Tongatapu/Nuku'Alofa.

First night:

Hot, hot, hot, dear god it is so hot. Humid too. Some of the clothing I brought will be absurd. I would have to completely grease myself before putting on my jeans. I wonder what the hell I am going to wear to meet the Asst. Prime Minister?

The airport was very casual, folks wandering around the tarmac seemingly without a care. Tonga gets about 12 flights a week, so it has a ‘Nomey’ feel at the terminal. The second floor is an observation deck with a chain link fence. The fence is backlit just enough to show that the length of it is covered with kids climbing and playing like so many of the geckos omnipresent in the bathrooms here. Why just the bathrooms? No idea.

Nuku’Alofa is a series of villages claiming to be a city. Not much happening at 10PM on a Saturday night, and apparently nothing at all tomorrow. Given that Sunday closes the whole island down, I will attend a driving tour instead, along with the two Austrian women in the shuttle from the airport.

The shuttle dropped us at Ali Baba’s guest house. Plan to find out why the place is named after the whole forty thieves thing, but tonight is not the time. Not many folks here, slow season, which is likely a good thing. Tried to climb into the hammock on the deck but discovered that it is more the concept of a hammock than the reality, the holes having taken over the structure long ago. It is still left hanging in respect for the departed. There is one single outlet in the room, and the bathroom is rudimentary. That said, it is cheap and Tonga is not a major tourist destination. I think I will be fine.

Second Day;

Sticky as hell, but I slept well. The nice thing about places this hot and humid is that you don’t mind the absence of hot water. The cold water wake up is pretty much obligatory when you have to peel your sheets off with a spatula. Ali Baba’s is simple and luxury-free but this is a deeply poor country. I don’t take a lot of pictures of the average home here as I think we all know what poverty looks like, whether it be in the tropics or in an Alaskan village. Most folks here are scraping by in Western terms, but they seem happy and the material deprivation doesn’t weigh as heavily as one would expect. I hear laughter constantly as I walk the roads. With that in mind Ali Baba’s fills my need admirably; air conditioning and hot showers are a bit outside the Tongan experience.

Perhaps some of the ability to laugh off poverty comes from the spirituality of the population. Nearly all Tongans are Christian of varying stripes, and being that today is Sunday the place is shut down. No feed, no snacks, no cabs; even the two tourist hawkers in town have gone home. Yet I can hear the glorious singing through my window, and smell the earth ovens cooking the Sunday feast. These folks may be religious but they are not ascetics. They eat, they praise, they sleep. Good Sunday plans all around.

During the tour of Tongatapu I passed at least a dozen Mormon wardhouses as well as other churches of varying types. Sunday sees the wearing of formal woven mats as a sign of mourning, and in the case of Mormons ties with lavalavas, always tres cool in my book. The king and his retinue were at the main Free Wesleyan cathedral, his black London cab parked in front guarded by soldiers. After my experience in Fiji I shall not have much to say in Tonga regarding the government or his Highness. The contrast between the poverty about, no matter how well borne, and the luxury of the king is difficult to overstate. Enough said. The churches were almost as beautiful as the voices.

Royal Palace:

Sunday involves church, a huge feast at home, a long afternoon nap, then a walk to the bakery for a dinner of a loaf of bread heavy with butter. This is civilization. You may not live to see 50, but damn if you don’t die content. This also explains the presence of more swine than people on the streets.

As nothing was open this seemed like a perfect day for a tour. Our guide was the husband of the airport transfer driver, a returned Mormon missionary and a man of very few words. This silence exasperated some of my tour companions but served my purposes beautifully, allowing me to hang out the window like a dog on a road trip and ogle the sights. After growing up in SLC the churches did not impress me, but the trees full of sleeping flying foxes, the surf driven blowholes, and just the feeling delivered by a day of touring around a place few tourists bother to look at made up for my sticking horribly to the vinyl seats. This place grows like kudzu, almost visibly pulsing in the heat and damp. It is beautiful even as it decomposes. There is no time to mourn death here, nature doesn’t allow the remains to linger. The local metabolism is high enough to swallow and reconfigure everything from coconuts to coral. I am no longer in awe of the size of Tongans, I wonder instead why they are not all eight feet tall to match the landscape from which they feed. Eat large, die young, and don’t worry about the corpse.

The coastal blowholes alone were worth the price of the tour.

Enough. Tomorrow I must begin working, but tonight it is questionable Chinese food with an even more questionable Bavarian/Austrian duo. Ein! Zwei! Chug!

Flying Foxes:

Third and fourth days

Ali Baba’s continues to grow on me, as does Nuku’Alofa, Tonga as a whole, and likely a range of tropical fungal infections. This town has little in the way of a business district; in this it is a polar opposite of Suva, and livestock roam freely everywhere. The piglets, puppies, and kittens abound, but they are usually with fairly protective parents and are certainly more wild than I am accustomed to. Their presence keeps down the smell of the organic waste locally and the pigs in particular roam without restraint; they seem particularly willing to devour the flowers in the cemetery.

