memoir followed by talking each day to a coconut. The one I’d chosen on this occasion was small and green and I had to pierce his head with a stick which Sue found hilarious. I then drank his somewhat sour milk and scratched a face on his young green skin.  I felt like Sammy Jnr as I spoke to my coconut atop his stick body.