As I mentioned earlier the churches dominate this town, but as I explore it becomes much more pronounced. Tonga has gone from Stone Age to Modern in 200 years, and while it has managed the transition while avoiding colonization and the loss of the indigenous monarchy, it has not been a notably graceful shift. What money is here is generally resident in the church and the nobility, and the average person lives on a salary of roughly NZD$1.60 an hour. Yet the churches soar. They are beautiful, and they offer support and coherence in troubled times, but the concentration of national wealth in them is jarring.

The Catholic Basilica, and inside:

I suppose it is better than the bankers having it all. It is refreshing to be in a place where the nicest building in town is not owned by some vaguely worded financial entity (Rhombus Para-Transfer Mutual Investment Group, Walrus Crisps Consultants, LLC). Religion also has the benefit of offering a epistemological reach-around in exchange for your donations.

The National Bank is the most impressive commercial spot in the country. No one could explain to me why the Japanese flag had pride of place in front of the Tongan Bank. Tora, Tora, Tora.

Business here is concentrated in small shacks selling canned goods and sweets, scattered throughout town. These are literally everywhere, I can pass several in a block and have seen an intersection where three of the four corners had a little bodega sitting upon it. These are generally run by the small, and seemingly derided, Asian minority.

Local Engrish; Susan China will treat your machinery with acupuncture:

The combination of poverty and isolation has created a hell of a bad dietary situation. By WHO estimates 90% of Tongan adults are overweight. Granted, Tongans likely don’t fit the standard charts well but they do have huge numbers of dietary diseases. Local food is generally either out of the sea or out of a tin of fatty corned beef. Also present are the infamous sipis, the fattiest bit of a lamb, shipped over from New Zealand. No fresh food at the small markets, everything is highly processed and full of sugar.

Not a huge amount of exercise going on either, though I can hardly blame them for that. In this heat and humidity I can barely move. Slow walking and measured output is a must. There is the local time sense, as everywhere, with the Tongan version being somewhere between that of California and Paraguay. You might not be seen at the hour you hoped, but likely will within the same day. Workable.

The bureaucracy has been beautifully adapted from its British source material. I met with the Assistant Prime Minister/Minster of Health who suggested I meet the Director of the Health Department. He suggested the Chief of Health Services. He suggested the medical information section. They pointed out that since the Ministry of Health was founded in response to the Flu pandemic, in late 1919, there would not be many records from 1918. True enough, and I was able meet some very nice folks on my way to this fairly obvious point.

Simply getting to the various offices has been an adventure. Addresses are a rarity here, and I soon discovered why. Tongans do not use maps. I am not suggesting that they do not have the capability, Tongans have the highest per capita number of PhD's in the world (though that tells you little about practical skills); they simply never learn the skill. Even the highly educated have never seemingly had to acquire this bit of knowledge. Visiting the Catholic Basilica I went looking for the Bishop. Instead of Church offices the lower level of the Basilica was filled with shops, including a tattoo parlor and a billiards hall. My kind of church. Noticing a law firm I entered and asked for direction to the Bishop’s House. After I pulled out my map a conference including both attorneys and a paralegal ensued where all involved marveled over the map and began tracing routes with their fingers. After some time and a few angry words a consensus was reached, until they realized the map was 90 degrees off from their assumed point of view. The discussion resumed. I was tempted to go and play a game of pool while I waited but did not wish to be rude, so I watched. I now have 2 spots marked within about a half kilometer radius where I shall go exploring. This has repeatedly occurred. This is just one of the many joys inherent in growing up on a small island.

Walking is further complicated by the approaching category 4 cyclone which has just blasted its way across Fiji. It has been raining harder than I have ever seen, and the roads are not built for drainage. Only the natural good nature of the Tongans has prevented them from continuously soaking me as they drive by. Just a single car has gone out of its way to add more water to my load. Stateside it would be seen by many as a moral imperative to punish my arrogant walking along the road with a good dousing. Government Ministers are finding reasons to be out of the country and Wednesday is starting to look a bit rough work wise. Maybe I will get some reading done if the power stays on. Actually looking forward to it, a luxury the locals can’t share. I get to leave after playing voyeur in the storm; they have to pick up the pieces. Still, bring it on.

Other weirdness? How about eerie ability of windshields to attract coconuts. The number of cars with damaged or missing windscreens attests to the general vindictiveness of this omnipresent plant. Also, the signed publicity shot of the Village People up in the tourist center.

I have a meeting with the Lord Vaea in the morning, perhaps I will ask him. I do like this place and its people.